The most recommended books on organizational culture

What I love about this book is that it offers such a useful and practical approach to dealing with stress and becoming more resilient. The author teaches readers how to become immune to the most common causes of stress, instead of typical techniques to deal with stress like meditation. My work depends on helping people make the best use of their most important resources—not time or money, but body and mind. And stress is an unavoidable part of life that damages our well-being, dampens our energy, and saps our motivation. Stress-Proof Your Life provides solutions to stress based on original research and unique advice, and every busy person needs these solutions.

The framework presented in Corporate Lifecycles deals with the same core issue of Stages and Challenges of Organizational Growth as dealt with in my own book, but from a different perspective. The author is a former academic who has developed his own framework of corporate lifecycles and his methodology of organizations working through them. The book presents a different framework of corporate life cycles and emphasizes the managerial styles that are appropriate to reach stage of the corporate lifecycle. The author has seen and worked with a large number of companies that have employed his methods. He presents his perspective and insights for this role as a participant-observer. 

There aren’t a lot of scholarly studies of fraternities and sororities in part because, until recently, academia didn’t see the topic as worthy of serious study.

Turk’s groundbreaking study dives deep into the archives to tell the origin story of the oldest Panhellenic sorority, and in the process, reveals a dramatic shift in organizational culture between its early years and second and third generations.

You’ll have to read the book to find of what happened and why…

I read this book at a time where I was seeing how competitive environments were holding people back and constraining performance but nobody seemed to be noticing.

But Margaret Heffernan, a brilliant thought leader, had noticed it.

In this book, she uses fascinating examples across business, education, and sport to challenge conventional thinking and show that collaboration and cooperation can often be so much more effective than competition.

I was privileged to speak to her as I was writing my book and receive her warm support.

Building a great company and a great team takes more than love and data. In Leaders Eat Last, I learned the science behind why we join teams, why we leave a team, and how to build a team where people want to stay.

It turns out that being a part of a team is in our DNA. Literally. We have survived as a species by working together, and our brains produce pleasure chemicals when we are standing shoulder to shoulder with a co-worker.

But that’s not what makes this book great. Simon Sinek references both large companies and the military to make his case. Among other thoughtful insights, Sinek argues that the dedication, drive, and sacrifice that make the Air Force such a formidable team can be similarly created within work teams and companies. 

This is a must-read if you want to really understand why and how we work together… show more.

This book is one of the most skillful and actionable executions of an incredibly complex topic: how do we successfully work with people from different cultures?

The book covers techniques for unpicking cultural differences and better understanding our own so that people from dramatically different backgrounds can work better together: a topic that is close to the heart of all of us in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world.

The most fun part of this book is an exercise that you can do with your team to highlight and understand cultural differences. Despite sounding like a potential minefield, you’ll come out with a clear perspective on how each individual approaches building trust, prefers to give and receive negative feedback, and navigates decision-making in a group.

From my notes after I read it, “Great content and organization. Triggered me to write and plan a 2022 Book.”

There was specific practical content like removing vacation policy, removing travel and expenses policy. An opening the books, which showed the practices behind the no rules idea, and their consequent results in the business. As a consultant, these give me a tool for discussion with clients. What if you did the same?

Again a great leader, and successful businessperson, using persistence and imagination to deal with the forces against change.

If you’re early- or mid-career and seeking to climb the ladder, this book offers great advice on how to advance and how to position yourself as high potential within your organization. 

The authors look at five key differentiators, which they call the “X factors,” that set people apart from average performers.

I’ve worked in large and small companies throughout my career and can attest that these “X factors” really are what we look for when we are deciding who is a key player within our organization.

Nigel Travis, chairman of Dunkin’ Brands, discusses why the most effective leaders have people around them with a diversity of thoughts, opinions, and approaches. Travis believes the best way for organizations to succeed in today’s environment is to embrace challenges and encourage pushback. He maintains that everyone in an organization must be able to question the status quo, to talk in a civil way about difficult issues, and to debate strategies and tactics without fear of reprisal.

I love the practice of what he calls “coffee chats,” to open his thought aperture. The attendees were able to ask him any questions within the bounds of civility. As he said, “The purpose of the coffee chat is to provide an open and safe forum for people to ask questions, share information, articulate ideas, express opinions, and surface disagreements.” 

Pixar movies have been seen all over the world by humans of all ages. They make us laugh, smile, and wipe tears.

Pixar has some of the best storytellers on the planet and Creativity, Inc. shares more about how they’ve built their engine. This book looks at the business side of creativity and how you create a culture that can sustain and navigate producing top-quality films every year.

It offers wonderful insights on how to lead people, navigate difficult moments, and bring the best out of others. If creativity or storytelling are any part of your business or life, this book is for you!

This unfortunately titled book reflects my own philosophy and recommendations for managing software engineers. The title is unfortunate because there's nothing radical about the author's recommendations, at least not to me.

The focus is on providing compassionate candor to your staff, caring personally about them while directly challenging them in areas where they should improve. The first part of the book explains why you should take this approach, including its benefits. The second part provides clear and specific guidance on attaining those benefits.

Having been a manager and coach for over 25 years, I'm often asked what management book I recommend. Until now, my choices were too esoteric or too academic. Now, I recommend Radical Candor.

With business conditions and prospects looking so difficult, we will need to be ever more strategic in the use of our resources. In this light, Michael Ventura’s practical approach to inserting empathy into leadership and how businesses should function with a higher degree of empathy is a tremendous read. Ventura uses a host of case studies based on the work he’s done with his company, Sub Rosa. As such, the material is real life and the book is packed with a host of great and practical exercises. While it’s all about empathy in business, the book is also a good reminder of how empathy can be useful in our private lives, our intimate relationships and in society in general. 

It is hard to pick just one Jon Kolko book to recommend because all of his books are brilliant. My copy of Creative Clarity is dog-eared and heavily underlined which is an indicator of just how much I rely on it over and over again. I like it because Kolko articulates the specific conditions necessary to achieve creative cultures and most importantly details how to do it. Mastering design thinking is much more than learning new tools and building the mindsets and behaviors to deepen your experience, it is about solving more problems and ultimately creating more impact. This book will help you do that. 

This book explains how any employee – not matter their role – can take action to make their workplaces better (without burning career bridges behind them).

I am inspired by Professor Meyerson’s insistence that any employee (not just managers, not just the CEO) can be an agent for positive change. What I particularly love about this book is her focus on small wins. Positive change in work environments is about accumulating small changes, not about huge transformational restructures.

I also love the fact that the book’s recommendations can be applied to any social issue. You can follow your passion to make your workplace more inclusive, more environmentally sustainable, or more socially responsible.

We are in an exponential world today and we grew up in an incremental world for businesses. 

Daniel not only helps us understand how to anticipate more of the future, he teaches us how to anticipate which is one of the most important skills for business leaders today. After reading his book, I also worked through his anticipatory leader course. 

By understanding the power of being anticipatory, I have used his techniques to lead our firm to bigger opportunities. In the future of work, anticipating what people will want and need, provides a distinctive advantage. 

From the author of The Dream Manager comes a book that will challenge and inspire the core of your organization. Kelly’s bread-and-butter as a business coach and motivational speaker shows in his writing style—be prepared to have the six key lessons reinforced through repetition (great for those of us who read in short bursts with lots of life happening in between). But this book has a strong practical aspect too. Applying its lessons will fill your to-do list for months to come!

I picked this book up because it was super cheap in hardcover. It had an interesting premise with a suspense set in the business world between two competing companies. Not typically my thing, but I gave it a chance because of the price. Once I started to read it, Joseph Finder became one of my favorite authors. I could not put this down and read it in three days. It had me on the edge of my seat as the main character has to infiltrate another company, and OMG, the twist at the end! I loved this book so much that I decided to attend the Thrillerfest conference in Phoenix that year because Joseph Finder would be there. Yep, that’s how much I loved the book. I met him and gushed like a fool!

If you’re looking for a book on customer service or customer experience, you have to read one of Shep Hyken’s books! Shep is the world’s top customer service expert, a hall-of-fame speaker, and one of my biggest mentors (you could say I’m his superfan!). His most recent book, I’ll Be Back is my personal favorite of his because of its focus on the organizational culture that’s needed to drive a customer-centric brand. 

Austin, Texas, where I now live, is home to the first Whole Foods in America. Before the chain of grocery stores was bought out by Amazon, I used to shop there. Then I stopped, or well, I no longer went as often, because I learned in LoRusso's book that company founder John Mackey promoted a libertarian spirituality that considered government interference morally hostile and went as far as to proclaim Obama Care a form of fascism. 

I spent my career leading software engineering at two of America’s top banks. It’s not all innovative work, as you might guess, and here is where Toyota comes in. 

Toyota teaches the difference between routine, standardized work (where we use predictive process control) and creative work (where we use adaptive process control). Balancing this in practice is a key to being a great software engineering leader. For those manufacturing-like processes (incremental feature addition, defect repair) the Toyota manufacturing way became the basis of the Agile movement a decade later: flow, pull, level work, quality the first time, process standardization and continuous improvement, and closeness to customers. Toyota Way provides a deeper understanding than any agile seminar.