The 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards: Management & Workplace Culture Book Giveaway

We announced the longlist for the 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year last week, and will be dedicating our giveaways for the rest of the year to the books on the list. 

We recognize 40 book on our longlist—five books in eight different categories. This week, we'll be giving away the books in the Management & Workplace Culture category, which are listed below along with the publisher's description of the book. (Check in at In the Books Wednesday for our take on each of these books.) Each of this week's winners will receive all five books in the category.

The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor, and Authenticity Create Great Organizations, by Linda Adams, Abby Curnow-Chavez, Audrey Epstein, and Rebecca Teasdale, PublicAffairs

Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, though they can make it look deceptively easy.

Too many teams engage in dysfunctional behaviors or fall into territorialism, apathy, and unproductive relationships. The result? An overwhelmed, unengaged, and stressed-out workforce that settles for average or poor performance.

Here, four authors with a combined century of management experience show readers how every team can be extraordinary. The authors introduce their field-tested Loyalist Team 3D assessment that allows anyone to get to the heart of why teams break down, identify the weaknesses in their own team, and build a Loyalist Team. This kind of team has members who ensure each other's success as they work to ensure their own, operate with absolute candor, and value loyalty and authenticity to deliver results, create a healthy work environment, and help companies succeed. The Loyalist Team is a must-read for anyone who wants their team to achieve extraordinary results.

Own It: The Power of Women at Work by Sallie Krawcheck, Crown Business

One of the highest ranked women ever to work on Wall Street shows women how to elevate themselves and their careers by embracing and investing in the unique traits proven to make women stonger leaders, better team players, and more valuable assets to companies and employers. Picking up the conversation where Lean In left off, she shows women how to go beyond sitting at the table and how to rise to the next level.

Sallie Krawcheck has had it with advice implying that if women simply leaned in a little farther, played the game a little better, and demanded just a few more seats at the table—i.e. acted a little more like MEN—they could finally break through that glass ceiling. This is a contest rigged to lose. A better strategy is to embrace and invest in the unique traits that make women better positioned to lead and succeed: broader perspective, greater long-term focus, healthier attitude toward risk, higher aptitude for creativity, better people skills, empathy, and more. Women who capitalize on these traits won’t need to demand a place at the table; employers will offer it to them—not out of political correctness—but because it makes good business sense.

Having been the lone woman at the highest rungs of Wall Street, Krawcheck knows what it takes to succeed as a woman in a man’s world. And now she puts her research analyst background to work to reveal irrefutable evidence that companies perform better when they fully engage women; that companies with women leaders serve clients and customers better, have a stronger and more engaged culture, are more innovative, and sustain profits over a longer term. Drawing on this research and on stories from her years at the top echelon of the biggest boy’s club in the world, Krawcheck empowers women to elevate themselves and their companies by bringing their true female selves to work.

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott, St. Martin's Press

A simple but revolutionary approach to management.

From the time we learn to speak, we’re told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. While this advice may work for everyday life, it is, as Kim Scott has seen, a disaster when adopted by managers.

Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google and then decamped to Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, the “radical candor” method.

Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve.

Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get (sh)it done, and understand why it matters.

Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.

The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries, Currency

Entrepreneur and bestselling author of The Lean Startup, Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses of all kinds, ranging from established companies to early-stage startups, to grow revenues, drive innovation, and transform themselves into truly modern organizations, poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the twenty-first century.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups—building a minimal viable product, customer-focused and scientific testing based on a build-measure-learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to an entirely new group of organizations: established enterprises like iconic multinationals GE and Toyota, tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio.

Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a system of entrepreneurial management that leads organizations of all sizes and from every industry to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential road map for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.

Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power by Michael Mankins & Eric Garton, Harvard Business Review Press

Managing Your Scarcest Resources.

Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That’s why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization—resources that are too often squandered. There’s plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What’s really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company’s full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors.

Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article “Your Scarcest Resource,” Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people’s time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization’s productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag—the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people’s energy—and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people’s time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.