The 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Management & Workplace Culture Book Giveaway

We will be dedicating the rest of this year's book giveaways to the books on the longlist for the 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year.

This week, we're giving away the books in the Management & Workplace Culture category, which are listed below along with the publishers' descriptions of the books. You can find my thoughts on the category and the books we chose by going Inside the Longlist with me.

Each of this week's winners will receive all five books in the Management & Workplace Culture category.

Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart by Shane Snow, Portfolio

Award-winning entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow reveals the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down—and why some break through.

The best teams are more than the sum of their parts, but why does collaboration so often fail to fulfill this promise? In Dream Teams, Snow takes us on an adventure through history, neuroscience, psychology, and business, exploring what separates groups that simply get by together from those that get better together.

You’ll learn about:

• How ragtag teams—from soccer clubs to startups to gangs of pirates—beat the odds throughout history.
• Why DaimlerChrysler flopped while the Wu-Tang Clan succeeded, and the surprising factor behind most failed mergers, marriages, and partnerships.
• What the Wright Brothers’ daily arguments can teach us about group problem solving.
• Pioneering women in law enforcement, unlikely civil rights collaborators, and underdog armies that did the incredible together.
• The team players behind great social movements in history, and the science of becoming open-minded.

Provocative and entertaining, Dream Teams is a landmark work that will change the way we think about people, progress, and collaboration.

Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harper Business

In this timely, provocative book, a Stanford business professor contends that many modern management practices are toxic to employees—hurting engagement, increasing turnover, and destroying their physical and emotional health—and to company performance, as he offers ways to build human sustainability at work.

You don’t have to do a dangerous job—in a coal mine or on a construction site, commercial fishing boat, or an oil rig—to endure a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening, workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload, once handled by several employees, required frequent all-nighters—leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a sixty-pound weight gain thanks to having no down time to eat properly or exercise. Or the marketing professional prescribed antidepressants a week after joining her employer.

These individuals are not exceptions—they are too often the norm. Every industry is filled with similar horror stories, and the costs, to both employees and their companies, is enormous—and worsening. In Dying for a Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer exposes the infuriating truth about modern work life: even as organizations allow management practices that literally sicken and sometimes kill their employees, those policies do not enhance productivity or the bottom line. Instead, they diminish employee engagement, increase turnover, reduce job performance—and drive up health costs.

Exploring a range of important topics, including layoffs, health insurance, work-family conflict, autonomy, and why people remain in toxic environments, Pfeffer offers guidance and practical solutions all of us—employees, employers, and the government—can use to enhance workplace wellbeing. We must wake up to the dangers and costs of today’s workplace, Pfeffer argues. Dying for a Paycheck is a clarion call for a social movement focused on human sustainability. Pfeffer makes clear that the environment we work in is just as important as the one we live in, and with this urgent book, he opens our eyes and shows how we can make our workplaces healthier and better.

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson, Wiley

Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy.

The Fearless Organization offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule, or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud, creating a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing.

This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation.

With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud. It creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing.

This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation.

• Explore the link between psychological safety and high performance.
• Create a culture where it’s “safe” to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes.
• Nurture the level of engagement and candor required in today’s knowledge economy.
• Follow a step-by-step framework for establishing psychological safety in your team or organization.
• Shed the “yes-men” approach and step into real performance.
• Fertilize creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more.

The Fearless Organization helps you bring about this most critical transformation.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, Harper Business

In this timely manifesto, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework broadly reject the prevailing notion that long hours, aggressive hustle, and “whatever it takes” are required to run a successful business today.

In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson introduced a new path to working effectively. Now, they build on their message with a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture—what they call “the calm company.” Their approach directly attacks the chaos, anxiety, and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and hampers billions of workers every day.

Long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for modern professionals. But it should be a mark of stupidity, the authors argue. Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for large organizations—individuals, contractors, and solopreneurs are burning themselves out the same way. The answer to better productivity isn’t more hours—it’s less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress.

It’s time to stop celebrating Crazy, and start celebrating Calm, Fried and Hansson assert.

Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. “Calm” has been the cornerstone of their company’s culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn’t a book telling you what to do. It’s a book showing you what they’ve done—and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together by Joanne Lipman, William Morrow

Going beyond the message of Lean In and The Confidence Code, Gannett’s Chief Content Officer contends that to achieve parity in the office, women don’t have to change—men do—and in this inclusive and realistic handbook, offers solutions to help professionals solve gender gap issues and achieve parity at work.

Companies with more women in senior leadership perform better by virtually every financial measure, and women employees help boost creativity and can temper risky behavior—such as the financial gambles behind the 2008 economic collapse. Yet in the United States, ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 chief executives are men, and women hold only seventeen percent of seats on corporate boards. More men are reaching across the gender divide, genuinely trying to reinvent the culture and transform the way we work together. Despite these good intentions, fumbles, missteps, frustration, and misunderstanding continue to inflict real and lasting damage on women’s careers.

What can the Enron scandal teach us about the way men and women communicate professionally? How does brain circuitry help explain men’s fear of women’s emotions at work? Why did Kimberly Clark blindly have an all-male team of executives in charge of their Kotex tampon line? In That's What She Said, veteran media executive Joanne Lipman raises these intriguing questions and more to find workable solutions that individual managers, organizations, and policy makers can employ to make work more equitable and rewarding for all professionals.

Filled with illuminating anecdotes, data from the most recent relevant studies, and stories from Lipman’s own journey to the top of a male-dominated industry, That's What She Said is a book about success that persuasively shows why empowering women as true equals is an essential goal for us all—and offers a roadmap for getting there.