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

We are dedicating the book giveaways for the rest of 2016 to the books on the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Longlist—one category at a time. This week, we have the Management & Workplace Culture category. 

(Editor's Note: the copy below is publisher promotional copy. If you would like to hear from the judges at 800-CEO-READ in our own words, and why these books in particular were chosen, check back in to the News & Opinion channel this Wednesday to go "inside the longlist," or subscribe to the Keen Thinker to get our weekly roundup of content on Thursday.)

Each of this week's winners will receive all five finalists for the Management & Workplace Culture category, and we have five sets available. The books you'll receive are:

Communication the Cleveland Clinic Way: How to Drive a Relationship-Centered Strategy for Superior Patient Experience, edited by Adrienne Boissy, MD and Timothy Gilligan, MD, McGraw-Hill Education

The proven strategy for driving patient satisfaction, physician engagement, and better clinical outcomes with improved doctor-patient communication—from the thought leaders at Cleveland Clinic.

Today, physicians face a hypercompetitive marketplace in which they must meet unique and complex patient needs as efficiently as possible. But in a culture prioritizing clinical outcomes above all, there can be a tendency to lose sight of one of the most critical aspects of providing effective care: the communication skills that build and foster physician-patient relationships.

Studies have shown that good communication between doctors and patients and among all caregivers who interface with patients directly results in better clinical outcomes, reduced costs, greater patient satisfaction, and lower rates of physician burnout.

In Communication the Cleveland Clinic Way, Dr. Adrienne Boissy and her team tell the story of how Cleveland Clinic created and applied the R.E.D.E. to Communicate: Foundations of Healthcare program, making the world-renowned hospital system a leader in relationship-centered care.

It reveals why the Clinic made effective communication a top strategic priority and how it successfully overcame obstacles to implementing it, including internal resistance from physicians, and adapted it for advanced care providers. This practical guide provides the information decision-makers need to design, develop, and implement communication skills training in their own institutions.

An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Business School Press

A Radical New Model for Unleashing Your Company’s Potential.

In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.

This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.

Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace by Jessica Bennett, HarperWave

Part manual, part manifesto, a humorous yet incisive guide to navigating subtle sexism at work—a pocketbook Lean In for the Buzzfeed generation that provides real-life career advice and humorous reinforcement for a new generation of professional women.

It was a fight club—but without the fighting and without the men. Every month, the women would huddle in a friend’s apartment to share sexist job frustrations and trade tips for how best to tackle them. Once upon a time, you might have called them a consciousness raising group. But the problems of today’s working world are more subtle, less pronounced, harder to identify—and harder to prove—than those of their foremothers. These women weren’t just there to vent. They needed battle tactics. And so the fight club was born.

Hard-hitting and entertaining, Feminist Fight Club blends personal stories with research, statistics, and no-bullsh*t expert advice. Bennett offers a new vocabulary for the sexist workplace archetypes women encounter everyday—such as the Manterrupter who talks over female colleagues in meetings or the Himitator who appropriates their ideas—and provides practical hacks for navigating other gender landmines in today’s working world. With original illustrations, Feminist Mad Libs, a Negotiation Cheat Sheet, and fascinating historical research, Feminist Fight Club tackles both the external (sexist) and internal (self-sabotaging) behaviors that plague women in the workplace—as well as the system that perpetuates them.

Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by David Burkus, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A provocative work that challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management—and proves that they are outdated, outmoded, or simply don’t work.

Do open floor plans really work? Are there companies that put their employees’ welfare first, and their clients second? Are annual performance reviews necessary?
Dr. David Burkus is a highly regarded and increasingly influential business school professor who challenges many of the established principles of business management. Drawing on decades of research, Burkus has found that not only are many of our fundamental management practices wrong and misguided, but they can be downright counterproductive.

These days, the best companies are breaking the old rules. At some companies, e-mail is now restricted to certain hours, so that employees can work without distraction. Netflix no longer has a standard vacation policy of two to three weeks, but instructs employees to take time off when they feel they need it. And at Valve Software, there are no managers; the employees govern themselves.

The revolutionary insights Burkus reveals here will convince companies to leave behind decades-old management practices and implement new ways to enhance productivity and morale.

Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results—Without Losing Your Soul by Karin Hurt and David Dye, AMACOM

You CAN love your job again.

It can feel like a rigged game. Executives set aggressive goals, so managers drive their teams to burnout trying to deliver. Or, employees seek connection and support, so managers focus on relationships… and fail to make the numbers. The fallout is stress, frustration, and disengagement, and not just among team members—two-thirds of managers report being disengaged.

To succeed, managers cannot choose between results and relationships. They need both: They must get people to achieve while creating an environment that makes them truly want to. Winning Well offers managers a quick, practical action plan—complete with examples, stories, and online assessments. They will learn how to:

• Stamp out the corrosive win-at-all-costs mentality
• Focus on the game, not just the score
• Reinforce behaviors that produce results
• Sustain energy and momentum
• Correct poor performance without drama
• Build productive relationships
• Be the leader people want to work for

Today’s hypercompetitive economy has created tense, overextended workplaces. Keep it productive, rewarding, and even fun with this one-stop success kit.