HR Book Club Recommendations

December 2017 V.1 Page 1
HR BOOK CLUB NZ | Suggestion Master List
Month Title Author Published Amazon Link Themes Blurb/Commentary Rating
An Everyone Culture:
Becoming a
Deliberately
Developmental
Organization
Dr Robert
Kegan, Dr Lisa
Lahey **
2016, USA http://a.co/ihHhaRE Development 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.
Clever: Leading Your
Smartest, Most
Creative People
Rob Goffee and
Gareth Jones
2009, UK http://a.co/fiXiPkG Talent They tend to obsess over work projects, don't like to be told what to do
and need lots of space. They are video-game designer Will Wright, iMac
creator Jonathan Ive and Louis Vuitton brand rejuvenator Marc Jacobs.
They are the clevers, the highly talented individuals with the potential to
create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the
organization makes available to them. Goffee and Jones, professors at
the London School of Business, present a smart and surprisingly
entertaining manual on identifying and handling these employees for
optimum benefit, complete with a dos and don'ts chart. They advocate
building a corporate culture catering to these individuals—following the
lead of Cisco Systems, Nestlé and Google—and argue that the stagnant
economy demands creative approaches to inspire productivity: the
particular skills of exceptionally gifted workers can be harnessed by
entire businesses, creating clever teams and corporations. The book is

balanced in its treatment and also explores the flip side of cleverness,
making the important caveat: the clever economy is not a utopian
capitalist idyll, in its illustration of how unchecked and glamorized
cleverness contributed to Wall Street's implosion. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved.
Creativity, Inc.:
Overcoming the
Unseen Forces That
Stand in the Way of
True Inspiration
Ed Catmull 2014, USA http://a.co/ge7CN0d Creativity Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees
to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the
first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation
Studios—into the story meetings, the postmortems, and the ‘Braintrust’
sessions where art is born. It is, at heart, a book about how to build and
sustain a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and
president Ed Catmull writes, ‘an expression of the ideas that I believe
make the best in us possible.’
Emergent: Ignite
Purpose, Transform
Culture, Make Change
Stick
Stephen Scott
Johnson
2017, USA http://a.co/4nT8H95 Transformation Emergent provides a handbook for navigating – and thriving in – the
new cultural paradigm. More than a simple DIY for change, this book
empowers organisations to diagnose change risk, address current
shortcomings and adapt to the increasing current away from hierarchies
to autonomous and interdependent networks. Unguided, most fail in
their attempt; this shift exposes huge skills deficits, a lack of
engagement, lack of value and meaning, market reach, penetration and
more. Here, a twenty-year veteran of brand and culture transformation
outlines a unique governance framework and blueprint for
implementing and co-creating your own cultural shift. Methodologies
from crowdsourcing and social movements are adopted as tools for
initiating change and creating cultural cohesion around a higher
purpose, and essential skills and tools help equip organisations and
individuals for the emergent future. Today's workplace demands are
creating extraordinary challenges for organisations; power is shifting,
and the spotlight has forced businesses to engage with stakeholders in
more meaningful ways, and to acknowledge a need for radical
‘humanization' of the workplace. To drive successful change you need to
spark a movement. This book provides a way forward through the
transition, with expert guidance and a clear, actionable framework for
implementation.
Everyday Ethics Dr Simon
Longstaff **
2017, Australia http://a.co/egVga7V Ethics Do I buy eggs laid by free-range chooks or the cheaper ones from caged
birds? Do I tell my best friend I saw her boyfriend kissing another girl?
Do I lie to my mum by telling her I will wear the jumper she bought me,
even though it’s the ugliest jumper in the world? Every day our lives are
punctuated by points of decision. Some of these decisions will be
momentous, remembered for decades: most will go unnoticed, by us
and by others. Yet all our choices matter: taken as a whole, they shape
our lives and contribute to the rhythms of the world. In Everyday Ethics,
Australia’s leading authority on ethics, Simon Longstaff, provides a map
to help you better navigate the landscape of daily decisions more

ethically. Using a broad range of topics and examples to provoke eye-
opening reflection and discussion, Everyday Ethics is a lesson in how
even our smallest choices can matter, and an empowering guide that
will help us discover what is ‘good’ and what is ‘right’.
Future Brain: The 12
Keys to Create Your
High-Performance
Brain
Dr Jenny
Brockis
2015, USA http://a.co/cBAIloU Neuroscience Future Brain is the busy professional's secret weapon for boosting
mastery, efficiency, and productivity to gain that coveted competitive
edge — in business and in life. Designed to be implemented at the
individual, team, or organisational level, this in-depth, step-by-step
framework leverages neuro-scientific principles to help you develop a
solid, habit-changing plan for building and maintaining brain fitness and
healthy behaviours. Author Dr. Jenny Brockis will help you develop your
thought processes and your regular routine to get more done with less
effort and time. Based on the idea of neuroplasticity, these daily
practices improve focus, creativity, and effectiveness to help you stay
relevant, competitive, and way ahead of the pack. You already have a
magnificent brain, but you probably take it for granted; we often
develop "survival techniques" that force our brain to work with an
incompatible "operating system" in an effort to keep up with the ever-
increasing velocity of change and information overload. This book helps
you beef up your brain awareness so you can take advantage of the
built-in features and native capabilities that make the human brain a
truly awesome machine.
Homo Deus: A Brief
History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah
Harari
2016, Israel http://a.co/hGTAmwk Future Those who read and loved Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens have been
eagerly anticipating his new book Homo Deus. While Sapiens looked
back at our evolutionary development, this new book examines where
we might be headed (Homo Deus is subtitled “A Brief History of
Tomorrow”). Predicting the future isn’t as easy as deconstructing the
past, and Harari openly admits the challenge—but even if he’s
completely wrong in his predictions, and most of us doubt he is, Homo
Deus is the kind of provocative, food-for-thought read that drew so
many of us to his work in the first place. According to Harari, our future
could be very different from our present—dark, technocratic, and
automated—but reading about our possible fates, presented in Harari’s
clear-eyed and illuminating style, sure is fascinating. --Chris Schluep, The
Amazon Book Review
How to Have A Good
Day: A Revolutionary
Handbook for Work
and Life
Caroline Webb 2016, USA http://a.co/3bRju2e Behavioural
economics
All around the world, people could be having better days. Constraints at
work can make us feel disengaged and dissatisfied, and as we spend
more time in the office than we do with our families that feeling can
follow us home.
But here's the wonderful news: powerful advances in cognitive science
have shown us how we have far more control over the quality of our
day-to-day lives than we realize. How To Have A Good Day translates
behavioural economics, neuroscience and psychology into practical
advice to help you make every day - at work and at home - a good day.
With fascinating case studies and easy-to-implement daily strategies for

effectiveness, happiness and productivity, Caroline Webb shows how
we can all have more control and more 'well-planned luck' - in our work,
in our family life and in our communities.
Insight: Why We're
Not as Self-Aware as
We Think, and How
Seeing Ourselves
Clearly Helps Us
Succeed at Work and
in Life
Tasha Eurich 2017, USA http://a.co/3m7Fm00 Self-Awareness Most people feel like they know themselves pretty well. But what if you
could know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small
improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life?
Research shows that self-awareness – knowing who we are and how
others see us – is the foundation for high performance, smart choices,
and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t
see themselves quite as clearly as they could. Fortunately, reveals
organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, self-awareness is a surprisingly
developable skill. Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research
and work in the Fortune 500 world, she shows us what it really takes to
better understand ourselves on the inside - and how to get others to tell
us the honest truth about how we come across. Through stories of
people who’ve made dramatic gains in self-awareness, she offers
surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help readers do the
same – and how to use this insight to be more fulfilled, confident, and
successful in life and in work.
Kill the Company: End
the Status Quo, Start
an Innovation
Revolution
Lisa Bodell 2012, USA http://a.co/dAhJw0n Mindset In the ever-changing world of business, we've arrived at a point where
process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has
made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the
land of status quo, we've forgotten how to think. And the very
structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them
back. It's time to Kill the Company. This book is a call to arms: to start a
revolution in how we think and work. But instead of more one-size-fits-
all change initiatives forced upon employees, we need to embrace
smaller, positive behavioral changes that create ripple effects
throughout the organization. Thinking can no longer be exclusive to the
creative team or lead strategists. Rather, a culture of curiosity must be
fostered among the ranks to shake up our standard practices, from
unproductive meetings to go-nowhere strategic planning. This
revolution can and will awaken our ability to think, and ultimately, to
innovate and grow. In Kill the Company, innovation specialist Lisa Bodell
urges companies to shift the mindset from business as usual to the
company of the future, to move from what she calls “Zombies, Inc.” to
“Think, Inc.” This involves both risk and trust: to allow all employees the
opportunity and environment to be curious and inquisitive—even
challenging and provocative when the situation calls for it. Too often,
this type of behavior is seen as threatening, says Bodell, who has
actually been told by CEOs that they discourage employees from
thinking. In step with the call to Kill the Company, is a plea to kill fear,
complacency, and the all-too-familiar answer from our leaders: “I can't
be bothered with your (perhaps brilliant) idea.” In the end, readers of
Kill the Company will have a full sense of how much riskier it is to stay

here in the status quo than to break out and think.
Mindset - Changing
The Way You think To
Fulfil Your Potential
Dr Carol S.
Dweck
2012, USA http://a.co/hvkavXF Mindset World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in
decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly
groundbreaking idea-the power of our mindset. Dweck explains why it's
not just our abilities and talent that bring us success-but whether we
approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why
praising intelligence and ability doesn't foster self-esteem and lead to
accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right
mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades,
as well as reach our own goals-personal and professional. Dweck reveals
what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how
a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a
resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.
Pakeha and the
Treaty: Why It's Our
Treaty Too
Patrick
Snedden
2006, NZ http://a.co/disi8u4 Diversity Award-winning book looking at what the Treaty of Waitangi means for
Pakeha. Written by businessman and public figure Patrick Snedden, this
important book won Montana Best First Book of Non-fiction 2006.What
does the Treaty mean for Pakeha today and into the future? Patrick
Snedden discusses a range of issues around this topic, including what it
means to be a Pakeha New Zealander. He deals head-on with Pakeha
unease about Maori claims, different world-views, land protests and
claims, and the disquiet over the Foreshore and Seabed Bill.Pakeha and
the Treaty: why it's our Treaty too is a hope-filled book that encourages
New Zealand's emerging cultural confidence and takes pride in what we
have achieved as a nation. Intelligent and thoughtful, it makes a
significant contribution to ongoing national debate.
Senior Leadership
Teams: What It Takes
to Make Them Great
(Leadership for the
Common Good)
Ruth Wageman
et al.
2008, USA http://a.co/bwHEImx Teams An organisation's fate hinges on its CEO—right? Not according to the
authors of Senior Leadership Teams. They argue that in today's world of
neck-snapping change, demands on leaders in top roles are rapidly
outdistancing the capabilities of any one person - no matter how
talented. Result? Chief executives are turning to their enterprise's senior
leaders for help. Yet many CEOs stumble when creatinga leadership
team. One major challenge is that senior executives often focus more on
their individual roles than on the top team's shared work. Without the
CEO's careful attention to setting the team up correctly, these high-
powered managers often have difficulty pulling together to move their
organisation forward. Sometimes they don't even agree about what
constitutes the right path forward.The authors explain how to
determine whether your organisation needs a senior leadership team.
Then, drawing on their study of 100+ top teams from around the world,
they explain how to create a clear and compelling purpose for your
team, get the right people on it, provide structure and support, and
sharpen team members' competencies - and your own. Timely and
practical, this book enables you to create and sustain a leadership team
whose members learn from one another while collaborating to pursue
your company's objectives.

Smart Collaboration:
How Professionals
and Their Firms
Succeed by Breaking
Down Silos
Heidi Gardner 2016, USA http://a.co/3qXoeMT Collaboration Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients
increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from
regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only
teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have
carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly
defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often
messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating
and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially
true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters
independently, not by working with peers. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi
K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client
loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge
when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a
former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now
lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-
depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her
research with clients and the empirical results of her studies
demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both
professionals and their firms. But Gardner also offers powerful
prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-
margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring,
decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost,
break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With case studies and
real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case
for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and
their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.
Stories for Work: The
Essential Guide to
Business Storytelling
Gabrielle Dolan
**
2017, Australia http://a.co/iGsTvXK Storytelling Stories for Work walks you through the science of storytelling, revealing
the secrets behind great storytellers and showing you how to master
the art of storytelling in business. Stories hold a unique place in our
psyche, and the right story at the right time can be a game-changer in
business; whether tragedy, triumph, tension or transition, a good story
can captivate the listener and help you achieve your goals. In this book,
author Gabrielle Dolan draws from a decade of training business leaders
in storytelling to show you what works, why it works, when it works best
and what never works. You'll learn how to create your own stories —
authentically yours, crafted to attain your goal — and develop an
instinct for sharing when the time is right. In-depth case studies feature
real-world people in real-world businesses, showing how storytelling
has changed the way they work, motivate and lead — providing clear
examples of the power of this enormously effective skill. Storytelling
gives you an edge. Whether you're after a promotion, a difficult client, a
big sale or leading through transition, a great story can help you smooth
the road and seal the deal. This book is your personal coach for
masterful storytelling, with expert guidance and lessons learned from
real-world business leaders.

The 100-Year Life:
Living and Working in
an Age of Longevity
Dr Lynda
Gratton **,
Andrew Scott
2016, UK http://a.co/0ty28kV Ageing This book is a "must read" for almost everyone - if you are a parent, a
grandparent, or anyone under 40, you really need to read this book! The
100 Year Life taps into the major demographic shift that is going on as
we are living longer, healthier lives, and how this results in the need to
rethink the entire life course - the nature of work, education, and how
we think about time and how we use it. The book gives a very practical
take on what today's young people, who are likely to live into their 90s
and 100s, need to think about as they navigate this longer life course
and how it will shift how people think about work, retirement, and
relationships.
The Impostor
Syndrome: Becoming
an Authentic Leader
Harold Hillman
PhD **
2013, NZ http://a.co/2gR2att Imposter
Syndrome
How to be a better leader, confident in your own abilities. Many people
privately fear they are not properly qualified to do the job they have
been appointed to - and this fear undermines their capabilities. Learn
how to overcome this problem and become a better, stronger leader. Be
able to express your fears and recognise your weaknesses, but also be
able to harness your strengths and those of your team to the best
effect.
The Rise of the
Robots: Technology
and the Threat of
Mass Unemployment
Martin Ford 2015, USA http://a.co/6TU5Aup Future Intelligent algorithms are already well on their way to making white
collar jobs obsolete: travel agents, data-analysts, and paralegals are
currently in the firing line. In the near future, doctors, taxi-drivers and
ironically even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by
'robots'. Without a radical reassessment of our economic and political
structures, we risk the very implosion of the capitalist economy itself. In
Rise of the Robots, technology expert Martin Ford systematically
outlines the achievements of artificial intelligence and uses a wealth of
economic data to illustrate the terrifying societal implications. From
health and education to finance and technology, his warning is start - all
jobs that are on some level routine are like to eventually be automated,
resulting in the death of traditional careers and a hollowed-out middle
class. The robots are coming and we have to decide – now – whether
the future will bring prosperity or catastrophe.
Tribal Unity: Getting
from Teams to Tribes
by Creating a One
Team Culture
Em Campbell-
Pretty
2016, Australia http://a.co/fGb1esa Teams Tribal Unity is a real world, practical guide, for leaders committed to
making their organisation a great place to work. Based on the true story
of how one inspiring leader transformed a highly toxic organisational
culture into an internationally recognised case study of success, Tribal
Unity shares proven patterns that are revolutionising the way teams of
teams connect and perform.
Wayfinding
Leadership: Ground-
breaking Wisdom for
Developing Leaders
Dr Chellie
Spiller **,
Hoturoa
Barclay-Kerr,
John Panoho
2015, NZ http://a.co/0kgp673 Leadership This book presents a new way of leading by looking to traditional waka
navigators or wayfinders for the skills and behaviours needed in modern
leaders. It takes readers on a journey into wayfinding and leading,
discussing principles of wayfinding philosophy, giving examples of how
these have been applied in businesses and communities, and providing
action points for readers to practise and reflect on the skills they are
learning.

Why Should Anyone
Work Here?: What It
Takes to Create an
Authentic
Organization
Rob Goffee and
Gareth Jones
2015, UK http://a.co/exVCVKF Organisational
Learning
What would that company be like? How would you build and sustain it?
As a leader, you need to know. In the past, businesses made people
conform to the organization’s needs. But the old paradigm has shifted.
Now leaders must transform their organizations so that they attract the
right people, keep them, and inspire them to do their best work. How
do you create a culture people want to belong to? In this powerful and
necessary follow-up to the classic Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?,
leadership and organizational sages Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
identify and illuminate the six key organizational attributes to do just
that.
Work Rules!: Insights
from Inside Google
That Will Transform
How You Live and
Lead
Laszlo Bock 2015, USA http://a.co/1Z25jX0 HR A compelling manifesto with the potential to change how we work and
live, Work Rules! offers both a philosophy of the new world of work and
a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent and ensuring the
brightest and best prosper. The way we work is changing - are you?
** Author known to members of the Book Club and will be approached, if their book is selected, to gauge willingness to speak to the Group.

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