Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg; Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $24.95, Hardcover; March 2013, ISBN 9780385349949

The COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most powerful women in business, and as such is a leader not only at the top of her organization, but also to other women in business. Neither is an easy role, and Sandberg gets criticized for her work in both spheres. (The amount of media chatter about this, her first book, is cacophonous.) But she also reaps the benefits, and is the first to say that her advantages are exactly what behooved her to write this book.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a pragmatic, and even sometimes anthemic, book that began as a TEDTalk in 2010. The same intelligent and intimate voice she employed in her talk drives this book as well. Sandberg doesn’t hesitate to share from her life the stories and struggles she has both observed and experienced as one of the few women in such organizations as Google and Facebook—as well as during her time at the World Bank and the Treasury Department. From her seat on the front lines, Sandberg acknowledges the generally female-unfriendly culture of boardrooms, but makes a credible argument for women to take control of what they can change: themselves.

Lean In begins with a chapter titled, “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?” Sandberg believes that it is fear that causes women to undermine their own ambitions:

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

To nullify that fear, Sandberg compels women to “Sit at the Table,” “Don’t Leave Before You Leave,” and “Make Your Partner a Real Partner.” Every well-researched chapter focuses on one change of behavior that can shore up a woman’s will to strive. In “Seek and Speak Your Truth,” after a rather self-deprecating story about crying while talking with her boss Mark Zuckerberg about a personal affront, she hints at the way in which women make things harder for themselves than they need to. Often, women feel like they need to leave their home lives at home or their emotions tucked away, but Sandberg thinks that is not the case.

It has been an evolution, but I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work. I no longer think people have a professional self for Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That type of separation probably never existed, and in today’s era of individual expression … it makes even less sense.

If the chapter titles and the passage directly above sound like some practical advice for all working people, it’s because it is. Lean In, despite being obviously directed toward helping women succeed, is, at its core, simply a book about success… for both genders. And is, in fact, a book that can and should be read by both.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Crown Business, 320 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, March 2013, ISBN 9780307956392

Each day, all day, we make decisions. Often, these many decisions are simple: what to wear, where to eat, and how best to churn through the tasks on our to-do list. Sometimes the stakes are higher: how should we address an employee issue, should we make a career change, or do we stay the course with our business plan? In either case, we generally narrow the choices down to two solutions, create a mental list of pros and cons, and make our decision based on the results.

According to Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, we’re doing it all wrong. Our gut instincts are loaded with bias, and the pros and cons we create—even though our intent is to be objective—are based on those biased gut reactions:

Generating distinct options is even more difficult when our minds settle into certain well-worn grooves. Two of those grooves are common states of mind, studied widely by researchers, that play a role in almost every decision we make. One is triggered when we think about avoiding bad things, and one is triggered when we think about pursuing good things. When we’re in one state, we tend to ignore the other.

Instead, the Heaths recommend building a process by which to make better decisions. To start, they quote Steve Cole, VP of R&D at HopeLab, who said, “Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?” This kind of broader thinking about a situation is what the authors find an innovative, more risk-averse method of deciding what to do. From there, the Heaths explore a variety of process building scenarios: consider opposites, find previous solutions to the same problem, overcome short-term emotion, and more. And with each scenario, they present real examples of these processes (and their outcomes) in action.

Those who have read the Heaths’ previous books, Made to Stick and Switch, know they are great writers. Their books are filled with clever stories, detailed research told in a relatable way, and as a result, each page simply makes you think, and think more clearly. But what elevates their books above many others is that they operate both as “how-to” guides as well as social insight. You can read them to change what you do or how you think, and in the process, you’ll understand the world a bit better. Because decision-making is one of the great challenges for leaders, entrepreneurs, and really anyone trying to manage a career, this book is an important one.

How Stella Saved the Farm: A Wild and Wooly Yarn About Making Innovation Happen by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, St. Martins Press, 160 pages, $19.98, Hardcover, March 2013, ISBN 9781250002129

I was surprised to see that two of the most respected and knowledgeable business book authors writing today, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, wrote a parable. The team—both faculty at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth—has previously written three more academic-leaning books together, and their 2012 book Reverse Innovation appeared on numerous best-of lists. So, why the parable now? Perhaps it’s because turning theory into story can reach an entirely new audience, as this book should.

Here’s the scenario: Animals have taken over running all the small “family” farms, and humans run huge factory farms. Humans, however, want to buy up all the smaller farms, and the animals want to prevent this because the worker-animals on the human farms are treated unfairly. On this particular farm, the (horse) CEO has moved on and bequeathed the running of the farm to his (horse) daughter, Deidre, who is (the sheep) Stella’s mentor. Deidre’s promotion is a surprise and puts her at odds with the farm manager (a bull) who expected to take over for the late CEO, but was overlooked due to his more traditional approach to business.

Clearly the farm is in danger, and obviously there is a bad guy (human) who would like to snatch it up. This puts pressure on the farm to do some quick innovating.

They hold a contest, and Stella’s suggestion of introducing a new, rather “foreign” revenue stream to the farm is chosen as one of the changes. Drama (and lots of ground pawing) commences. Does Stella and her innovative idea save the farm? The authors suggest early on that just because the book is named after Stella doesn’t mean she actually did save the farm. Numerous other characters contribute to the attempts to innovate, so the suspense remains high to the end.

I’ll admit, as I was reading, I began to think about the independent bookstores we’ve seen wither under the assault of first the super-stores and now the online monolith, Amazon.

Overall, Deidre determined, the farm was operating as efficiently as ever. That was the good news. But prices for the farm’s products were dropping across the board, squeezing profits. If current trends continued, Windsor [farm] could be forced out of business in just a few years.

In other words, I could relate—which is exactly what Govindarajan and Trimble set out to do with this parable. This tale enables the authors to share their theories of innovation with any reader who learns better or engages more intimately through story, even if the story features farm animals at the helm. Additionally, as I was reading, I started to come around to the idea that these animals (hooved, but able to type!) were actually fine representatives for those of us who feel handcuffed when fighting against companies with more money and more power.

Govindarajan and Trimble offer us an insightful little book laced with humor and clever little details that make for entertaining reading. Will you need to suspend disbelief that there are custom-made desks for horses? Yes, but you will not need to struggle through a lengthy academic thesis to access the pragmatic lessons the authors make clear through the struggles of this charming little farm. They also offer a list of review questions and ponderables at the end of the book to get you thinking about the many layers of lessons woven into the story. And this last section allows readers to become a very important part of the story.

Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results by Bob Garfield & Doug Levy, Portfolio, 229 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, March 2013, ISBN 9781591845775

It’s a lousy cliché, but the instruction to “be yourself” is becoming an essential modus operandi for today’s successful marketers. When social media arrived on the radars of advertisers and marketers, many said, “Oh goody, new media to purchase,” and quickly filled up the cheap new real estate with the same old message: “We are great! Buy our stuff!” They were quickly dismayed by their inability to get results they were used to with this kind of messaging. In Can’t Buy Me Like, Bob Garfield and Doug Levy provide the why and the wherefore to the essential follow up question: “What has happened to the audience we once controlled?”

“Welcome to the Relationship Era,” they say, yet it won’t feel like a warm welcome to many. They spell out the present and future (i.e. the death) of advertising. They tell us that googling “I love Satan” will elicit ten times more results than will “I love Citibank”—293,000 against 21,100, respectively.

But they have good news to share, as well, such as the growth Panera Bread has seen because of their choice to put people and relationships before profits—or rather, perhaps, because of their ability to drive profits through its people and relationships. Anecdotes and lessons such as these quickly override the negative and they continue throughout the book, inspiring something real inside us—maybe the understanding that business is, after all, personal. And these stories are exciting too, as we begin to dawn on the realization that in this new era we don’t need to fret over the market research we can’t afford. Good companies are winning, simply by being themselves.

The authors share MEplusYOU’s “Brand Sustainability Map,” a chart mapping customer trust and transactions across different types of relationships. It’s a good way to measure your relationships with your customers, and the authors reveal the most important part about it:

Put aside the notion of investing in the research required to definitively plot your brand on the grid. What matters most is the very concept of the Brand Sustainability Map. Once you accept what it reveals, you will most likely be able to intuit with some accuracy where you brand sits, and in which direction it is headed.

Of course, multi-billion dollar companies will continue spending big money on marketing, but the good news is that it’s not the most important thing anymore—relationships are. The book is full of stories about companies that soared in the Consumer Era and are struggling in the Relationship Era, and of companies now thriving in the Relationship Era. In many cases, these examples are of such ubiquitous brands that we can’t help but see the immediate wisdom in the appraisal of the situation.

Garfield and Levy bring their decades of experience in advertising and brand analysis to (literally) lay out a map that companies can use to move toward more sustainable and profitable relationships with their customers. As they say, it’s the concept itself that’s essential, and once you’ve embraced it you’re probably already moving in the right direction. Their book will point you there.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honoré, HarperOne, 224 pages, $25.99, Hardcover, January 2013, ISBN 9780061128820

After reading the first six pages of The Slow Fix at my desk, I turned to a coworker and exclaimed, “This is so good!” And that’s truly the best way to react to a book, isn’t it? I’m not sure what it is about Honoré’s voice that appeals so much to me, but when he takes the time to describe the offices of the World Health Organization like this:

Grey filing cabinets and in-trays piled high with folders line a dimly lit corridor. A yellow, handwritten note saying Hors Service (Out of Order) is taped to the coin slot of the drinks machine. Sandal-wearing academic types work quietly in offices with tropical fans on the ceiling. It feels like the sociology department of an underfunded university or a bureaucratic outpost in the developing world.

I do a little mental fist-pump—“Yes!”—because reading should be fun and open up worlds, even office worlds, that we’ve never stepped foot in. Honoré’s writing remains engaging throughout, with careful attention to the people and places that populate his examples of successful slow fixes. At the base level, Honoré’s argument is that, when trying to solve complex problems, the fast fix is the futile fix. After all, he somewhat cheekily claims, “No TEDTalk has ever changed the world.” (Honoré gave a TEDtalk “In Praise of Slowness” in 2007.)

Whether your problem is related to health (Lose 15lbs in 2 days!) or business (Reduce staff to cut costs!) or manufacturing (Speed above quality!) or politics (WMDs anyone?), successful problem solving requires “a deeper, seismic change,” and The Slow Fix offers an adaptable recipe for doing just that. “Think holistic” like a Charter Management Organization called Green Dot did when asked to fix a dangerous and disappointing South Central Los Angeles school. Or “Crowdsource” like Iceland did when their political system was in desperate disarray after the 2008 collapse of their economy. Perhaps “Play” like Honoré himself did in trying to motivate his family to perform their household chores using a game called Chore Wars that taps into the human instinct for play. Honoré encourages us to use those and/or several other slow approaches that will create lasting change. After all:

If the earth is going to sustain eight, nine, or even ten billion people, we need a revolution in the way we live, work, travel, consume, and think. Making this happen will be the biggest Slow Fix of all.

The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, Twelve, $26.99, 320 pages, Hardcover, January 2013, ISBN 9780446571593

Just as market theory sits on the foundation of Adam Smith’s ideas, made famous in The Wealth of Nations, the study of organizational economics began with the work of Ronald Coase in a famous article entitled “The Nature of the Firm.” Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan explain in their new book, The Org:

Coase’s conception of the market involved a lot more friction and discord than Adam Smith’s original vision. It gives us a more complete understanding of why orgs exist and why we don’t trade for everything on the open market, and a way of thinking about how orgs make decisions about drawing their boundaries. Those high costs of transacting business on the market drive people to organize. And Coase’s main insight—that the cost of an in-house transaction needs to be compared with the cost of a market transaction—has served as the basic building block for the modern economic theory of what organizations do.

The authors use that framework to help dissect and remedy the Dilbert-like quality of the modern org. They begin by telling the story of Hewlett Packard. Started in a garage now called “the birthplace of silicon valley,” HP was a nearly ideal org for decades, famous for “the HP Way”—a management style “focused on the people who made up the company rather than on the products.” By 1992, they were employing more than three hundred thousand employees. But HP had lost its famous “Way.”

These days, employee-friendly practices such as telecommuting, flextime, freedom to pursue independent projects, and airtight job security need to pass the “market test.” … When profits and employees’ interests come in conflict, profits win out, as in 2005, when the new CEO handed out thousands of pink slips, to the glee of Wall Street investors. Information Week magazine ran an opinion piece called, “In Praise of [HP CEO] Mark Hurd’s 9,000 Layoffs” in 2010. .… And the newest HP savior, CEO Meg Whitman, announced another round of layoffs in 2012, this time totaling twenty-seven thousand jobs.

It’s no wonder people are not only wary to go to work in such organizations, but are scared to grow their small businesses into larger orgs for fear of what they’ll become. But most of us still make our living, and spend a great deal of our lives, within organizations, and they are still the best way to accomplish tasks we can’t do on our own—“a machine for getting stuff done.” The authors want to modernize that machine without losing the engine that makes it run. Looking at everything from “Designing the Job,” to “Putting Together the Organizational Puzzle,” and “The Economics of Org Culture,” they help leaders and entrepreneurs capture the problems and promise of their organizations in all their complexity and commonality.

As Fisman and Sullivan say, “The org is not a problem. It’s a solution—but one that comes with some messy realities … ” Their book, The Org, will help you tidy up that mess.

Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab by Sarah Miller Caldicott, John Wiley & Sons, 284 pages, $21.95, Hardcover, December 2012, ISBN 9781118407868

Midnight Lunch is a book about collaboration, and about contemporizing the prolific Thoman Edison’s belief that collaboration is key to innovation. The title itself refers to the late night gatherings of team members at Edison’s famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey—collaborative sessions that spawned inventions and innovations that every schoolchild in America grows up learning about.

It is evident throughout the book that Caldicott is passionate about her subject, not only because she is the iconic inventor’s descendent, but because she believes wholly in the great potential inherent in successful collaboration.

Like gravity, collaboration is a pervasive force. It lies at the heart of what uniquely shapes teams and organizations. It connects people to the vast power of their own knowledge and shines a light on the purpose of their work and lives. Collaboration holds the power to link teams with diverse skills and traits, urging them to come together in an aligned way and yielding breakthroughs that can impact hundreds—even millions—of people.

Edison did indeed touch millions of people through his inventions—inventions he acknowledges he would not have gotten credit for had it not been for the hard work of his laboratory teams. Caldicott writes it well: “Like the connective tissue in the human body, Edison’s true collaboration methods gave backbone, sinews, muscles, and tendons to his world-changing innovation process.” But this is not a biography as much as a call for action—or, rather, a call to belief. Edison serves as Caldicott’s spirit guide as she presents a technical methodology for achieving high-performing collaboration. That method has four parts, which make up the four sections of the book:

Phase 1: Capacity | Phase 2: Context | Phase 3: Coherence | Phase 4: Complexity

Organizations often tackle #4 first, forgetting that teams need to lay the foundation before building the proverbial skyscraper. Anyone who is a member of a team can benefit from the exercises scattered throughout the book that will help them understand the value of all four steps and find that sweet spot where true collaboration exists, that “nexus between discovery learning and performance.”

The demand for organizations to pursue true collaboration is important not only because of the growing complexity of innovation, but because prospective employees will demand it: “Gen Y’s attraction to collaborative work environments and discovery learning will continue to hold magnetic power as this crucial cohort comes to dominate the US workforce by 2025.” If organizations don’t embrace exciting, collaborative work environments, they will not be able to attract the best and the brightest. They might even miss out on the next Thomas Edison.