NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Talent Code unlocks the secrets of highly successful groups and provides tomorrow’s leaders with the tools to build a cohesive, motivated culture. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG AND LIBRARY JOURNAL Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind. Drawing on examples that range from Internet retailer Zappos to the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade to a daring gang of jewel thieves, Coyle offers specific strategies that trigger learning, spark collaboration, build trust, and drive positive change. Coyle unearths helpful stories of failure that illustrate what not to do, troubleshoots common pitfalls, and shares advice about reforming a toxic culture. Combining leading-edge science, on-the-ground insights from world-class leaders, and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded. Culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. The Culture Code puts the power in your hands. No matter the size of your group or your goal, this book can teach you the principles of cultural chemistry that transform individuals into teams that can accomplish amazing things together. Praise for The Culture Code “I’ve been waiting years for someone to write this book—I’ve built it up in my mind into something extraordinary. But it is even better than I imagined. Daniel Coyle has produced a truly brilliant, mesmerizing read that demystifies the magic of great groups. It blows all other books on culture right out of the water.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Option B, Originals, and Give and Take “If you want to understand how successful groups work—the signals they transmit, the language they speak, the cues that foster creativity—you won’t find a more essential guide than The Culture Code.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better

The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book he unpacks how culture works and gives us tools to partner with God's own making and transforming of culture.

The contribution of culture to organizational performance is substantial and quantifiable. In The Culture Cycle, renowned thought leader James Heskett demonstrates how an effective culture can account for 20-30% of the differential in performance compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors. Drawing on decades of field research and dozens of case studies, Heskett introduces a powerful conceptual framework for managing culture, and shows it at work in a real-world setting. Heskett's "culture cycle" identifies cause-and-effect relationships that are crucial to shaping effective cultures, and demonstrates how to calculate culture's economic value through "Four Rs": referrals, retention, returns to labor, and relationships. This book: Explains how culture evolves, can be shaped and sustained, and serve as the organization's "internal brand." Shows how culture can promote innovation and survival in tough times. Guides leaders in linking culture to strategy and managing forces that challenge it. Shows how to credibly quantify culture's impact on performance, productivity, and profits. Clarifies culture's unique role in mission-driven organizations. A follow-up to the classic Corporate Culture and Performance (authored by Heskett and John Kotter), this is the next indispensable book on organizational culture. "Heskett (emer., Harvard Business School) provides an exhaustive examination of corporate policies, practices, and behaviors in organizations." Summing Up: Recommended. Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.

Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of their engagement, and the ways they choose to act constitute the cultural aspect of civil society. Central to this cultural aspect of civil society is the “culture of democracy,” including normative values, individual interpretations, and interaction norms pertaining to features of a democratic society, such as civility, independence, and solidarity. The culture of democracy varies in different contexts and faces challenges, but it shapes civic actions, alters political and social processes, and thus is the soul of modern civil societies. The Culture of Democracy provides the first systematic survey of the cultural sociology of civil society and offers a committed global perspective. It shows that, as everyone is eager to have their voice heard, cultural sociology can serve as an “art of listening,” a thoroughly empirical approach that takes ideas, meanings, and opinions seriously, for people to contemplate significant theoretical and public issues.

Loss and consequent grief permeates nearly every life changing event, from death to health concerns to dislocation to relationship breakdown to betrayal to natural disaster to faith issues. Yet, while we know about particular events of loss independently, we know very little about a psychology of loss that draws many adversities together. This universal experience of loss as a concept in its own right sheds light on so much of the work we do in the care of others. This book develops a new overarching framework to understand loss and grief, taking into account both pathological and wellbeing approaches to the subject. Drawing on international and cross-disciplinary research, Judith Murray highlights nine common themes of loss, helping us to understand how it is experienced. These themes are then used to develop a practice framework for structuring assessment and intervention systematically. Throughout the book, this generic approach is highlighted through discussing its use in different loss events such as bereavement, trauma, chronic illness and with children or older people. Having been used in areas as diverse as child protection, palliative care and refugee care, the framework can be tailored to a range of needs and levels of care. Caring for people experiencing loss is an integral part of the work of helping professions, whether it is explicitly part of their work such as in counselling, or implicit as in social work, nursing, teaching, medicine and community work. This text is an important guide for anyone working in these areas.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

This is a unique must-read book. It has a revelation of hidden treasures with bifocal elements of universal need in this generation.