Named by The Washington Post as one of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018 When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability. Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

In this timely study, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb explores the nature and prospects of cultural freedom by examining the conditions that favor or threaten its development in the political East and West. Goldfarb--who examines conditions in the Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective European allies--focuses most closely upon Poland and the United States. He investigates a wide range of concrete cases, including the Polish opposition movement and Solidarity, the migration of artists, the American television and magazine industries, American philanthropy, and communist cultural conveyor belts. From these cases, Goldfarb derives a definitive set of sociological conditions for cultural freedom: critical creativity which resists systematic constraints, continuity of cultural tradition, and a relatively autonomous public realm for the reception of culture. Cultural freedom, Goldfarb shows, is not a static state but a process of achievement. Its parameters and content are determined by social practice in cultural institutions and by their relations with other components and the totality of social structure. So defined, cultural freedom is transformed from an ideological concept into one with real critical and analytical power. Through it we can appreciate the invisible nature of constraint in the West and the unapparent but acting supports of cultural freedom existing in socialist countries. Most importantly, Goldfarb's conclusions provide a framework for understanding more clearly than before the circumstance of cultural freedom in both East and West so that citizens may utilize their full creative abilities as they address the problems of the present day.

This book offers a sustained and vigorous defence of free expression and objective enquiry situated in the context of the current culture wars. In the spirit of J. S. Mill, Benn investigates objections to the ideal of free expression in relation to harm and offence, reaching broadly liberal conclusions with reference to recent examples of attempts to curb free speech on university campuses. Accepting that some expressions can cause non-physical harm, Benn also considers objections to free speech based on certain understandings of power and privilege. In its exploration and rejection of arguments against the possibility of obtaining objective truth, the book navigates hotly contested fields of contemporary debate, including feminism and identity politics. It challenges the dogma of social constructionism and examines current notions of identity, arguing that a case for fairness can be made without appealing to them. Offering a qualified endorsement of friendship between ideological opponents, Benn highlights common obstacles to civil and rational discussions, concluding with a rational, moral, and broadly spiritual solution to the cultural combat that monopolises present-day society.

This work traces the origin and development of the idea of freedom in Western culture. It deals with three distinct forms of freedom: personal freedom; civic freedom (the right to participate in public life); and sovereign freedom (the right to exercise power over others).

From the early days of Hitler’s rise to power, Bronislaw Malinowski was an outspoken opponent of National Socialism. In response to this, Malinowski began to devote much attention to the analysis of war, from its development throughout history to its disastrous manifestations at the start of the Second World War. Freedom and Civilization, first published in 1947, is the final expression of Malinowski’s basic beliefs and conclusions regarding the war, totalitarianism and the future of humanity. This book will be of interest to students of politics and history.