The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human
Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman
Page Two Books
February 2023, $24.95

Every employee, at every level, wants to feel seen, heard, and respected. If we don’t feel safe, we can’t be our best selves or do our most creative work. This is why leaders must ensure psychological safety for everyone on their team. Whether you’re a manager, CEO, or entrepreneur, The Psychological Safety Playbook is the guide you need to lead your team to the highest levels of performance and innovation.

The Psychological Safety Playbook invites you to explore 25 specific actions that will create more psychological safety in your workplace. These are all moves that every leader can adopt and practice. Each move features a description of why to try it, instructions on how to do it, and a nutshell summary. You can start anywhere in the playbook—all the plays and moves are self-contained!

STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World
Dan Lyons
Henry Holt & Company
March 2023, $36.50

Our noisy world has trained us to think that those who get in the last word win, when in fact it’s those who know how to stay silent who really hold the power. STFU is a book that unlocks this power and will change your life, freeing you to focus on what matters. Lyons combines leading behavioural science with actionable advice on how to communicate with intent, think critically, and open your mind and ears to the world around you.

Talk less, get more. That’s what STFU is all about. Prescriptive, informative, and addictively readable, STFU gives you the tools to become your better self, whether that’s in the office, at home, online, or in your most treasured relationships. Because, after all, what you say is who you are.
So take a deep breath, turn the page, and quietly change your life.

Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World’s Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink
Liz Hoffman
Crown Publishing
March 2023, $41.00

It was the ultimate test for CEOs, and almost none of them saw it coming. In early March 2020, with the Dow Jones flirting with 30,000, the world’s biggest companies were riding an eleven-year economic high. By the end of the month, millions were out of work, iconic firms were begging for bailouts, and countless small businesses were in freefall. Slick consulting teams and country-club connections were suddenly of little use: Business leaders were fumbling in the dark, tossing out long-term strategy and making decisions on the fly—decisions that, they hoped, might just save them.

In Crash Landing, award-winning business journalist Liz Hoffman shows how the pandemic set the economy on fire—but if you look closely, the tinder was already there. After the global financial crisis in 2008, corporate leaders embraced cheap debt and growth at all costs. Wages flatlined. Millions were pushed into the gig economy. Companies crammed workers into offices, and airlines did the same with planes. Wall Street cheered on this relentless march toward efficiency, overlooking the collateral damage and the risks sowed in the process.

In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short, Crash Landing exposes the fear, grit, and gambles behind the pandemic economy, while probing its implications for the future of work, corporate leadership, and capitalism itself, asking: Will this remarkable time give rise to newfound resilience, or become just another costly mistake to be forgotten?

 Intentional Leadership: The Big Capabilities Setting Leaders Apart 
Rose M. Patten
Aveo UTP
January 2023, $32.95

We live in a time of unprecedented speed, connection, and uncertainty. While many organizations are adapting to this new reality by reinventing business models, significantly fewer are examining the implications of these changes for developing effective leadership. In Intentional Leadership, Rose M. Patten draws on her expertise as one of Canada’s most influential leaders to shine a spotlight on this emergent and often neglected space.

Drawing on learnings and a framework tested with over 900 senior leaders across industries and geographies, Intentional Leadership presents a guide for continuous renewal, focusing on the human side of leading. Patten debunks common myths, emphasizing that leadership capabilities do not just develop over time, but require self-awareness, feedback, intention, adjustment, and practice. Whether you are a CEO of a large corporation, an activist, raising a family, working in government, or leading a not-for-profit organization, Intentional Leadership meets you where you are and provides the necessary tools for self-reflection and growth as a leader.

Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril
Peter A. Victor
New Society Publishers
April 2023, $29.99

Earth overshoot will end either by design or by disaster. Which future should we choose? Earth is in overshoot. The cumulative impact of eight billion humans combined with the relentless pursuit of economic growth in the name of “progress” has stressed the planet beyond its limits. We must act now.

Surveying economic alternatives and charting plausible paths forward for a planned economic contraction, Escape from Overshoot covers a wide terrain. 

Incorporating over 150 informative diagrams and illustrations, this compelling and provocative work is required reading for students and professionals grappling with specific manifestations of overshoot, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and food and freshwater shortages. It’s also essential for all people concerned about the deteriorating state of societies and the environment and seeking an equitable way out.

Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work
Joe Mull
Page Two Books
May 2023, $24.95

Finding, keeping, and motivating employees is harder than ever. Amid record-setting turnover and staffing shortages across industries, competition for candidates is fierce.

There is a massive recalibration taking place around how work fits into peoples’ lives. Winning the new war for talent requires a more humane employee experience, one that meets the needs and values of a changed workforce. Get this wrong, and the future of your organization is in jeopardy. Get this right, and you create an astounding competitive advantage around hiring and retention, while reaping all the benefits and business results that dedicated employees generate.

The era of trying to find the best person for the job is over. At an adapt-or-die moment for businesses of all sizes, employers must now create the best job for the person.

Paradoxical Leadership: How to Make Complexity an Advantage 
Ivo Brughmans
Rotman-UTP Publishing
April 2023, $36.95

On a daily basis, leaders, managers, and professionals alike have to deal with tensions caused by differing and even opposite approaches. We often feel the need to make a fundamental choice between either one or the other for the sake of clarity. Using practical methodology and an extensive toolkit, Paradoxical Leadership reveals how to transform divisive dilemmas into creative solutions and paralyzing polarization into a constructive dialogue.

This book sheds a refreshingly new light on a wide range of fundamental organizational and management challenges, such as strategy development, business design, corporate governance, performance management, change, agility, innovation, diversity, culture transformation, leadership, and talent.

Demonstrating how to manage contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas in a productive and inclusive way, Paradoxical Leadership provides the skills, frameworks, and tools necessary to integrate both/and thinking into your working and leadership style.

The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic
John Quiggin
Yale University Press
April 2023, $32.95

From the author of Zombie Economics, The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic proposes a plan for creating a post-pandemic economy that is more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable than the one preceding it.

The COVID‑19 pandemic has upended the global economy and revealed glaring inadequacies and injustices in many parts of our social and economic systems. The pre-pandemic world was defined by globalization and the free movement of goods, people, and capital. It was also a world of ever‑increasing concentration of wealth held by those at the very top.   Showing how the coronavirus exposed the weaknesses of a system that had us on the path to entrenched inequality and environmental disaster, John Quiggin argues that a “return to normalcy” is neither possible nor desirable. With an astute historical perspective that takes into account the outcomes of the economic strategies employed following the devastation of each of the two world wars, Quiggin shows how the pandemic offers the opportunity to discard outdated models and embrace new ideas in order to create a broadly shared prosperity.

Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace
Sally Helgesen
Hachette Go
February 2023, $38.00

Participants at leadership conferences often tell Sally, “Please don’t spend your time telling us why developing and retaining a diverse workforce is important. We get it. The problem is, we don’t know how to do it.” Rising Together provides that missing how in full detail by identifying both what holds us back and specific tactics that can help us move forward.

First, Sally identifies the eight common triggers most likely to undermine our ability to collaborate across divides—not only of gender, but also of age, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and life experience. These triggers are widespread, yet rarely acknowledged. They include differences in how people from different backgrounds view ambition, competence, perceptions, fairness, communication, networks, attraction, and humour.

Sally then offers specific practices designed to address these triggers: simple behavioral tweaks that we can use on a daily basis; a method for informally enlisting allies to hold us to account; and a means for cultivating and disseminating the dynamic power of “we.”

Rising Together is for readers at every stage and level of their careers who recognize that building a broad range of relationships is essential to their advancement, now and in the future. This book also serves as an indispensable guide for human resources, diversity, and leadership professionals tasked with addressing the misunderstandings, resentments, and derailments caused by the eight triggers. Sally’s focus on behaviours—how we act—rather than bias—how we think—promises to redirect the inclusion conversation in a grounded, real-world way that brings us together.

Data-Driven DEI: The Tools and Metrics You Need to Measure, Analyze, and Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Randal Pinkett
Wiley
March 2023, $33.99

Many DEI interventions lack rigour and measurable value beyond staff composition, statistics, and surveys. Data-Driven DEI presents readers with science-based, technology-enabled assessments and tools that will help individuals and organizations achieve measurable, lasting impact. With the tools in this book, readers can achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion by assessing their current state of DEI with the author’s proprietary the Intrinsic Inclusion Inventory; analyzing that data to produce a personalized action plan; and implementing evidence-based, behavioural learning interventions like the author’s proprietary program, The Inclusion Habit. Following these steps will lead to several measurable individual outcomes: increased cultural competence, accelerated career advancement, genuinely inclusive leadership, and effective allyship. It also produces numerous, quantifiable organizational outcomes, such as improved recruitment and retention, strengthened customer orientation, increased employee satisfaction, better-quality decision making, enhanced brand and reputation, and improved bottom line financial performance.