Culture, teams and people

Open-book management: teach every worker to read the financials and share the gains.

How firms that sell expertise set their ratio of juniors to partners, and price.

How family firms develop, seen as three overlapping circles: family, owners, firm.

How Pixar kept a creative company working after success, and the habits it used.

What organisational culture is, how it forms, and how it bears on leadership.

How family-owned firms can plan for growth, ownership and succession.

Essays on what makes professional work truly professional, beyond competence.

Building an ownership culture in which employees think and act like owners.

Lessons on why some family firms survive across generations and others do not.

Rewards work for routine tasks; creative work runs on autonomy, mastery and purpose.

From LinkExchange to Zappos, and the case for building a company on its culture.

Founder's own account of recruiting and holding a commissioned sales force.

Nucor's chief executive on flat structure, incentive pay and minimills

Broad-based stock options and what they did to company performance.

The NCEO's evidence on when shared ownership raises performance.

An owner who converted his own firm, on employee ownership in practice.

Current survey of ESOPs, worker co-ops and employee trusts.

Kegan and Lahey argue that most organizations are 'second nature' — places where people spend enormous energy managing impressions and hiding weaknesses. Deliberately Developmental Organizations build learning into daily work. A challenging read that sits at the furthest edge of what most organizations are ready for.

Coyle examines high-performing groups — SEAL teams, Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs — to identify the three skills that build strong cultures: building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose. The research is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which makes it more credible than most culture books.

A fable of a failing executive team and a five-level model of what goes wrong.

Five disciplines, led by systems thinking, that let an organisation learn.

An eight-stage process for organisational change, starting with urgency.

Why some groups of talented people achieve greatness and others never do.

Hire by defining the results a role must deliver, not the skills on a CV.

A fable of two rival firms showing why organisational health beats clever strategy.

Seven qualities, such as unconditional responsibility, of people who make firms work.

Leaderless organisations, from Alcoholics Anonymous to file sharing, and their power.

How to rate an organisation's tribal culture on five stages and raise it.

A method for hiring the right people, built on interviews with wealthy executives.

Change made easier: direct the rational rider, motivate the emotional elephant.

Tech firms' puzzle interview questions, and whether they pick good hires.

Organisational health, clarity and cohesion, matters more than strategy or smarts.

Insider account of Google's people operations by its SVP of HR.

Experiments showing people work for meaning and recognition, not just money.

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

Culture is how people behave when the leader is absent, and must be designed.

How Netflix built talent density and candour so it could remove controls.

Employment as an honest alliance: set tours of duty between firm and employee.