Workplace Politics

Today, the pay gap between chief executive officers of major US firms and their workers is higher than ever before - depending on the method of calculation, CEOs get paid between 300 and 700 times more than the average worker. Such outsized pay is a relatively recent phenomenon, but despite all the outrage, few detractors truly understand the numerous factors that have contributed to the dizzying upward spiral in CEO compensation.

Penguin Audio presents Damaged Goods, by Oliver Shah. In March 2015, British businessman and the chairman of Arcadia Group Sir Philip Green sold BHS for £1 to Retail Acquisitions, owned by Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt who filed BHS for administration shortly after. By April 2016, BHS had debts of £1.3bn, including a pensions deficit of £571m. Damaged Goods follows Green's journey to the big time, the sale of BHS and the subsequent investigation that concluded with Green paying £363m to the Pensions Regulator.

In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen illuminates today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution, and critiques of "social" companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Keen argues that this social media transformation is weakening, disorienting, and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age.

In this groundbreaking comprehensive analysis, based on more than 25 five years of in-depth surveys involving 100,000 men and women across dozens of Fortune 500 companies, Barbara Annis and Keith Merron provide a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of forces that have combined to create and perpetuate gender inequality. Gender Intelligence exposes common false assumptions that prevent men and women from successfully performing together at work.

In The Leap, bestselling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society.

Forty strong women from various ages, backgrounds and experiences have come together to share the most personal times in their lives. Listen in as these women 16-35 years of age each contribute a chapter about a hard time they have gone through and what they did to get through it. These stories will help motivate and inspire you through any hard time in your life. Your life is about to take a change for the better!

Ethics - described briefly as the norms by which acceptable and unacceptable behaviors are measured - has been the concern, and perhaps the great dilemma, of sentient humans since Socrates subjected it to philosophical inquiry almost 2,500 years ago. Socrates believed, without universal acceptance, that the most pertinent issues people must deal with are related to how we live our lives, what actions are and are not righteous, and how people should live together peacefully.

Every get the feeling that your company culture is completely insane? That your organisation is inherently dysfunctional and seems to emphasize pointless drama over getting work done? The good news is that you’re right: Your company’s culture is screwed up. The bad news is that most everyone else’s company culture is throwing sparks too. Culture is the product of the people that you work with, and people are...really quite interesting, given all the ways that well-meaning people can screw things up.

Just like the meteor that likely precipitated the end of the dinosaurs, social media is having a monumental impact on the world's economy; a change so dramatic that it has created a new business era. Welcome... to the Social Age. What does the Social Age mean for your business? Containing stories, analysis of real-world scenarios, and indispensable guidance, A World Gone Social gives you the tools and information you need to survive - and thrive - in a business climate in which customers hold all the cards...

The author of the widely praised Age of Greed now gives us a bold indictment of some of our most accepted economic theories - why they’re wrong, the harm they’ve done, and the theories that would vastly improve them.

Why does a CEO who has already made hundreds of millions of dollars continue to work? Why does a rock star who has made a bundle continue to tour? Why do retirees' miss work as soon as they stop doing it? Why do we all wrestle with our life's work and talk about it incessantly? The thing about work is that we love it, we hate it, we need it, we miss it, we measure ourselves by it, we judge others by it - we are addicted to it. Work often defines us and fulfills us.

It is taken for granted in the knowledge economy that companies must employ the most talented performers to compete and succeed. Many firms try to buy stars by luring them away from competitors. But Boris Groysberg shows what an uncertain and disastrous practice this can be.

The future is big right now - for perhaps the first time, our society is more focused on what is going to happen in the future than what is happening right now. In Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future, cultural critic and indie entrepreneur Hal Niedzviecki asks how and when we started believing we could and should "create the future." What is it like to live in a society utterly focused on what is going to happen next?

Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo take an unflinching look at the differences between Black and White women's experiences at work. Based on groundbreaking research, the book compares and contrasts the experiences of 120 first-generation Black and White female managers in the American business area. In-depth histories bring to life the women's powerful and often difficult journeys from childhood to professional success, highlighting the roles that gender, race, and class played in their development.

The Principles of Scientific Management by F.W. Taylor is a tremendously important book, the essence of which has had irreversible impact on the way we think about organized labour and management today. It is a product of many years of experimentation, uncertainty, and hard work, fused with thoroughly modernist ideals of a pedantic mind. This book is a culmination of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s career as, perhaps, the most famous management consultant. It stands on the shoulders of his previous examinations of the wage system and the operational characteristics of machine tools.

Best-selling author, professional speaker, and former editor in chief of Cosmopolitan Kate White shares the nine core principles gutsy women need to go bigger and bolder and achieve the full level of success they desire. Twenty-two years ago Kate White wrote the best-selling career bible Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do and helped thousands of women push their success to the next level. Now a new generation of women, still eyeing the pay gap and glass ceiling, needs its own set of rules for today's modern workplace.

There is an invisible army of people deep inside the world’s biggest and best-known companies, pushing for safer and more responsible practices. They are trying to prevent the next Rana Plaza factory collapse, the next Deepwater Horizon explosion, the next Foxconn labor abuses. Obviously, they don’t always succeed. Christine Bader was one of those people. Using her story as its skeleton, Bader weaves in the stories of other “Corporate Idealists” working inside some of the world's biggest and best-known companies.

This urgent and essential audiobook shows how to do just that. The Activist Leader argues that the world needs a new kind of business leader, one that thinks differently about their role in today’s challenges. From climate change to inequality, the major crises facing society have become critical issues for business, and the world expects companies to step up.

Actionable Ethics is part of a larger regimen of ethics training, for the company (but, more broadly-speaking, for life). What makes it different is the fact that it shares techniques gleaned from neuroscience on how to make moral behavior habitual. As Aristotle said, “Excellence is not an act, but a habit." Almost every other ethics book or course available addresses itself to the front of the brain (where executive function takes place). Actionable Ethics, by contrast, addresses itself to the back of the brain, where habit-formation occurs.

You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history? Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world's work - our work - gets done. From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is - and what it might become.