Beach Reads: 5 Thought-provoking Books that Tap into Workplace Culture

Each year, the global management consulting firm McKinsey and Company generates a list of the best books to help businesspeople broaden their perspectives. They gather input from CEOs, company founders, business publication editors, and other leaders to get a consensus on the most impactful reads.

McKinsey Global Publishing leader Raju Narisetti sorted through all the recommendations to produce the 2024 list, which features 90 titles spanning ten genres. Many of the books aren’t new but were selected because of their relevance to what business leaders are facing today.

Technology, personal development, and even fiction had strong showings. Unsurprisingly, organizational culture, which influences all business areas, was a focal point of numerous books on the list. We’ve selected five titles that represent a range of perspectives on the topic:

• The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work by Zeynep Ton
• Culture is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence by Matt Mayberry
• Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright
• What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz
• Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace by Melissa Swift

The following is a synopsis of these books, which relay in various ways how building an exceptional workplace culture is essential to business success.

The Case for Good Jobs

Author Zeynep Ton is a professor at MIT and president of the Good Jobs Institute, a non-profit founded to help companies create good jobs and “redefine what it means to run a successful business.”

In The Case for Good Jobs: How Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work, Ton discusses why companies struggle to find and keep workers. She stresses that a lack of equitable pay is the primary issue driving turnover but also believes that the structure of a company’s culture can add or decrease value for employees. Ton writes that an investment in people goes beyond wages.

“The mental model at companies with a good jobs system is customer centric. It recognizes that frontline employees are the ones driving differentiation, growth, and profitability. So, these companies invest in what it takes to attract the right people, train them, retain them, and keep expectations high.”

Ton describes four culture-based operational choices that companies offering good jobs make:

• Focus and simplify
• Standardize and empower
• Cross-train
• Operate with slack

After working with numerous companies, Ton has observed what keeps most companies stuck in mediocrity. Her prescription is to implement a “good jobs system,” including competitive wages and a culture that develops a high-performing, loyal workforce.

Culture Is the Way

Matt Mayberry’s career as an NFL linebacker was cut short by injury, but he walked away with valuable lessons about leadership, culture, teamwork, and performance. He combined his experience as a professional athlete with insight gained in his second career as a management consultant. His unique perspective made him an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker and thought leader on leadership and organizational culture.

In Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence, Mayberry offers a guide to generate employee engagement and high performance that lead to organizational excellence. Topics include:

• How to build a culture where people can become the best version of themselves and transform team performance
• Five common roadblocks that prevent leaders from using culture to get the best from their people and how to overcome them
• How to implement a company-wide playbook for cultural excellence

Mayberry goes into detail about three key pieces of advice that he offers leaders:

1. Develop a burning desire to improve culture.
2. Generate and bring positive energy daily.
3. Don’t just manage people; coach your people.

He emphasizes the transformative influence of culture, stating:

“Overall, culture wields enormous power. It is the deciding factor that not only can create an incredibly dynamic, innovative workplace, but also drive extraordinary levels of execution in the marketplace.”

Mayberry’s goal for this book was to create an actionable game plan that leaders can implement in their day-to-day operations to forge a dynamic workplace culture. He also includes success stories of leading companies with leaders passionate about building culture, making the advice practical and achievable.

Tribal Leadership

As noted in its forward: “This book points to a fact that is so ubiquitous it’s invisible: human beings form tribes.”

The authors of Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization focused on large companies as they gathered information for this book. They based their theories on extensive research conducted over ten years involving 24,000 people in two dozen organizations worldwide. In the book, they note that a small company is a tribe; a large company is a tribe of tribes. They calculated that anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes existed within each corporation they studied.

The book describes various types of tribal leaders who exist at every level of an organization—not simply at the top. The authors discuss how these leaders develop, and what it takes for them to become great and leave a legacy.

“[Effective] Tribal Leaders focus their attention on building the tribe—or more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cultlike loyalty, and a track record of success.”

Using examples from George Washington to modern CEOs, the authors offer a “road map to tribal leadership.”

What You Do Is Who You Are

New York Times bestselling author and management expert Ben Horowitz creatively blends history lessons with practical advice for business leaders in What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture. He highlights the leadership examples of four notable historical figures and connects them with modern case studies to demonstrate the architecture of great cultures.

Horowitz recounts the lives of rainmakers such as Genghis Khan and the Samurai shoguns. He asks readers to consider how these storied leaders perceived culture and the methods they developed to leverage it in challenging circumstances. Then, he diagrams the relevance of these examples to modern business. He suggests:

“Take note of practices you might want to emulate, and how perspectives well outside your own might be surprisingly pertinent.”

In the book’s second section, Horowitz guides readers through understanding the connection between a leader’s personality and company strategy. He explains how to use that knowledge to build the culture the company needs to succeed, noting that culture is a system of behaviors. He explores the thought-provoking question, “How do you become the kind of leader that you yourself want to follow?”

Work Here Now

Author and thought leader Melissa Swift is on Onalytica’s Top Influencers on the Future of Work list. She relies on data analytics, pragmatism, and a humanistic perspective to help business leaders improve their organizations. In the age of dwindling employee engagement, Swift focuses on building environments where people sincerely want to work.

In Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace, Swift tackles the elephant in the workplace: “Does work really have to suck this bad?” Noting the many reasons employees are disillusioned with their jobs, she delves into the “unintentional, unexamined choices that hurt workers mentally and physically, and over time dramatically dimmish the productivity of the organizations that employ them.”

She then explores what it would take to reinvent the work world. On her LinkedIn page, she explains:

“The book features 90 practical strategies (45 for organizations, 45 for teams) that can help unlock changes in the work we do, shifts in the skills and behaviors required to do that work, and fundamental re-sets on many different ways of working.”

Work Here Now explores different ways to crack the code of how it really feels for employees to do their jobs. Smith proposes a better work model than those prevailing today, with large and small next-generation improvements to build a workplace culture that benefits everyone.