If there is a theme to the books we're highlighting this week, it is applicability. Whether it's a "blueprint for modern-day career success" or an "essential new way of understanding" human behavior, a guide to "gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals" or "how statistics shapes our choices, reveals hidden truths, and guides us toward certainty in uncertain times," these books all offer practical, immediately actionable insights for work and life.  

All four titles are available online and hitting bookshop shelves today. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the book below come from the publisher.

Interested in buying multiple copies for your team, book club, or employee resource group? Follow the links below or give us a call to purchase the books, or check out our services for bulk book buyers to learn more about how we can help.

Career Cheat Codes: The Unspoken, Unconventional, and Unfiltered Rules of Career Success by Courtney Johnson, published by Ten Speed Press

Discover the unspoken rules for career success with this definitive guide to getting hired and getting ahead in any industry, from the creator of the viral Problematic Career Cheat Codes trend.

If you've ever felt like the rules of getting ahead at work were written for someone else, or like you're constantly working twice as hard for half the recognition, this is the book for you.  

Whether you're focusing on negotiating your first salary or just trying to stay sane between the hours of 9 and 5, Courtney Johnson pulls back the curtain on what the A players already know: it's not about working harder, it's about working smarter. With her signature, no-BS delivery and years of experience climbing the corporate ladder, Johnson delivers the blueprint for modern-day career success you didn't know you need. You'll discover how to:

• approach the job search so that hiring managers come looking for you; 
  
• conduct an interview that will have them asking when you can start;
  
• navigate office politics without losing yourself; 
  
• represent your work so that your contributions get the recognition they deserve;
  
• make the modern workplace work for you, from optimizing work-from-home setups to CV-ifying hobbies;
  
• and more.  

Career success shouldn't be reserved for a select few. With the tips and strategies in Career Cheat Codes, anyone can rewrite the rules and claim their seat at the table. It's time to stop waiting for opportunities and start creating them instead.

The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe, and Buy by Oliver Sweet, published by Basic Venture

A business anthropologist reveals how cultural intelligence is the essential tool for understanding human behavior.

Why do people do what we do? To answer this question, many of us turn to psychology. But it’s not enough to understand how we think. We also have to recognize the influence of where and how we live. From the ways we bring up children and welcome guests, to the products we buy and how we spend our free time, our culture creates who we are.

Trailblazing anthropologist Oliver Sweet has spent decades using cultural insights to help businesses, governments, and NGOs achieve their goals—whether he’s working with the Gates Foundation to encourage South African men to get HIV tests or helping a pet food company break into a new market in Brazil. Now, in The Rules That Make Us, Sweet shows us how to strengthen our own cultural intelligence. Drawing on research conducted in thirty-five countries, he maps culture’s hidden rules: how it governs our behavior and creates our assumptions, how it’s shaped by technology, and even how it can help us predict the future. This book is an indispensable guide to an essential new way of understanding our families and colleagues, our customers and constituents, ourselves and our world.  

Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede, published by Avid Reader Press

A game-changing, no-BS guide for anyone seeking meaningful success on their own terms, Start With Yourself will give you the tools and mindset to unlock your full potential in life and business—straight from a woman who defied all the odds to become a serial entrepreneur, a cofounder of culture-defining global businesses, a nonprofit champion, and the host of the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast, all while raising a family of four children.

Based on the factors of her early life—she’s the child of a working-class single mother and grew up in a rough neighborhood in East London and dropped out of high school—you’d never guess that Emma Grede would go on to become one of America’s richest self-made women.

This makes Grede unique, but she’s convinced you can do it, too: Start With Yourself is a blueprint to her mindset and how she thinks about business and life, structured in easy takeaways, so you can immediately apply her philosophy to what you’re trying to build and create.

Among her most blazing insights, Grede identifies what she calls “Old Thoughts”: stale thinking, outdated ideas; set-in-stone rules ingrained into the culture about work-life balance, the crassness of money, and the unseemliness of ambition—that aren’t actually rules at all. They’re biases, Grede insists, system errors, and we must strike them from our minds so that we can gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals.

Ultimately, this is a book for everyone tired of feeling like a bystander or passenger in their own life. Grede offers a new vision for work and life that encourages readers everywhere to take responsibility for their own thinking in order to achieve personal and professional success at the highest levels.

What Are the Odds?: A Statistical Guide to Certainty in an Uncertain World by Mark Prell, published by Harvard University Press

From bar bets to Nobel Prizes, viral outbreaks to lottery wins, how statistics shapes our choices, reveals hidden truths, and guides us toward certainty in uncertain times.

We live in an uncertain world. Morning commutes, natural disasters, global pandemics-our lives are riddled with events whose outcomes we can never know with certainty. In What Are the Odds? Mark Prell reveals how statistical thinking empowers us to navigate this uncertainty with clarity and confidence. Whether weighing the benefits of different medications or deciding if home insurance is worth the steep cost, Prell shows that just as important as asking what the data says is asking how reliable it is. Describing the core concepts and methods of statistical thinking, he teaches us how to extract meaningful information from raw data, and crucially, to recognize data that's been cherrypicked, fabricated, or is simply wrong. As we ask if survey responses are truthful, estimate the number of deaths from the Covid pandemic, and plan for retirement, we develop a skillset to test and update our assumptions, to make more accurate forecasts, and above all, to assess the certainty of our conclusions.

Through unforgettable stories of statistical ingenuity, Prell demonstrates that the underlying math can be intuitive and even fun. And as he turns us all into statisticians, he reminds us that statistics is about more than manipulating data-it's about joining a community of statisticians committed to truth and integrity.