Neal Schore offers "guidance and tools for becoming more self-aware, reigning in unruly feelings, and preventing needless drama." Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan "offer a powerful framework for innovations that scale across borders, industries, and income levels." Sarah O'Connor explores why AI, which we were told would do away with our more mundane and dangerous tasks and free us to work more creatively, "now threatens to turn even creative tasks into dehumanizing labor." And finally, a new book from a Nobel laureate in economics "lucidly lays out the successes and failures of the most important political system human beings have conceived of—and what we must do now to rescue it."

All four of the following titles hit local bookshop shelves and online ratailers in July. 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.

Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.

The 25th Hour: How to Thrive (And Gain Ridiculous Amounts of Time) by Getting Out of Your Own Way by Neal Schore, published by Avid Reader Press

Are you craving not just extra time but the wisdom and self-awareness to use it joyfully and effectively? An elite executive coach brings us his proprietary approach to finding at least another hour in our day to do anything we want—all by learning to manage our fears and other emotions better.

We often equate saving time with working smarter. If only we could cut unnecessary meetings, streamline emails, and collaborate more strategically, we could claw back all the stolen hours in our day. While these tactical adjustments help, they only skim the surface. The real problem isn’t external, but internal. In The 25th Hour, Neal Schore reveals how our emotional reactions quietly eat away not just at our time but also our energy. It’s the unproductive worrying, the anxiety that blooms and spirals, the decisions we make based on fear, the obsession over other people’s actions and behaviors—all those complicated emotional dynamics that we so rarely address at work. More than anything else, we get in our own way.

In three parts, The 25th Hour offers a simple, practical, paradigm-shifting approach to professional development, moving the focus beyond strategies for greater efficiency to what really costs us so much time and energy: our uncontrolled emotional responses.

Part I starts us off with some simple tools that can help you handle yourself better in any professional exchange, including the one question you should always ask yourself.

Part II introduces a series of strategies for maneuvering when life isn’t going as you’d hoped, including a failsafe way for resetting after a distracting or tough experience leaves you in a miasma of self-doubt.

Part III helps you reach new levels of achievement and efficiency by firing your fears, breaking with your automatic responses, and fighting back against impostor’s syndrome, with creative tools that will make you smile as you put them to work.

Drawing on Schore’s personal experiences and his successful work with some of today’s most consequential business leaders, The 25th Hour will show you how to manage yourself in order to manage your professional life. With proven guidance and tools for becoming more self-aware, reigning in unruly feelings, and preventing needless drama, this book will equip everyone from CEOs to students with the skills to focus in on what matters to work more productively and efficiently while also having more fun along the way. The counterintuitive surprise? Your colleagues will love that you don’t waste their time either!

Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform by Amos Winter & Vijay Govindarajan, published by Harvard Business Review Press

At the intersection of reverse innovation and design thinking, you find opportunities to create innovations that are global by design.

To solve wicked problems and seize opportunities in emerging markets, innovators must think and act globally. Thoughtful, innovative solutions can be global in scope and succeed in developing markets while disrupting equivalent, higher-cost products in established ones. But creating the right innovations that can succeed in both places will require a diligent, targeted design process.

In Global by Design, Amos Winter, a pioneering engineering design expert, and Vijay Govindarajan, one of the world's leading thinkers on strategy and innovation, offer a powerful framework for creating innovations that scale across borders, industries, and income levels.

Standing at the intersection of reverse innovation and design thinking, they draw on their deep experience in industry, academia, and government to move beyond theory and provide a practical, disciplined approach to spotting consequential problems, leveraging innovation to solve them, and building an ecosystem that produces high-value, low-cost solutions that have global appeal.

Whether you're a CEO, product leader, engineer, policymaker, or entrepreneur, Global by Design provides the tools and perspectives to turn ambitious ideas into life-changing innovations that matter.

We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work by Sarah O’Connor, published by David R. Godine, Publisher

From award-winning Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor, a deeply reported investigation into how AI and robotics are transforming the way we work.

Automation, we were told, was meant to do away with dull and dangerous tasks, freeing us to pursue more fulfilling work. But AI now threatens to turn even creative tasks into dehumanizing labor.

Investigative journalist Sarah O’Connor has spent the last few years gathering stories of burned-out Amazon warehouse workers, Orwellian employee surveillance softwares, AI job interviews, translators frantically trying to keep up with machines, and truck drivers endlessly on the road.

As Sarah O’Connor writes, “Automation was meant to do away with dull, dirty, dangerous tasks. It was meant to free us up for more interesting and creative work. So why was my notebook filling up with stories of good jobs turned bad, and bad jobs turned worse? These people were not being liberated by machines. Instead, they were being crunched into systems run by machines and paced by machines, in which important concepts such as fairness, intelligence, even human-ness itself, were being quietly redefined by machines. And that left me with a question. A question that prompted me to write this book. We think we’re robotizing our work, but what if we’re actually robotizing ourselves?”

Our fear that machines will make us more robotic, O’Connor argues, is not new and has its origins in the industrial revolution, when workers fought against the expectation that they should toil like tireless machines. Inspired by campaigners from nineteenth-century English cotton mills to twenty-first century Swedish mines, O’Connor lays out a path where we can fight for work that is more respectful of our limits, and more worthy of the capacity of our minds.

What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, published by Dutton

From Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and coauthor of the runaway bestseller Why Nations Fail, an ambitious and expansive take on the biggest story in global politics over the last hundred years: the rise and fall of liberal democracy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was supposed to herald the "end of history.” The post-World War II era had seen a battle between liberal democracy (a political philosophy centered on individual freedoms, protection of the most vulnerable, and commitment to self-government) and more autocratic, largely communist regimes—and liberal democracy had won. Soon, it seemed, we would all be living in functional democracies, with sustained economic growth benefiting all segments of society, and war would be a relic of the past. A generation later, one can only ask: What happened?

Liberalism, Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in this powerful and persuasive new book, was a philosophy built to challenge power—yet it still has not adjusted to being in power. Acemoglu, using the wide interdisciplinary lens that has won him acclaim, traces the history of liberal political thought from the Roman Republic to the Renaissance to the present day. He shows the extraordinary progress, unparalleled in human history, that this system of government has created—and explains why it has gone off the rails in recent years.

Looking at rapid advances in technology, shifts in regulatory environments, global political history, and economics, Acemoglu lucidly lays out the successes and failures of the most important political system human beings have conceived of—and what we must do now to rescue it.