If you dive into our picks of this week's best new releases, you'll get a welcome to the “forever-tight” labor market along with instructions for building an employee-focused strategy, and learn why we must "shift from prioritizing answers to focusing on questions." You'll learn to reshape your beliefs so that they "actually support better mental health, clearer decision-making, and stronger leadership," and how to build campaigns that "curb the destructive behavior of corporations"

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.

Help Wanted: How to Find and Keep Talent in a Forever-Tight Labor Market by Jerry Rubin & Steven L. Dawson, published by MIT Press

How employers can compete in a challenging labor market—by hiring differently, redesigning job quality, and rethinking their government relations strategies.

Over the past ten years, the U.S. labor market has been buffeted, with demand shifting dramatically. At the same time, demographic trends mean that U.S. labor supply will steadily tighten into the coming decade: Relatively fewer native-born workers are entering the workforce; a greater percentage are choosing not to work; and an aging baby boom generation is exiting the workforce. What’s worse, this systemic tightening of the US labor market has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s decision to dramatically constrain immigration, the primary source of recent labor market growth.

Welcome to the “forever-tight” labor market. In Help Wanted, Jerry Rubin and Steven Dawson combine their 80 years of experience in management and workforce development to offer employers an “employee-focused competitive strategy.” This strategy includes a wide range of practical, well-researched tools and detailed case studies from a breadth of employers that will help readers compete for talent and retain a productive workforce.

Since the underlying cause of the tightening labor supply is structural, employers—whether for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental—must respond in kind. They too must undertake structural changes in finding, hiring, and retaining workers.

Now equal in importance to an organization’s customer-service strategy, an employee-focused strategy is no longer simply a competitive advantage—it is fast becoming a competitive necessity.

Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times by Owen Fitzpatrick, published by Ideapress Publishing

Right now, your brain is selling you a story about who you are, what's true, and what you should believe. And you're buying it, even when it sabotages your success.

In Inner Propaganda, psychologist Owen Fitzpatrick reveals the internal persuasion system shaping your thoughts, your decisions, and your reality. After decades studying external propaganda, from witnessing first-hand modern influence operations in North Korea, Afghanistan, and Washington D.C., to analyzing the incredible double agent who helped change the outcome of World War II, Fitzpatrick reached a startling conclusion:

The same tactics that sway nations also operate inside each of us.

Your mind has its own propaganda machine. It manufactures certainty, reinforces old narratives, and keeps you loyal to beliefs that no longer serve you. And in an era of infinite information and AI-generated content, these internal distortions intensify—making it nearly impossible to distinguish between genuine insight and manufactured conviction.

But understanding your own propaganda is the key to understanding everyone else's. Once you see how your brain manipulates you, you finally understand why others believe what they believe. As the current media landscape fragments our relationships, this can help you bridge divides rather than deepen them.

To do this, he offers a deceptively simple framework: Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense—three forces that explain why ideas take hold, why we cling to them even when they harm us, and how to reshape beliefs that actually support better mental health, clearer decision-making, and stronger leadership.

Fitzpatrick's insights come from deep research and lived experience. Early struggles with mental health set him on a lifelong path to understand how beliefs form and how they can change—a journey that led him to study the science of influence at Harvard and MIT and advise organizations across 33 countries. Through that work, he explains:

• Why the inner voice you trust most might be lying to you
  
• Why smart leaders make terrible decisions
  
• Why teams resist great strategies
  
• Why the harder you argue, the more people dig in

Your inner story war never ends.

But now, you can choose which side wins.

Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers by Lani Watson, published by Viking

A transformative and philosophical investigation into how we ask questions, full of practical advice on how we can harness the power of questions for ourselves.

We live in a world that wants answers. Answers provide solutions to our problems, teach us about the world, and help us navigate our lives. But we rush toward answers forgetting, that it is questions that set the course.

Questions are a form of power, as well as a vital, everyday tool. After all, if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get the right answers. In Q, philosopher Lani Watson examines the history of question-asking, analyzes our answer-oriented present, and offers a path forward toward a question-oriented future. Along the way, she asks us to consider what a question is, why we ask the questions we do, when we first start asking questions, and where we want our questions to take us.

The shift from prioritizing answers to focusing on questions is not easy, and it requires careful attention and practice. Q also includes practical tips called Q Tools, inspired by the historical, philosophical, and cultural material of each chapter that offer readers exercises and advice for becoming better question-askers. There are real-world benefits to creating a question-oriented future, and it will require a personal, social, political, philosophical and technological transition. In Q, Lani Watson provides us with the knowledge and tools that we need to implement this change in our own lives and communities.

Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed by Michael Marx, published by Island Press

A comprehensive guide to planning and running effective corporate campaigns to pressure companies to do the right thing.

Major corporations exercise enormous control over our lives. They influence how we think, what we buy, who we vote for, and how our society evolves. They are key drivers of the wealth that fuels our economic system, and their power insulates them from strict government regulations and accountability. In this setting, corporate abuses—pollution, toxic and inhumane work environments, defective products—go unchecked. When the government refuses to corral industry’s misdeeds, advocacy groups turn to corporate campaigns to expose and change harmful behavior.

Reining in the Bulls is the first comprehensive resource for professionals of nongovernmental organizations who want to understand, plan, and execute modern corporate campaigns. Michael Marx is a pioneer in this field and has led multiple high-profile campaigns, pressuring companies that were harming workers, communities, and the natural environment. He draws from his and other campaign experts’ experience to highlight lessons from both US and international campaigns. Corporate campaigns are unique in that they require knowing how to pressure branded companies and understanding their inner workings to strategically target that pressure.

The need for a comprehensive guide is growing. Few advocacy professionals receive training on how to conduct these campaigns effectively. Even those who have worked on corporate campaigns for a while need to evolve their strategies to incorporate advances in social media and the threats posed by new industries, such as AI. There is an urgent need to curb the destructive behavior of corporations, and this book gives advocates a powerful tool for holding companies accountable and protecting our social and environmental well-being.