From the C-suite to collecting garbage off the street, and from global positioning to forging our own path within our communities, this week's books cover a lot of ground.

All four titles are available online and on local bookshop shelves today. 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.

Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human—Not Just Artificial—Intelligence by Julie Averill, published by 8080 Books

Julie Averill, the CIO behind lululemon’s rapid growth from $2B to $10B shares a playbook for executives and technology leaders navigating today's AI revolution, and reveals why authentic human leadership is your competitive advantage. 

Every organization claims they're "doing AI," but many are just burning money on technology while ignoring the human intelligence required to make transformations stick. Julie Averill learned this the hard way while scaling lululemon from a $2 billion athletic apparel company to a $10 billion global powerhouse as their Global CIO.

In Chief Impact Officer, Julie pulls back the curtain on what actually happens when you try to transform a company. This isn't a polished case study or a consultant's framework. It's the messy, honest story of leading through a pandemic, building technology teams across three continents, and discovering that the hardest part of transformation has nothing to do with the technology.

As a lesbian in high tech and corporate retail, Julie learned that succeeding meant showing up as her authentic self—not despite her identity, but because of what that journey taught her about building trust. That realization allowed her to build an India Tech Hub with nearly 50% women engineers (earning NASSCOM's AI Game Changer Award), lead through a pandemic that turned every assumption about work upside down, and create the psychological safety that high-performance teams need. She discovered that influence without authority beats positional power, that vulnerability is a leadership competency, and that the professional masks that helped her climb the ladder were exactly what was holding her team back.

But she also made mistakes, faced failures, and had to unlearn decades of code-switching and strategic silence.

This book is for executives, technology leaders, and anyone responsible for driving change. It's for leaders tired of AI hype who want the truth: transformation requires psychological safety, not just algorithms. It demands vulnerability, not just vision. And it needs leaders who understand that culture isn't a soft skill—it's your competitive infrastructure.

With practical insights from building global technology organizations at lululemon, Nordstrom, and REI, Julie delivers a blueprint for leading in the AI era that's grounded in reality, not buzzwords. Because real transformation requires human, not just artificial, intelligence.

Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World by Katherine Dunn, published by Bloomsbury Publishing

The unexplored history of GPS, a military technology turned daily necessity that impacts all aspects of our lives.

Gone are the days when we pulled off to the side of the road, twisted a map this way and that, and squinted in exasperation before saying, “We’re lost.” Now, a network of satellites that circles the earth points us in the right direction. The Global Positioning System is embedded not only in our phones but in our cultural history and our future. GPS, intangible but ubiquitous, has instigated a radical shift in our relationship to our own intuition and place in the world, making us critically dependent on technology we forget is even there.

Little Blue Dot uncovers GPS’s origins as a product of the Cold War, from the Space Race to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, following along as its military and civilian uses expanded and shifted to become part of the fabric of modern life. With pulsating detail and witty expertise, investigative reporter Katherine Dunn takes us on a fascinating journey from the origins of the technology to its modern-day iteration, considering its role in international politics and conflict—and its rising vulnerabilities to manipulation. Initially a cog in the wheel of globalization, GPS has now taken on a new life and may even serve as a parable for the proliferation of AI and newer technologies on the horizon. Sharp and evocative, Little Blue Dot considers the future of GPS, its impact on our understanding of space and time, and the role of technology in our lives.

The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion by Luke Burgis, published by St. Martin's Press

It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

We are surrounded by tribes: political, professional, online, ideological. Each offer belonging at a price. Join, and you risk dissolving into a ready-made identity. Refuse, and you risk drifting into isolation. Either way, the modern person is pulled toward the same end: forming a fragmented self that is easier to manage, easier to sell to, and easier to recruit.

In The One and the Ninety-Nine, bestselling author Luke Burgis argues that the great crisis of our time is not simply polarization or loneliness, but a crisis of formation: it’s difficult to form an identity that is solid enough to withstand the pressure of the crowd, and modern institutions don’t reward the effort. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, and personal experience, Burgis shows how groups shape our desires, how “social contagion” spreads through families and institutions, and why the hunger to belong can turn ordinary people into instruments of movements they barely understand.

This book is about the missing skill that makes real community possible: learning how to remain oneself while staying connected to others. Burgis offers a practical map for recognizing false belonging, escaping coercive dynamics, and passing through the rites of passage that produce people with integrity and courage.

The One and the Ninety-Nine is a timely and inspiring wake-up call, an invitation to reject counterfeit community and develop depth of personality—to become someone who can stand alone—so that we can finally stand together.

Trash!: A Garbageman's Story by Simon Pare-Poupart, published by Melville House

A Montreal garbageman's sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to "stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears" . . .

This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean.

Paré-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more “respectable” fields, he is still on a truck—out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.

His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan.

Trash!—the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada—explains and questions efforts to “clean up” a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else.

Aligned with great books about work from Zola to Orwell to Lucia Berlin, and in dialogue with societal critiques like How To Do Nothing, Trash! will change how you think about your waste and the people who handle it.