Best Books on Driving Human-Centric Culture

Culture is at the heart of many of the challenges that organizations, and society as a whole, face. Creating a human-centric culture has the power to inspire and unite us in the service of common goals. These five books explore the ways in which culture affects us all, and how to go about redefining and building culture so that it puts the well-being of individuals front and center.

In his new book, If Your Culture Could Talk – A Story About Culture Change, author Thomas R. Krause reveals how a degraded company culture can have disastrous effects. Krause employs a compelling storytelling approach in which his fictional CEO is confronted with a disastrous organizational crisis that results in lives lost. The CEO attempts to find a way through using his go-to approach — identify the components; then their relationships; find the through line; and plan the necessary action. His arrogance, however, is the true culprit. It directly correlates to a companywide lack of trust, teamwork, and communication. Krause draws from decades of experience designing culture change interventions — including in the aftermath of NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy — to reveal why so many leaders fail in their attempts to shape company culture. He then demystifies for leaders how to create a positive culture, starting with taking a critical look at their own values and behaviors.

In her book, The Power of Culture, author and organizational psychologist Laura Hamill expertly uncovers the abstract nature of culture as the collective set of reasons why groups behave the way they do. More often than not, she explains, formation of the shared mindset is informal, unwritten, and even unclear. Noting the chasm that habitually exists between the culture an organization aspires to and the one that employees actually experience, Hamill offers practical tools and approaches to bridge the gap. She shares her “Intentional Culture Circle” as a tool for bringing an organization’s aspirational culture to life in an authentic way. Hamill offers organizational leaders valuable and relatable guidance for inspiring and uniting an entire workforce in the service of common goals.

Shuaib Ahmed, in his book, Personal Business: Using the ASA Way to Build an Inspired, Purposeful Team, establishes a strong argument for creating workplace cultures that treat employees as whole individuals. Ahmed was himself a victim of the law profession’s expectation for tallying an astronomical 2100 to 2800 billable hours a year — regardless of what may be happening in one’s personal life. Ahmed struck out on his own and created a more humane law firm culture. He presents his “ASA Way” approach that gets away from the traditional corporate mentality of seeing employees only in terms of increasing the bottom line. While the firm empathetically cares for team members, at the same time it has tripled its revenues and boosted employee morale and productivity.

Veteran negotiator Cash Nickerson’s The Seven Tensions of Negotiation reveals how negotiation mastery involves recognizing the different tension “cultures” at play. To be a great negotiator on either side of the table, we needed to understand the roles, culture, style, and decision-making process of the other party. The outcome depends on where you start a negotiation — called anchoring. But anchoring is contextual and cultural, and if we aren’t aware of the context, culture, or message we’re sharing, we’ll be outsmarted. Nickerson emphasizes the enormous negative and costly social consequences of a hard-lined approach. For example, in the US alone, large companies spent $23.71 billion on litigation in 2021. He believes that by improving how we negotiate, we can change the world.

In George E. Danis’s memoir, Go Far, Give Back, Live Greek, he draws on lessons learned through his personal rags to riches story as an ambitious young Greek who immigrates to America in search of a more promising future. Hard work and tireless ambition led him to achieve enormous success, yet he also came to recognize the ways in which American culture hasn’t lived up to its full potential. He encourages us to “live Greek” — which he says “isn’t a matter of how much olive oil you put on your salad or the type of feta cheese you eat. It’s about people. Living Greek means learning to see the value of community. It means helping your neighbors, offering your support to people who need it, and realizing the responsibility that lies on us all.” Danis entreats us to engage with each other and our communities in such a way that we create a culture where everyone is invested in winning together.

We all need to be thoughtful and intentional about the cultures we are a part of and that we all help to create. It’s time to reject organizational and societal cultures that serve only to oppress, and to usher in values-driven and human-centric cultures that enable everyone to thrive.

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