22 Aug Inspiring New September Reads
Be inspired by the leadership of the CEO of Microsoft, the man who founded Tough Mudder, the important contributions we can make as Beta leaders, and how a social historian’s personal life has fitted within women’s history during the past 70 years.
Microsoft’s CEO tells the inside story of the company’s continuing transformation, while tracing his own journey from a childhood in India to leading some of the most significant changes of the digital era and offering his vision for the coming wave of intelligent technologies.
Hit Refresh is about individual change, the transformation happening inside Microsoft, and the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced – including artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It examines how people, organisations, and societies can and must transform, how they must ‘hit refresh’ in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, and continued relevance and renewal. Yet at its core, it’s about humans and how one of our essential qualities – empathy – will become ever more valuable in a world where technological advancement will alter the status quo as never before.
Nadella explains how the company rediscovered its soul – transforming everything from its culture to its business partnerships to the fiercely competitive landscape of the industry itself. Nadella concludes by introducing an equation to restore digital trust, ethical design principles, and economic growth for everyone. Hit Refresh is an astute contemplation of what lies ahead from a conscientious, deliberative leader searching for improvement – for himself, for a storied company, and for society.
Beta: Quiet Girls Can Run the World: There is more than one way to be the boss by Rebecca Holman
What does a successful woman look like? The shoulder-pad wearing Alpha? The dogmatist who rules with an iron fist? The reality is far more nuanced. Yet women are still pigeonholed as Alpha 
boss, or Beta secretary or assistant. When 47% of the workforce are reduced to two unhelpful stereotypes, how can you embrace your inner Beta and be a success on your own terms?
It’s an important question because the world is changing, fast. Successful companies need people who can lead with emotional intelligence, be flexible to new ideas and adapt their plans when required, leaving their ego at the door. The Beta woman’s time is now.
Beta celebrates the collaborators, the pragmatists, and the people who believe that being nice works and getting your own way isn’t always the most important thing. It is a call-to-arms that explores the unsung workforce of Beta women who are being great bosses, great leaders and are still living their own lives: having relationships, making time for friends, having families. Beta inspires confidence and will help you in the workplace. Fully researched and rich with interviews, anecdotes and case studies, Beta is a smart and entertaining read that really explores the role of women in the workplace today.
It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement by Will Dean
Tough Mudder is not a race. It’s a challenge.
Unlike other endurance events, Tough Mudder encourages team spirit. The course’s design forces you to seek help from others and with twenty obstacles, forty tons of ice and five hundred thousand litres of Grade-A mud set over ten to twelve miles, you’re going to need it.
This revival of community is the key to the company’s success. In It Takes a Tribe, co-founder and CEO Will Dean explores the mental, physical and social principles behind the experience and reveals how he built a global tribe. Arguing for clear principles, bravery and persistence, Dean shows a new generation of entrepreneurs why it’s important to create a brand that people identify with and love.
It Takes a Tribe is the astonishing inside story of Tough Mudder, and a textbook for anyone looking to start a business or find more followers.
Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time by Juliet Gardiner
From Britain’s leading social historian, a lyrical look at the changes to women’s lives since 1940, told with examples from her own life. The book provides an intimate, brilliant account of feminism over the last 6 decades. Juliet Gardiner writes here about the span of women’s lives from her birth during the Second World War to the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Using episodes from her own life as starting points to illuminate the broader history in society at large, she explores changing ideas towards birth and adoption, the importance of education for girls, The opportunities offered by university, to expectations of work and motherhood, not to mention her generation’s yearning for freedom.
Everyone has his or her history and at the same time is part of history as this book so perceptively and beautifully demonstrates. As a work of living history, both lyrical and personal, Joining the Dots is an accessible and empowering story of how one mid-twentieth-century woman grew into a world so different from the one into which she was born. It is a story of bed-sits, sexual choice, motherhood and marriage, feminism, family planning and professional ambition.