2018.11.5 New Arrivals

Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

AUTHOR : Patty McCord
PUBLISHER : Silicon Guild

When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, “Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility,” she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR - annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs - often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.

“Powerful” will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

Flights

AUTHOR : Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft (Translator)
PUBLISHER : Fitzcarraldo Editions

“Flights,” a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death.

In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw.

In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island.

With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

AUTHOR : Ken Kocienda
PUBLISHER : St. Martin’s Press

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era: the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world’s most admired companies.

Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation, inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy - and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.

An insider’s tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, “Creative Selection” shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.