The books behind the guides.

A behavioral economist demonstrates through clever experiments that human irrationality is not random but systematic and predictable, shaping the decisions we make about money, relationships, honesty, and happiness.

Effectiveness—doing the right things well—is not an inborn trait but a learnable set of habits that any knowledge worker can master to convert intelligence, knowledge, and ability into results.

An exploration of rapid cognition—the split-second, unconscious judgments we make in the blink of an eye—that reveals when these snap decisions serve us brilliantly and when they betray us catastrophically.

A practicing CEO teaches managers that their true output is the output of their team, and shows how applying production principles, leverage, and motivation systematically raises that output.

A self-directed home-study program that trains construction workers to become effective health and safety representatives by teaching them the law, hazard recognition, and their role within Ontario's Internal Responsibility System.

A guided tour of why smart, capable leaders and organizations make disastrous decisions—and how to design decision processes that harness collective intelligence to make better choices.

A venture capitalist's guide to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), the collaborative goal-setting system that helped Intel, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Bono's ONE Campaign achieve breakthrough results.

A failing plant manager, guided by a Socratic physicist named Jonah, discovers that the goal of any manufacturing organization is to make money, and learns to manage by identifying and exploiting system constraints rather than chasing local efficiencies.

To improve our relationships and accelerate personal growth, we must shift our focus from giving better feedback to becoming better receivers by understanding and managing the three triggers—Truth, Relationship, and Identity—that block our ability to learn.

Some ideas survive and thrive while others die, and the difference lies in six learnable principles that make ideas 'sticky'—understood, remembered, and capable of changing behavior.

Human error stems as much from 'noise'—the unwanted and costly variability in our professional judgments—as from bias, and this book reveals its hidden impact and provides a systematic 'decision hygiene' toolkit to reduce it.

Effective work teams come not from leaders managing behavior in real time but from leaders creating and sustaining five enabling conditions that set the stage for great team performance.

A practical guide to making better decisions by using a four-step process (WRAP) that counteracts the four biases that systematically undermine human judgment.

A comprehensive academic handbook exploring the diverse theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of organizational decision making from multiple disciplines including psychology, economics, and sociology.

This book provides a framework and actionable techniques for transforming emotionally-charged, difficult conversations into productive learning conversations by deconstructing them into their three core components: what happened, feelings, and identity.

A top US general reveals how he transformed a conventional, hierarchical military command into an agile and adaptable 'team of teams' to defeat a decentralized, networked enemy in the complex environment of modern warfare.

Real teams—small groups mutually committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and working approach—are the primary unit of performance in organizations, but only when a disciplined focus on demanding performance challenges (not team-building for its own sake) drives their formation.

A consumer psychologist reveals how human decisions are 'manufactured' from the interplay of cognitive machinery, motivational controls, and informational raw materials—and why we so predictably deviate from rational choice.

A compact workbook of fifty visual decision-making models drawn from business, psychology, and philosophy that help you structure complexity and make better choices about yourself, others, and the world.

Great senior leadership teams are not born but built, by CEOs who deliberately establish three essential and three enabling conditions that increase the odds—though never guarantee—that a group of high-powered executives will collaborate to lead their enterprise superbly.

This book collates 25 years of seminal research and practice in Lean Construction, presenting its core theories, themes, and practical approaches for improving productivity, quality, and value delivery in the construction industry.

A former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator distills field-tested, emotion-driven tactics into a practical system for winning any negotiation while preserving the relationship.

This collection of international research and best practices provides a systemic framework for managing health and safety on construction sites, arguing that a proactive safety culture, integrated planning, and shared responsibility among all stakeholders are essential to overcoming the industry's persistently poor safety record.

A scientific tour of how human decisions are actually made—through a metaphor of decision-making as a manufacturing process shaped by cognitive machinery, motivational controls, and informational inputs.

A practical, science-grounded guide to implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that actually work by detangling goals from compensation and running disciplined short cycles from mission down to metrics.

Successful change—individual, organizational, or societal—follows a repeatable three-part pattern: direct the rational mind, motivate the emotional mind, and shape the surrounding environment.

Psychological safety—a shared belief that a workplace is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—is the essential, learnable foundation that lets people speak up, learn, innovate, and perform in a complex, knowledge-driven world.

A comprehensive methodology for managing commitments, information, and tasks to achieve a state of relaxed control and stress-free productivity in life and work.

A comprehensive overview of foundational principles and modern methodologies for planning, managing, and executing work to efficiently achieve personal and organizational goals.

A practical guide to developing, implementing, and integrating standards-based management systems for quality, environment, and safety within construction organisations.

A total-project management framework showing how safety, health and environment (SHE) performance in construction is determined by decisions made at every stage from concept through design, contracting, construction, commissioning and review.

Our world is dominated by unpredictable, high-impact events ('Black Swans'), and our cognitive biases and flawed statistical tools make us blind to them, leading to catastrophic errors in forecasting and risk management.

Organizations that operate reliably under trying conditions do so by cultivating collective mindfulness—continuously tracking small failures, resisting oversimplification, staying sensitive to operations, committing to resilience, and deferring to expertise—so unexpected events are caught and contained before they become catastrophes.

A practical economics guide that reveals where the uncertainty in our lives comes from and how to use tools from economics and finance to manage risk rather than eliminate it.

A practical engineering methodology for designing and managing construction so that hazards are eliminated or controlled at the design and planning stage rather than left to worker behavior on the job site.

A practical, step-by-step guide for the person tasked with designing, developing, and installing process safety management (PSM) systems within a chemical plant or company.

Through a business fable about a struggling Silicon Valley startup and its new CEO, the book reveals five interrelated dysfunctions that undermine teams and shows how to overcome them.

A disciplined, systematic approach for discerning what is absolutely essential, eliminating everything else, and making execution of the vital few almost effortless so you can make your highest possible contribution.

Through a patented 'discovery' method, Clotaire Rapaille reveals the unconscious 'Culture Codes'—the emotional meanings cultures imprint on things like cars, love, food, and money—that secretly drive why people buy and behave as they do.

To be a great boss you must combine caring personally about your people with challenging them directly, and then operationalize that stance to build relationships, give guidance, motivate people, and drive results.

A comprehensive handbook for mining professionals detailing MSHA regulatory compliance, practical safety strategies, and hazard management techniques to prevent accidents and fatalities in the mining industry.

A practical guide showing home builders and small-to-mid-size contractors how to design, implement, and enforce a comprehensive safety and total loss-control program that protects workers, ensures OSHA compliance, and improves the bottom line.

Through nine years of matched-pair research on companies that thrived in extreme uncertainty, Collins and Hansen show that greatness in chaos is a matter of disciplined choice, not circumstance or luck.

A comprehensive handbook for mining professionals detailing MSHA regulatory compliance, practical safety strategies, and hazard management techniques to prevent accidents and fatalities in the mining industry.

A field-tested operating system—the 4 Disciplines of Execution—for reliably achieving your most critical goals amid the daily chaos of business as usual.

Scrum is a lightweight, team-based framework—derived from Toyota's lean manufacturing, combat aviation's OODA loop, and studies of high-performing teams—that lets organizations deliver twice the work in half the time by embracing iteration, transparency, and continuous improvement.

In a distraction-saturated economy, the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks—deep work—is becoming both rare and increasingly valuable, and this book teaches you to cultivate it systematically.

A practical CCPS guideline for integrating separate safety, health, environmental, quality, and security (SHEQ&S) management systems and their metrics to reduce overall operational risk and improve process safety performance.

A practical method for negotiating agreements that satisfy both parties by focusing on interests and objective merits rather than haggling over positions.

A practical, hands-on guide to transforming any aviation organization's safety program into a functioning, scalable safety management system (SMS) built on four interdependent components.

The Cynefin framework helps leaders diagnose which of five decision contexts they face—simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, or disorder—and adapt their leadership style accordingly.

A passionate argument that rigorous engagement with the humanities—what the author calls sensemaking—is the essential, irreplaceable skill for understanding human behavior and making wise decisions in a world dangerously seduced by big data and algorithmic thinking.

A comprehensive reference manual for preventing occupational injury and illness across the full range of construction tasks, hazards, equipment, and legal duties in Ontario.

A strategic, boardroom-to-site framework for managing construction and engineering safety by integrating the 'science' (systems, economics, design, research) and 'art' (culture, skills, learning) of safety management.

A practical guide to adopting the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework to set ambitious goals, align teams, and lead an engaged, high-performing workforce.

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, mastering the skills of dialogue lets you speak honestly and safely about almost anything and turn tough moments into better results and relationships.

An encyclopedic synthesis of how teams and collaborations form, function, and succeed—linking design choices and leadership to psychological states like trust and psychological safety that drive team effectiveness.

The definitive, lightweight framework of roles, events, artifacts, and rules that enables people to address complex adaptive problems while delivering products of the highest possible value.