Human Culture

How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s - the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovative Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversized waterlily inspire the magnificent Crystal Palace, the crowning achievement of Victorian architecture and engineering? These are some of the failures and successes that Henry Petroski, author of the acclaimed The Pencil, examines in this engaging, wonderfully literate book.

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology - and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Finalist in the Business Book of the Year 2024 awards! The Chief People Officer role has finally taken its rightful place on the Executive Committee and human resource management is recognised as a true differentiator of success for modern organisations. However, CPOs face a challenge. In a world of increasing regulation and litigation, and with greater expectations than ever of how organisations should support their people, the HR role risks being overwhelmed. Managers are drowning under the weight of people-related tasks, while staff demand ever more from their workplace. CEOs and Boards ...

In the 70,000 years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f--k things up. From Chairman Mao's Four Pests Campaign to the sinking of the Titanic; from the American Dustbowl to the world's leading superpower electing a reality TV mogul as President...it's pretty safe to say that, as a species, we haven't exactly grown wiser with age.

Nothing is more important in today’s competitive work environment than the strength of an organization’s culture. But how do you change a culture and strengthen it to help your organization? How do you increase productivity and engagement among your team while lowering employee turnover, workplace drama, and confusion?This book provides leaders with loads of answers to solve their company culture problems. It contains proven strategies that will have an enormous impact on the direction of any organization. With this book, anyone, in any institution can become a great leader and build an...

Evolutionary theory has long established that humans are animals: Modern Homo sapiens are primates who share an ancestor with monkeys and other great apes. Our genome is 98 percent identical to a chimpanzee's. And yet we think of ourselves as exceptional. Are we? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores the profound paradox of the "human animal".

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.

History is rife with drug use and drug users, and Human History on Drugs takes us through those highs (pun intended) and lows on a witty and entertaining ride that uncovers their mind-boggling impact on our past.

For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence urgently require rethinking.

Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

As it absorbs data, gains agency, and intermediates between humans and reality, AI will help us to address enormous crises, from climate change to geopolitical conflicts to income inequality. It might well solve some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, revolutionize fields as diverse as medicine and architecture, and elevate the human spirit to unimaginable heights. But it will also pose challenges on a scale and of an intensity that we have never seen.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

Transform Your Life and Leadership Applying the five transformative principles of the Human Operating System is so much more effective than hacking through the forest of leadership trade books, workshops, and management techniques. Many of these tools can be helpful, but they often function more like apps or accessories rather than a deeper operating system that can offer meaning, direction, and coherence to everything you might do as a leader. Jack Nicholson and Rob Murray have been developing the Human Operating System over many years of work with executive leaders, teams, and ...

North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an "American" or "Canadian" culture, but rather into one of the 11 distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory. In American Nations, Colin Woodard leads us on a journey through the history of our fractured continent....

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.

In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff sets out with her three-year-old daughter in tow to learn and practice parenting strategies from families in three of the world’s most venerable communities: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She sees that these cultures don’t have the same problems with children that Western parents do.

Virtue is more than a word: it's a way for us all to live, a way to flourish as human beings. And when applied to organizational life, virtue serves to enhance engagement, strengthen relationships, and foster success in business. Picking up where the acclaimed Exception to the Rule left off, Better Humans, Better Performance connects the classical Greek virtues—Trust, Compassion, Courage, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, and Hope—with authoritative science that can help you achieve the highest performance.

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals?