Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

We get feedback every day of our lives, from friends and family, colleagues, customers, and bosses, teachers, doctors, and strangers. We’re assessed, coached, and criticized about our performance, personalities, and appearance.

We know that feedback is essential for professional development and healthy relationships—but we dread it and often dismiss it. That’s because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We want to learn and grow, but we also want to be accepted and respected just as we are now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging and offers a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace.

The business world spends billions of dollars and millions of hours each year teaching people how to give feedback more effectively. Stone and Heen argue that we’ve got it backwards and show us why the smart money is on educating receivers – in the workplace as well as in personal relationships. It’s the receivers, after all, who interpret what they’re hearing and decide whether and how to change.

Coauthors of the international bestseller Difficult Conversations, Stone and Heen have discovered that while receiving feedback can be fraught, doing it well can be taught. With humor and clarity, the book blends the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. It is destined to become a classic in the world of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.

Neuroception: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety

The author describes recent findings on the neurobiological mechanisms involved in perceptions of risk and safety. The term “Neuroception” describes how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. Neuroception explains why a baby coos at a caregiver but cries at a stranger, or why a toddler enjoys a parent’s embrace but views a hug from a stranger as an assault. The author explains the Polyvagal Theory, which posits that mammals–especially primates–have evolved brain structures that regulate both social and defensive behaviors. The Polyvagal Theory describes three developmental stages of a mammal’s autonomic nervous system: immobilization, mobilization, and social communication or social engagement. A neuroception of safety is necessary before social engagement behaviors can occur. Infants, young children, and adults need appropriate social engagement strategies in order to form positive attachments and social bonds. Faulty neuroception might lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, and Reactive Attachment Disorder.

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge

Today’s economy is fueled by knowledge. Every leader knows this to be true, yet few have systematic methods for converting organizational knowledge into economic value. This book argues that communities of practice–groups of individuals formed around common interests and expertise–provide the ideal vehicle for driving knowledge-management strategies and building lasting competitive advantage. Written by leading experts in the field, Cultivating Communities of Practice is the first book to outline models and methods for systematically developing these essential groups. Through compelling research and company examples, including DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, authors Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder show how world-class organizations have leveraged communities of practice to drive strategy, generate new business opportunities, solve problems, transfer best practices, develop employees’ professional skills, and recruit and retain top talent. Underscoring the new central role communities of practice are playing in today’s knowledge economy, Cultivating Communities of Practice is the definitive guide to fostering, designing, and developing these powerful groups within and across organizations.

Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World

Holacracy is a revolutionary management system that redefines management and turns everyone into a leader.

Holacracy distributes authority and decision-making throughout an organization, and defines people not by hierarchy and titles, but by roles. Holacracy creates organizations that are fast, agile, and that succeed by pursuing their purpose, not following a dated and artificial plan.

This isn’t anarchy it’s quite the opposite. When you start to follow Holacracy, you learn to create new structures and ways of making decisions that empower the people who know the most about the work you do: your frontline colleagues.

Some of the many champions of Holacracy include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (author of the #1 “New York Times” bestseller “Delivering Happiness”), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium), and David Allen.

Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd Edition

This second edition is an annotated version, a “director’s cut” where Henrik reflects upon the content and shares new insights gained since the first version of the book.

The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.

Under the leadership of Henrik Kniberg they experimented with different team sizes, different sprint lengths, different ways of defining “done”, different formats for product backlogs and sprint backlogs, different testing strategies, different ways of doing demos, different ways of synchronizing multiple Scrum teams, etc. They also experimented with XP practices – different ways of doing continuous build, pair programming, test driven development, etc, and how to combine this with Scrum.

This book includes:

Practical tips and tricks for most Scrum and XP practices
Typical pitfalls and how they were addressed
Diagrams and photos illustrating day-to-day work
Testing and test-driven development
Scaling and coordinating multiple teams
Dealing with resistance from inside and outside the team
Planning and time estimation techniques