Teaser: How we make decisions in healthcare is heavily influenced by our emotions, whether we like it or not. This important book outlines the impact that emotions have on decision making, so at least we can have a hope of making better emotions. It describes prospect theory, which suggests two stages to decision making and how it can be influenced.

Teaser: Anybody who wants to display graphical information should read this book. Anybody who wants to understand how beautiful data can look should read this book. Read this book and do not put up with unintelligible and ugly graphics ever again.

Teaser: This book is one of the great blockbusters of management. It is a synthesis of the empirical literature currently available on organisational structuring. Importantly, Mintzberg discusses organisations that are staffed by highly trained professionals, like clinicians. So, if you want to understand the evidence of leading and managing the health service, this is one of the best.

Teaser: Repeated research studies demonstrate that doctors and patients alike overestimate the likelihood of benefits and underestimate the likelihood of harms. That is because we do not understand risk. Gerd Gigerenzer, is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and lectures around the world on the importance of proper risk education for everyone from school-age children to prominent doctors, bankers, and politicians. In this book he outlines way in which we can make better decisions in healthcare.

Teaser: This book, the first in Castells′ ground–breaking trilogy, is an account of the economic and social dynamics of the new age of information. Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, it aims to formulate a systematic theory of the information society which takes account of the fundamental effects of information technology on the contemporary world.

Teaser: The great management expert Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Repeated studies have shown the importance of culture on healthcare importance. Yet, almost all healthcare reform focuses on structural and transactional change, forgetting culture. The guru on culture is Edgar Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership is the classic reference for leaders seeking a deeper understanding of the inter-relationship of organizational culture dynamics and performance.

Teaser: We all work in organisations. But do we understand why and how organisations work? This book is a classic text in sociology. It provides a succinct overview of the principal schools of thought of organizational theories, placing each into critical, historical, and cultural context. Vividly written, with many specific, student-oriented examples, Complex Organizations offers a critical perspective on organizations, analyzing their impact on individuals, groups, and society as a whole.

Teaser: The 21st Century is the age of networks; this is the only way we can deliver the complexity of population health and care. Bureaucracies are critical for linear tasks, but networks are needed for complexity. In this book two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, outline how networks can create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. They describe the hypertext organisation, that floats alongside the bureaucracy.

Teaser: In this book, Wilkinson and Pickett remind us that it is not poverty but inequality that causes most damage to society. They also outline how more equal societies enjoy greater health and well-being and that this benefits everyone in society- the most and least deprived. In healthcare, we must therefore, address inequity of access, or the Inverse Care Law, as this is a form of inequality that is entirely within our control.

Teaser: When we study healthcare at a population, as opposed to institutional, level, a whole new perspective emerges- unwarranted variation. This is variation that is not driven by a failure to standardise, but variation that shows we do not have systems for population healthcare. Understanding the symptom that is unwarranted variation helps inform how we can fix the causes of lower value population healthcare.