As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies – distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking – running through our organisational lives. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration and ultimately result in a strange feeling of unreality that pervades our workplaces.

With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that freethinking leaders will recognise immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company’s culture, that matters most; that we need less focus on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people’s goals we should strive to align people’s sense of purpose and meaning; that people don’t want constant feedback, they want helpful attention. This is the real world of work.

If you embrace each person’s uniqueness and see this as key for all healthy organisations; if you reject dogma and engage with the real world; if you seek out emergent patterns and put your faith in evidence, not philosophy; if you thrill to the power of teams – if you do all of these, then you are a freethinking leader, and this book is for you.