Perhaps the problem lies with how our culture views the company as a “machine” (in a metaphorical sense) whose only purpose is to produce some useful output. All that matters is how can you tweak or modify the machine to be more productive or less costly to operate. People in this world view are simply the metaphorical cogs (preferably interchangeable ones). It would be silly to care about a cog the way you would your significant other or even your pet.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It just happens to be the state of modern work culture.

There’s an emerging world view that instead sees a company as a purposeful organism with all the biological messiness and unpredictability that it implies. This organism has its own needs and desires separate from the productive outputs. Traditional management hierarchies don’t exist for it. Instead, each person is like a independent cell that senses their environment and reacts on their own, but for the common good as they’re actually interdependent in each other.

It’s still early, but there’s emerging evidence from the last few decades[1] that this way of being in the world could be more resilient in the long term and may eventually supplant the company-as-machine model.

[1]: [Reinventing Organizations](https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Organizations-Frederic-La...)

Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux - https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Organizations-Frederic-La...

For me it is the most influential book on how I think about "agile" , what that really means, and which factors really matter.

Not sure... what part of it interests you? Teamwork? Innovation? Decision making?

I was putting together a "best read of 2015" type post but never finished it. There were a couple on my list that I think are related and maybe you'd find interesting.

This one from HN a few weeks back, http://justinkan.com/three-stories

Higher level company organization stuff I thought these two books gave at times contradictory and at times very complimentary thoughts on what made teams work. In reality, neither were exactly about making teams work though :)

Playing to Win http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Win-Strategy-Really-Works/dp/1... is on creating strategies

Reinventing organizations http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Organizations-Frederic-Lal... is about holacracy but talks a lot to people's motivations in a company.

Hopefully I have a couple more interesting things to say on andrewxhill.com too, so keep an eye on it!