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Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us
How can we fix what we can't see? The norms crushing innovation—and our joy—are finally made visible. All 24 of them.
In Our Best Work, Nilofer Merchant names the 24 invisible norms—born of hierarchy, control, and a worn-out model of capitalism—that limit us all. Along the way, she dismantles some of management’s most beloved
Servant LeadershipPersonal BrandingSpeaking UpPerformance ReviewsMove Fast and Break Things
These aren’t just ideas that fall short—they are daily routines that trap us in the past. Merchant exposes how and why they fail us. But it’s not enough to know the problem, we must also know how to move forward. She lights the path to the future by providing the 24 leading indicators that bring out the best of us and the best of us. Each chapter closes with a concrete practice, so teams can turn insight into action.
Ranked among the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, Merchant brings an unmatched range of from her start as an administrative assistant to shaping strategy at Apple and early-stage startups to serving on corporate boards. She has experienced the realities of power from every seat at the table, across industries, and around the globe. Her ideas have already reshaped companies—and their futures. With this incisive take, Merchant offers a clear and collective path to do our best work,
Unlocking the essential source of new and novel ideasReplacing competition with trustCreating the solutions of tomorrow, not just today’s profits
If you’ve tired of self-help fixes or the latest fads, Our Best Work offers another by changing the rules of work itself.
In Our Best Work, Nilofer Merchant names the 24 invisible norms—born of hierarchy, control, and a worn-out model of capitalism—that limit us all. Along the way, she dismantles some of management’s most beloved
Servant LeadershipPersonal BrandingSpeaking UpPerformance ReviewsMove Fast and Break Things
These aren’t just ideas that fall short—they are daily routines that trap us in the past. Merchant exposes how and why they fail us. But it’s not enough to know the problem, we must also know how to move forward. She lights the path to the future by providing the 24 leading indicators that bring out the best of us and the best of us. Each chapter closes with a concrete practice, so teams can turn insight into action.
Ranked among the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, Merchant brings an unmatched range of from her start as an administrative assistant to shaping strategy at Apple and early-stage startups to serving on corporate boards. She has experienced the realities of power from every seat at the table, across industries, and around the globe. Her ideas have already reshaped companies—and their futures. With this incisive take, Merchant offers a clear and collective path to do our best work,
Unlocking the essential source of new and novel ideasReplacing competition with trustCreating the solutions of tomorrow, not just today’s profits
If you’ve tired of self-help fixes or the latest fads, Our Best Work offers another by changing the rules of work itself.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published February 24, 2026
About the author
Nilofer Merchant
6 books122 followersNilofer Merchant is the co-founder of Intangible Labs.
She spent over 25 years leading technology companies (Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe) and personally launched over 100 products and services, netting $18 billion in revenues.
She is ranked among the top 50 influential management thinkers in the world (one of her TED Talks has been referenced 300 million times).
Our Best Work is her 4th book.
She spent over 25 years leading technology companies (Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe) and personally launched over 100 products and services, netting $18 billion in revenues.
She is ranked among the top 50 influential management thinkers in the world (one of her TED Talks has been referenced 300 million times).
Our Best Work is her 4th book.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 9, 2026
Our Best Work is the business book I’ve been waiting for.
Because somewhere along the way, work became about more.
More productivity. More efficiency. More growth. More output. More shareholder value.
Extraction became the organising principle - and control became one of the ways we ensured it continued.
What Nilofer Merchant asks in Our Best Work is something altogether different: what if work was actually designed to bring out our best?
It sounds deceptively simple. But to answer it, Merchant first has to make visible the system we’re operating within.
She identifies 24 “Limiting Norms”: inherited assumptions about work, leadership, power and value that have become so embedded in organisational life that we barely recognise them anymore.
Performance reviews. Hero leaders. Personal branding. Ranking people. Overwork. Paternalistic leadership. Separating strategy from execution. Telling people to “speak up”. Worshipping work. Measuring the wrong things.
Individually, we might recognise these as frustrations of organisational life. Collectively, they reveal something much bigger.
They are the invisible bars of the cage.
And I think that is what makes this book so powerful.
We often talk about organisational change as though people are the problem. Employees resist change. People need to become more adaptable. Leaders need to manage resistance. Organisations need another transformation program.
But what if “change” itself can become another form of control?
Something decided elsewhere, imposed downwards, communicated through carefully managed consultation, and then measured against outcomes people had little role in defining.
Merchant offers another possibility: rather than endlessly planning change, we can collectively practise changing.
That distinction stayed with me.
So did her discussion of what she calls the “agency myth”: our belief that individual effort can somehow overcome structural constraints. Work harder. Speak up. Build your personal brand. Become indispensable. Be the exception.
But individual agency only takes us so far when the system itself determines whose ideas matter, who gets to think, who holds power and what gets counted as valuable.
This is where the 24 Limiting Norms become so useful. Merchant doesn't simply tell us that “power dynamics” are a problem. She names the specific ways power operates.
And once something has a name, we can see it.
Once we can see it, we can challenge it.
For each Limiting Norm, Merchant provides a Leading Indicator and an Innovation Practice - a way of moving from recognising the system to actively practising something different.
That feels particularly urgent in the age of AI.
If technology becomes increasingly capable of performing routine and repeatable work, our value cannot simply be our capacity to produce more. Our distinctly human capabilities - thinking, questioning, imagining, collaborating, dissenting, caring, exercising judgement and creating genuinely new ideas - become more important, not less.
Yet how many organisations are actually designed to enable those things?
Merchant cites the enormous proportion of jobs designed to be effectively “nonthinking”. That should concern us far more than whether AI can perform those jobs. Why did we design human work that way in the first place?
This book also gave language to something I’ve wondered about throughout my career: why do organisations invest so much in innovation, leadership development and change management while preserving the structures that inhibit the very behaviours they say they want?
You cannot demand innovation while punishing dissent.
You cannot ask people to think differently while concentrating thinking at the top.
You cannot build trust through control.
You cannot unlock human potential while treating people primarily as units of productivity.
And you cannot create the future using systems designed for the past.
Although Our Best Work is written primarily for business, I kept thinking about higher education too. Academia is certainly not immune to hierarchy, metrics, hero cultures, overwork, labels, competition or the conflation of busyness with value. I would love to see what applying these 24 ideas could unlock in universities.
This isn't another book about becoming a better worker within the existing system.
It asks us to question the system itself.
To make the invisible visible.
To stop designing work around extraction and start designing it around contribution.
And perhaps, finally, to create the conditions in which people can actually do their best work.
Thought-provoking, challenging, practical and ultimately hopeful.
An easy 5 stars.
And thank you to Tim Kastelle for putting this book on my radar - I was particularly delighted to see him quoted in it.
Because somewhere along the way, work became about more.
More productivity. More efficiency. More growth. More output. More shareholder value.
Extraction became the organising principle - and control became one of the ways we ensured it continued.
What Nilofer Merchant asks in Our Best Work is something altogether different: what if work was actually designed to bring out our best?
It sounds deceptively simple. But to answer it, Merchant first has to make visible the system we’re operating within.
She identifies 24 “Limiting Norms”: inherited assumptions about work, leadership, power and value that have become so embedded in organisational life that we barely recognise them anymore.
Performance reviews. Hero leaders. Personal branding. Ranking people. Overwork. Paternalistic leadership. Separating strategy from execution. Telling people to “speak up”. Worshipping work. Measuring the wrong things.
Individually, we might recognise these as frustrations of organisational life. Collectively, they reveal something much bigger.
They are the invisible bars of the cage.
And I think that is what makes this book so powerful.
We often talk about organisational change as though people are the problem. Employees resist change. People need to become more adaptable. Leaders need to manage resistance. Organisations need another transformation program.
But what if “change” itself can become another form of control?
Something decided elsewhere, imposed downwards, communicated through carefully managed consultation, and then measured against outcomes people had little role in defining.
Merchant offers another possibility: rather than endlessly planning change, we can collectively practise changing.
That distinction stayed with me.
So did her discussion of what she calls the “agency myth”: our belief that individual effort can somehow overcome structural constraints. Work harder. Speak up. Build your personal brand. Become indispensable. Be the exception.
But individual agency only takes us so far when the system itself determines whose ideas matter, who gets to think, who holds power and what gets counted as valuable.
This is where the 24 Limiting Norms become so useful. Merchant doesn't simply tell us that “power dynamics” are a problem. She names the specific ways power operates.
And once something has a name, we can see it.
Once we can see it, we can challenge it.
For each Limiting Norm, Merchant provides a Leading Indicator and an Innovation Practice - a way of moving from recognising the system to actively practising something different.
That feels particularly urgent in the age of AI.
If technology becomes increasingly capable of performing routine and repeatable work, our value cannot simply be our capacity to produce more. Our distinctly human capabilities - thinking, questioning, imagining, collaborating, dissenting, caring, exercising judgement and creating genuinely new ideas - become more important, not less.
Yet how many organisations are actually designed to enable those things?
Merchant cites the enormous proportion of jobs designed to be effectively “nonthinking”. That should concern us far more than whether AI can perform those jobs. Why did we design human work that way in the first place?
This book also gave language to something I’ve wondered about throughout my career: why do organisations invest so much in innovation, leadership development and change management while preserving the structures that inhibit the very behaviours they say they want?
You cannot demand innovation while punishing dissent.
You cannot ask people to think differently while concentrating thinking at the top.
You cannot build trust through control.
You cannot unlock human potential while treating people primarily as units of productivity.
And you cannot create the future using systems designed for the past.
Although Our Best Work is written primarily for business, I kept thinking about higher education too. Academia is certainly not immune to hierarchy, metrics, hero cultures, overwork, labels, competition or the conflation of busyness with value. I would love to see what applying these 24 ideas could unlock in universities.
This isn't another book about becoming a better worker within the existing system.
It asks us to question the system itself.
To make the invisible visible.
To stop designing work around extraction and start designing it around contribution.
And perhaps, finally, to create the conditions in which people can actually do their best work.
Thought-provoking, challenging, practical and ultimately hopeful.
An easy 5 stars.
And thank you to Tim Kastelle for putting this book on my radar - I was particularly delighted to see him quoted in it.
April 2, 2026
Our Best Work is a book that has been missing from business spaces, forever.
This work from Nilofer Merchant is not only valuable from a performance and innovation point of view, it also speaks directly to the behaviours that reinforce degenerative cultures and leadership.
Focusing on 24 'Limiting Norms' that you will 100% empathise with, and offering 24 'Leading Indicators' as liberatory alternatives, this book is packed full of storytelling, case studies, and possibility.
If you are like me, you have wondered for years how we actively move away from the top-down, mechanistic, and often harmful organisational design that limits potential and value creation, then this book goes a long way to answering that wondering.
Working in the chemicals industry as I do, I can see the huge, trans formative power for both people and business performance of making this shift into measurable intangibles. Sounds like an oxymoron right? Dive into the book to see how Nilofer crafts potential and possibility that we too often cannot even see.
An easy 5/5 for me. I strongly urge you to get your copy.
This work from Nilofer Merchant is not only valuable from a performance and innovation point of view, it also speaks directly to the behaviours that reinforce degenerative cultures and leadership.
Focusing on 24 'Limiting Norms' that you will 100% empathise with, and offering 24 'Leading Indicators' as liberatory alternatives, this book is packed full of storytelling, case studies, and possibility.
If you are like me, you have wondered for years how we actively move away from the top-down, mechanistic, and often harmful organisational design that limits potential and value creation, then this book goes a long way to answering that wondering.
Working in the chemicals industry as I do, I can see the huge, trans formative power for both people and business performance of making this shift into measurable intangibles. Sounds like an oxymoron right? Dive into the book to see how Nilofer crafts potential and possibility that we too often cannot even see.
An easy 5/5 for me. I strongly urge you to get your copy.
April 17, 2026
Our Best Work. Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us by Nilofer Merchant is a thought provoking examination of workplace systems and the hidden norms that shape behavior, leadership, and innovation. The book identifies 24 invisible rules that influence how organizations operate and challenges readers to rethink long standing management practices.
What stands out is the systems level perspective. Instead of focusing on individual productivity tips, it examines structural habits like performance reviews, hierarchy, and traditional leadership models, arguing that many of them limit creativity and trust. Each concept is paired with practical reflections, making the ideas more actionable.
Overall, it’s a reflective and forward looking business book that will appeal to leaders and professionals interested in organizational change, workplace culture, and modern leadership thinking.
What stands out is the systems level perspective. Instead of focusing on individual productivity tips, it examines structural habits like performance reviews, hierarchy, and traditional leadership models, arguing that many of them limit creativity and trust. Each concept is paired with practical reflections, making the ideas more actionable.
Overall, it’s a reflective and forward looking business book that will appeal to leaders and professionals interested in organizational change, workplace culture, and modern leadership thinking.
May 8, 2026
In Our Best Work, Nilofer Merchant pulls back the veil on why we’re not doing our best work and provides real ways to achieve changes that make a difference. Spoiler alert: it’s not the glitz-marketed, rehashed-and-repackaged-yet-again management bromides all over the business shelf and LinkedIn. Just as Nilofer highlighted the human side of what we all bring in The Power of Onlyness, Our Best Work delves into how to unleash that power instead of simply being cogs in the corporate machine. Work, whether vocation or avocation, is fundamentally a human endeavor. Nilofer reminds us that being truly valuable is not formulaic—it too is human. I finished the book with two realizations: I wish I’d had this guidance when I was just starting out many decades ago, and, in a world where AI and quarterly results seem to be all that matter, in the end those things that make us human and unique are what will ultimately bring real value.
October 1, 2026
Our Best Work is an expose on the hidden patterns workers often experience. It gives words to the challenges and struggles they may feel but not know how to express. Nilofer Merchant pulls back the curtain on what gets in the way of our best work and offers a new perspective that will have you seeing things differently.
March 31, 2026
Although this book was written for how modern day businesses should begin to transform their way of thinking and organizing systems within. I could not help but think how education could use. many of these 24 strategies to transform education.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews