'Useful, practical and non-preachy' Financial Times

Gender balance is first and foremost a business issue. McKinsey estimates we could add 28 trillion to global GDP if we achieved gender equality everywhere - that is more than the GDPs of the US and China combined. But it is so much more than that. Gender balance is one of the best levers we can pull to build better managers and leaders at every level, improve team performance and create better cultures where everyone can thrive.

In the Penguin Experts: Create a Gender-Balanced Workplace, Ann Francke, the CEO of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), introduces her solution to combating the problems at the heart of the continued imbalance and offers clear, actionable strategies for making a positive change in your organisation.

At the beginning of the 1650s, England was in ruins  wrecked by plague and civil war. Yet shimmering on the horizon was a vision of paradise: Willoughbyland.

Ever since Sir Walter Ralegh set out in 1595 to claim the Beautiful Empire of Guiana for the English crown  and to find the legendary city of El Dorado  adventurers had struggled against the fierce jungle of the Wild Coast in search of their fortune.

Now, in the lush landscape between the great Amazon and Orinoco rivers, a group of Cavaliers, expelled by Oliver Cromwell, had established a new colony named after its founder  Sir Francis Willoughby.

This is the untold story of Willoughbylands spectacular rise and fall, set at a pivotal moment in British and world history. Here are the indigenous Indian kings and their people, both friend and foe to the new arrivals. Here is Fifth Baron Willoughby himself, like his colony a mass of contradictory extremes. And here is Aphra Behn  later one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration stage  sent to spy on a man with whom she will fall in love, transforming the fate of this entire enterprise.

In the blissfully warm and fragrant air, these adventurers and exiles found a land of unimaginable freedom and natural beauty. Yet, as planters and traders followed explorers, and mercenaries and soldiers followed political dissidents, it would become a place of terror and cruelty, of sugar and slavery. As Matthew Parker reveals, the history of Willoughbyland is a microcosm of the history of empire, its heady attractions and fatal dangers.

'This is a miracle of a book' George Lamming

'Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an age' Owen Jones

'Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial'

This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world.

When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left, and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory. Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall's struggle in post-war England: that of building a home and a life in a country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light.

Told with passion and wisdom, this is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.

From Inner-City Nobody to Brilliant Neurosurgeon

When Ben Carson was in school, his classmates called him the class dummy. Manyincluding Ben himselfdoubted that he would ever amount to anything. But his mother never let him quit. She encouraged Ben to do better and reach higher for his dreams, and eventually he discovered a deep love of learning. Today this young boy from the inner-city is one of the worlds greatest pediatric neurosurgeons. Through determination and lot of hard work, Ben overcame his many obstacles and is now dedicated to saving the lives of critically ill children around the world.