The Extraordinary Business Book Club

'Books are made by humans, for humans, in conversation with other humans, and they are still the best vehicle we have for sustained thought.' It's episode 500 of The Extraordinary Business Book Club. I KNOW!!! To mark the milestone, I handed the mic over to YOU, the listeners, to reflect on what the show has meant to you over the years. There are reflections on discovering what to read next, findi...

'The publishing of the book actually is not the finish line, it's the start line.' Chris Ducker is a serial entrepreneur, three-times bestselling author, keynote speaker and founder of Youpreneur, where he helps entrepreneurs and industry leaders and experts launch and market their books and grow their authority and their businesses. In other words, the perfect Extraordinary Business Book Club gue...

'Confidence can fuel good performance, doubt can sap performance.' Julie Smith's first book, Coach Yourself Confident , focused on the individual experience of confidence: closing the gap between how capable we are and how capable we believe ourselves to be. It won quite a few awards. Her new book, Contagious Confidence , explores confidence as a performance variable: a powerful way for leaders to...

'We worked really hard to create "me too" moments rather than "so what" moments.' Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? is a phrase that has entered the business lexicon, not just as a book title and the name of a company but as a leadership philosophy. Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge self-published the first edition 15 years ago - Ben telling the inspiring story of how he and the British men's ro...

'The art of building your own status with your audience is to convey to as many people as you can, as often as you can, hey, I really care about people. And I'm also really capable.' Status is a funny thing. We want it, but because it's what other people think of us, we assume we can't control it. And we're pretty sure that we shouldn't be caring so much what other people think of us, anyway. But...

'Today is day one of whatever streak you choose to commit to.' Something a little bit different this week, as I celebrate an unusual milestone: eight years of running every single day. But this isn't really about running, it's about streaking (no, not that kind of streaking, do grow up) and why committing to one tiny daily action can be such a powerful way of moving yourself towards the person you...

 'The more successful an organization is, the more valuable it is as a target. So the more golden the goose, the more the temptation to butcher it. We actually create the conditions for our own failure by blindly pursuing success.' Eric Ries wrote the bible for many entrepreneurs: The Lean Startup. But in recent years, he's turned his attention to what happens to startups as they mature - having s...

'Really paying attention to nature seems to shift something more fundamental... writing can begin to feel a little less effortful and a little more joyful.' You might think that being in nature and writing business books are two entirely unconnected activities. But the annual Write it Wild retreat keeps showing that the first benefits the second in more ways than even I had realised when I first c...

'Unlike the washing up, which I'm perfectly happy to delegate to a machine... I don't WANT to delegate my writing, because that's how I think.' Technology is great at making life easier. But sometimes, easy isn't what we really need.  It's hard to resist the siren call of AI as you stare at a blank document: 'Let me write that email/post/book, I can do it really quick and it'll sound super profess...

' Being creative means having a deep knowledge about anything that you do, because this helps you then to connect those things into new things.' Innovation. You can't sit through a corporate meeting without hearing the word. Everyone thinks they know what they mean by it, and most people are confident that it's someone else's responsibility. There's a department for that, right?  In fact, Barbara...

'...The very human tendency to focus on the thing that we think is the problem but isn't actually the thing that needs our attention.' In writing, as in life and work, we often focus on the question that looks obvious: How do I write this quickly? How do I find the time? How do I tell my story? How do I get feedback? But very often, there's a better question behind the one we're asking. In this Be...

'Readers don't finish books that make them feel impressed by someone with a lot of experience or success. They finish books that make them feel capable.' Does the book still have a place in next-generation corporate learning platforms? You bet.   Amy Cantin of Skillsoft talks me through the evolution of organizational learning, and the ways in which business books underpin the various summaries, w...

'If there's one thing that this podcast has reinforced for me over the last 10 years, it is that books and the people who write them matter.' It's almost a decade to the day since I first pressed 'record' and launched this podcast into the world (and you might be amused to find out the real reason behind it). In this 10th birthday episode I'm taking a moment to look back on the ambition and anxiet...

'Inclusion is what you do and diversity is what you get.' Paolo Gaudiano's expertise ranges from rocket science through computational neuroscience to the really tough work: diversity, equity and inclusion in organizations. It's not got any easier over the last couple of years, but it's not got any less important, either. Paolo simply points to the evidence: focusing on improving workplace experien...

'If you're into it, read into it.' Fresh (sic) from the London Book Fair, this week's episode brings together perspectives from across the industry on the National Year of Reading campaign. Does reading even still matter? [Spoiler alert: it matters more than ever!] And how can we - as an industry and as individuals - encourage people to do more of it, given all the competing demands on their atten...

'If you love somebody, set them free,' advised Sting back in 1985. Little did he know he was setting out a core principle of leadership for the 21st century. It's the big idea behind award-winning author Helen Beedham's second book People Glue: Hold on to your best people by setting them free, which leans into that paradox with rather more by way of helpful detail than the Police front man ever pr...

'We don't understand much about hope, and yet people are crying out for it from leaders.' If you ever hear someone dismissively say 'hope is not a strategy', be sure to introduce them to Ian Pettigrew, author of  Hope is a Strategy . He will disabuse them of the idea that hope is simply wishful thinking and introduce them to a more muscular, active concept: hope that can be – MUST be – wielded wit...

'O nce you know that you can't do it all, it becomes a little bit easier.' Why do so many of us feel like we're drowning in endless demands and to-do lists, at work and at home? Why, when we have so many smart productivity tools, is it so damn hard to get the important things done? If you relate, I'd like to introduce you to Chris Lovett. Because HE can introduce you to the genius idea of 'strateg...

'The crux of our whole business is just really finding talented people to help others do what they can't do themselves as well.' Kevin Anderson never planned to become CEO of one of the biggest editorial agencies in the world, but that's where his knack for seeing opportunities in a fast-changing industry together with the guts to take them has landed him.  In this episode, we talk about how publi...

"Love feedback, hate feedback, feel sort of somewhere in the middle, it still creates this sense of anxiety for everyone around." Organizational psychologist Becky Westwood is an expert in social anxiety at work. And that gives her a unique persepctive on the situation guaranteed to created anxiety in ALL of us: giving and receiving feedback.  In her book Can I Offer You Something? Expert Ways to...

"We need to think carefully about whether it's going to be the kind of pressure that creates energy and joy and diamond-style transformation, or the sort that sucks the air out of the room and makes things buckle and break." Pressure is the new normal - in life, at work, in leadership, and also in writing. Other people put pressure on us, we put pressure on ourselves, we put pressure on other peop...

' An author might be thinking, I can't wait till the book is out on a bookshelf... I would suggest focus on the experience of the writing and the pleasure of actually writing the book and the satisfaction you're going to get in doing that.' David Sinkinson, SaaS entrepreneur, podcaster, and co-author of Startup Different (all of this done in partnership with his brother, Chris) is a big fan of bus...

  'I think that flow is quite important. It's almost like a cultural logic.' Intercultural communication is always complex, but for Western leaders seeking to build relationships as a way in to the mighty Chinese market, it's particularly tricky. From seating plans to changing job titles to how to ask for a solution to a problem, there are very different assumptions and unspoken rules. Which is wh...

 'Our businesses have been designed for us by us, for humans by humans, and that's what the big change is now.' What's the real promise and transformative power of AI in business? In their new book Autonomous:  Why the fittest businesses embrace AI-first strategies in digital labor, Henry King and his co-author  Vala Afshar make the case that organizational design will be transformed by agentic AI...

'You have a choice about how you put content out into the world in 2026, and that choice isn't just a business choice, it's about who you are and what's important to you.' It's the time of year when we traditionally think about the changes we want to make in our lives to help us become the people we want to be. In 2026, I think we also need to think about what we want to KEEP doing for ourselves,...