The Extraordinary Business Book Club

Much handwringing goes on over the impact of technology on young people. Many domestic disputes centre on the amount of screentime that should or shouldn't be allowed. Robert Wigley saw the issue from two perspectives: as a father of adolescent boys, but also as a mentor and investor working with Gen Z entrepreneurs. The results of his research with both are fascinating, and reveal a more nuanced...

'You don't have to have everything figured out when you sit down at your computer.... just start writing.' Jackie Fast sees writing a book just like entrepreneurship - don't let fear stop you, break some rules, figure it out as you go along. And in Rule Breaker: Rebellious leadership for the future of work, she proves that that's the secret of success in the 21st century - the old playbook that so...

"I don't care how big of a following you have, who your publisher is, what kind of marketing plan you put together, how big of an influencer you are: if you don't sit down and write, then there will be no book." This is the game people, and this is how you do the work. Dre Baldwin didn't find basketball magically effortless, but he turned himself from high-school reserve to pro by doing the work,...

' Taking an all-seeing, all-knowing, conquering, dictatorial approach to managing people is going to land you in a world of pain.' Philip Levinson always dreamed of becoming a CEO, and thought he was ready. But when he got there he realised the truth: nothing can prepare you for this.  In Three Peaks Leadership he shares the lessons he learned, including the fact that leading at the highest level...

'What elements of your imperfection are you going to bring to the table?' That's the powerful question that strategist and storyteller Minter Dial poses about writing, but it could equally well be applied to leadership. Having all the answers is no longer what we need from our leaders: in a disrupted, uncertain world we need leaders who are willing to admit that they don't know everything and to s...

It's one of the great paradoxes of business books that they're written by experts, but the process of writing them is itself what builds expertise. In this Best Bits episode nine recent guests reflect on how writing their book changed them - often in unexpected ways.  Judy Piatkus on the impulse behind publishing self-development books Greg McKeown on writing Effortless for himself as much as anyo...

'This experience has taught me, like a lot of the work I do in life, that where you start isn't necessarily where you'll end up... the book we've written is much more practical and purposeful for our readers as a result of us really listening to [their feedback] and not being afraid to change our minds.' Diana Marsland and Julie Nerney began their work on Own Your Day just before the pandemic hit,...

'One of the first principles to make progress in writing is to have the courage to be rubbish because all writing, literally absolutely all of it, starts rubbish.' If his first book, Essentialism, was about prioritization, Greg McKeown's second book, Effortless, is about simplification. And this is no theoretical treatise: the truths behind the book were born out of a deeply traumatic personal exp...

In our fascination with tech start-ups and big corporates, we might be tempted to overlook the family business. Keel Hunt describes Ingram as 'the quiet company' - 50 years young, still family owned, and still quietly partnering with all the other players in the book supply chain to innovate and do business better.  If you love books, chances are you'll have benefited from an Ingram service perhap...

'I think we're going to have another watershed moment... there's going to be business pre-pandemic and business post-pandemic. And I wonder how many business books are going to feel out of date.' As a woman founder in publishing, Judy Piatkus is one of my heroes. Working from home long before it was fashionable, navigating caring for a child with special needs alongside the casual sexism of the 19...

'Productivity isn't just about efficiency.' As a Productivity Ninja, Grace Marshall was used to helping people who were struggling - with overloaded inboxes, poor time management, any number of everyday productivity pits. But she noticed that in many cases there was a different kind of struggle going on, one that wasn't talked about so much, one that couldn't be solved with a shiny new system, one...

'The hardest part is getting started, getting that first paragraph on the page. And once I've been able to do that, generally for me, my writing then flows from that.' Clive Lewis has written 17 books, so he's learned a bit about organizing and communicating his ideas. He writes about the things that mean most to him - this time it's the toxicity of the workplace (which is itself of course a micro...

'The reason why I was able to write it in 12 weeks is that I mapped out my entire book, sticky note by sticky note... And then I was relentless. I just went one word per sticky note and built the whole thing.' For someone who comes alive on the stage and accesses their flow speaking in front of an audience, the last year has been tough. But Frederique Murphy discovered that she could re-access tha...

Instagram has had a massive impacting in shaping our culture over the last decade - it's redefined our measures of success and celebrity. It's easy now to see it as somehow inevitable, but in No Filter, winner of the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2020, Sarah Frier uncovers the backstory of the app - the philosophy of its founders and the complex relationship with new owner Facebook.  Along...

'Everything is sales... the title should sell people on reading the subtitle, the subtitle should sell people on flipping it over to look at the blurb and the blurb should sell you on opening the book up and flicking through it. And if all those things occur in the right way, then the chances are you'll buy the book.' John Williams is an ideas guy, and he helps other people make their ideas happen...

Writing a business book is a particularly visible form of leadership - how do you find the courage for that? In this week's look back through my most recent Extraordinary Business Book Club conversations, I uncover the principles, tactics and Jedi mind tricks that enabled these authors to find the courage to make their voices heard.  There'll be something here that you can use too, to make yoursel...

'If you can just get over the fear of failure and treat failure as a learning process, then... you're going to go on to do some great stuff.' From designing the iconic 'Choose Life' t-shirts of the 1980s to launching one of the first lockdown festivals of 2020, Drew Ellis has been living by this mantra for years now.  One result of his experimentation is Like Minds, a global thought leadership and...

'In a way you have to be really cocky and bold to say I'm going to write a business book and it's going to be worthwhile and lots of people will want to read it. You have to be overflowing with confidence. And I saw in my interviews with women entrepreneurs that confidence is hard to sustain. Not only do women often knock down their own confidence, they have negative self-talk themselves, but in a...

For most of the guests on this show, writing a business book is part of building a personal and professional brand. This week I talk to someone who has no interest in having his name on the book he's written: he just wants to get the concept out there.  When his teenage daughter asked him 'Dad, what's the smallest amount of money you would have to put aside each day to become a millionaire?' he sa...

'By the way, do you have a strategy for you? Because if you don't, you should.' That throwaway line in a top-level strategic meeting was a game-changer for Kathryn Bishop. As a high-flying professional and academic, she had an astonishing array of strategic models at her disposal for evaluating options and making decisions. Why not draw on those tools when it came to planning her own life?  Naviga...

Steven Van Belleghem sees opportunities to experiment everywhere. When he works with brands like Google, Microsoft, and Disney to help them combine technology and behavioural trends to create outstanding customer experience, but also when he writes. He wrote the first business book to include augmented reality, he writes fiction to explore the possibilities of the future, and his latest book featu...

No business can ignore social media influencers these days, they're part of the fabric of our lives both personally and professionally. But what are the opportunities and the pitfalls for the influencers themselves and for the brands that work with them? Sara McCorquodale set out to answer that question, and along the way discovered the very human stories behind the public faces. She also discover...

Having interviewed hundreds of CEOs as a journalist, James Ashton started to notice some patterns. He got curious. In this fast-changing world, where leadership is more challenging than ever, what kinds of leaders have emerged and how do they respond to those challenges? A fascinating conversation about leadership itself, but also a practical glimpse into how a professional journalist organises an...

"Organizations, not government... hold the key to change in the world, and therefore when we write, we've got to write with the business, the organizational leader in mind." We talk a lot about engagement, empathy, psychological safety in the workplace. But what we're really talking about, claims Yetunde Hofmann, is love.  Love is a difficult word to use in the context of business. It makes us unc...

As a project manager, Rob Kerr was accustomed to evaluating options and allocating scarce resources for maximum impact. The magic happened, however, when he started taking those tools out of the office and applying them to life: 'We were making better decisions as a family. We were being a bit bolder with our choices... I thought, okay, this is working for us.' So Rob brought together his framewor...