The Extraordinary Business Book Club

'We've got more ways to communicate with one another than in any time in human history, and yet we've completely forgotten how to communicate with one another, or at least how to communicate in a meaningful way.' Charlie Corbett is starting a revolution. He wants to end corporate-speak and the lazy thinking behind it. Instead, he calls us to think hard and speak plainly as communicators, and chall...

'If you ask people do they have a plan for the week, do they know where they need to be, do they know the clients that they'll be meeting, they've prepared for that... Then you say, "What are you going to have for lunch?" And they go, "What?"' Most of us know exactly what we should be eating, few of us are actually eating it. Too often we fuel our working day with a quick-fix mix of carbs and caff...

The young Tom Cheesewright found his purpose in life when his mother bought him a copy of the 1979 Usborne Book of the Future. Now he's an Applied Futurist, focusing not on teleportation or interstellar travel but on identifying what is going to take an organisation out at the knees in five years' time. He discovered that the best way to do that was to create a narrative of the future: 'We've got...

You might not think of yourself as 'a creative', but if you're an entrepreneur or a business book author that's exactly what you are, insists award-winning jeweller Harriet Kelsall: you're creating something that didn't exist before you imagined it. And as she discovered the hard way, that means finding your own way to do what you do:  "What I need to do is what I do, not what everyone else does....

What if you had some help writing your book: a collaborator to transcribe your ideas, do the grunt work of researching huge amounts of material, bounce ideas off, give editorial feedback and even provide their own contributions in the form of a dialogue? And what if that collaborator was available without pay 24/7, had no ego or hangups, and demanded no intellectual property rights? Sounds too goo...

A few of the stand-out moments from the last few Extraordinary Business Book Club episodes -  this week we're asking.... why? Why write a book, when it's so damn hard? Here's why. Mark Burns on the stones in the reader's shoe Bec Evans on treating your book as a prototype Fiona Murden on keeping it real in a self-development book David Grayson on building a collaborative vision for a book  Whitney...

'Improv is always, "Let's just start something now. We don't know where it's going to go, but we'll start now. Whatever tools, whatever cast we have." That's what writing should be as well.' Neil Mullarkey, founder of the Comedy Store Players and long-time sketch buddy of Mike Myers, is on a mission to bring the joy, playfulness and co-creativity of improv into organisations around the world.  We...

Think you're in a profession that doesn't lend itself to writing a book? Della Hudson trained as a chemist and is now an accountant, but her book The Numbers Business: How to build a successful cloud accountancy practice was a winner at this year's Business Book Awards. And even she, one of the world's clearest thinkers, recommends writing a book as an exercise in clarity and an investment in your...

'Think about your audience. What stones do they have in their shoes? And what possibilities do they dream of?' And with this great advice from his editor ringing in his ears, Mark Burns and his co-writer Andy Griffith planned, wrote, rewrote, tested, revised and edited their way to their final manuscript - and investing in their own personal and professional development in the process.  In a fast-...

Self-development books are big business - but is it just navel-gazing on the hand or esoteric theory on the other?  'At the end of the day people want something that's pragmatic, and they can actually do something with.' Fiona Murden has been working with the world's most senior leaders for years: in Defining You she makes the profiling tools and techniques usually reserved for the extremes of soc...

When we talk about 'the future', we're subconsciously distancing ourselves from some indefinite, hypothetical construct. But in reality, argues Whitney Vosburgh and his co-author Charlie, we are continually co-creating the future in the present, without fully making the connection between the two.  'Instead of being futurists, we need to be now-ists. The future only happens now, and now, and now.'...

Something a bit different this week: I buttonholed some of the top voices in the book industry at last week's IPG Spring Conference and asked them: What is it that authors need to know but publishers are too polite to tell them? Their answers might surprise you - and they will definitely help you if you're writing a book, and particularly if you're planning to submit a proposal to a publisher. Thi...

'What is the business case for being unsustainable?' Professor David Grayson has been involved in social enterprise before it was even a thing, and over the last few decades he has acted as the conscience of business on a range of issues from accessibility and diversity to corporate social responsibility and sustainability. In All In, he and his co-authors Chris Coulter and Mark Lee examine the pr...

'[The principles behind the book were those of] the lean startup: build, measure, learn, which meant running experiments, testing stuff with users and iterating and improving... treating it as a whole series of prototypes.' In writing her first book - How to Have a Happy Hustle - Bec Evans drew on all her knowledge of innovation strategy as well as her expertise in writing productivity. The result...

'Mindfulness is… all about recognising where we're coming from, and who we are, and how we like to think, and where we're going with all that information.' Dr Audrey Tang is in the business of 'applied mindfulness' – how can it help us be better leaders, smarter learners, and happier people? In The Leader's Guide to Mindfulness, she shows how soft skills give hard results in areas such as problem...

A few of the stand-out moments from the last few Extraordinary Business Book Club episodes - there's a celebratory feel as it marks the fifth birthday of Practical Inspiration, and this week we're focused on finding inspiration in the uncomfortable and owning your ideas. Niki Schafer  on submerging yourself in things that inspire you Anjali Ramachandran  on seeking out ideas outside your comfort z...

As a journalist, Mike Sergeant's job was to communicate complex issues clearly and quickly. He had to find within huge geopolitical issues the human stories that listeners could connect with. Today he uses that experience to help business leaders communicate more powerfully.  Mike believes that PR is simply storytelling - human to human. Finding the story and creating the emotional connection, tha...

Kate Minchin claims her entire career has been built on a mountain of coffee beans. Which sounds a bit precarious, but you get the idea: getting the best out of people is based on getting to know them, and that means getting out of the office and into conversation. While there are stacks of business books written for leaders and entrepreneurs, relatively few are aimed at frontline managers (same g...

Fresh [sic] from the London Book Fair 2019, where Practical Inspiration Publishing was an exhibitor, this week's episode is a reflection on the big themes of the Fair, and the Quantum conference that preceded it (and of which I was a Chair). Listen up for the latest on:  the growth of non-fiction - why we're all trying to make sense of a world gone mad the audio explosion - how audio books, podcas...

'Our events are a bit like a business book; a business book should give you new ideas, cutting edge content, stuff that you haven't thought about before. But great business books can do it in a way that makes learning fun, that is entertaining to read, that also inspires the reader.' London Business Forum do events a bit differently. You don't get Tom Peters in boxing gloves at your run-of-the-mil...

Amazon has revolutionised retail, and it's showing no signs of stopping. To understand the Amazon effect, and consider what might be coming next, we need to analyse it through two lenses - retail strategy and technology. Which is why retail analyst Natalie Berg and technology journalist Miya Knights decided to combine their perspectives and co-author their new book Amazon: How the world's most rel...

'Wouldn't it be helpful if somehow you could anticipate the key skills that would be needed in the future to support people's professional growth?' And that was the question that eventually led Chris Watson to write his first book:  Upskill: 21 Keys to Professional Growth.  In this conversation we explore the steps between: the research behind the book, how Chris pulled it all together and found t...

'Constantly trying to be open to knowing about things that we're not that comfortable with, I think that's important.' Most of us live inside a bubble of our own making: we read and talk about things that we know, we filter our feeds and our network to the voices that are like ours, whose opinions validate our own. That's dangerous, warns innovator Anjali Ramachandran, and it's also poor business....

'We have trailers and teasers about a movie. So why shouldn't there be a teaser or trailer for a book?' When Niklas Jansen graduated he knew he wanted to start a business, but he didn't know much about running a business. And he also realised that suddenly he didn't have as much time as he'd had as a student for reading. So where better to start than creating a business that involved reading lots...

Designers look at life differently, and writers can learn a lot from their approach. Niki Schafer's aim as an interior designer is to design happiness into her clients' homes. And while she was writing her book on 'dwellbeing', she discovered how to capture the joyful state of creative flow kinaesthetically, so that she could bypass 'procrastination and head-scratching' and put herself immediately...