Music notation may seem a world away from business books, but the parallels are striking: when music editor Elaine Gould wrote what was to become the classic reference work Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation, her focus was relentlessly on the musicians who had to use those marks…
We like to think of ourselves as rational beings. But over the last 30 years or so behavioural science and psychological research has conclusively proved otherwise: the bit of our brain that makes decisions does so mostly on the basis of stimuli and associations, and pretty much all the meaningful…
‘I always wanted to write a book… but it was never my time. My husband wrote a book, my father passed away, I have three little kids, I mean, I have a business, you know, life gets in the way… And then finally, one day… I thought: I want to…
The launch of Trusted was a very special occasion. When one of my authors has a book launch it’s ALWAYS a special occasion, of course, but this one was exceptional for a number of reasons: It was two authors, not one, both of whom had written every word of the…
‘If you want to be a good designer, you don’t really bring an ego to the work, you listen to what people say and you try and design the most customer-centric thing that you can and I’ve tried my best to bring that mentality to writing. A book ultimately is…
‘One of the drawbacks of working in the traditional publishing world is that they’re very, very big on the idea that you need to go out and sell books. I’ve always thought of a book as something that should go out and sell the author, so the reason I write…
It’s The Extraordinary Business Book Club’s half-century episode! And we’re celebrating with an extraordinary selection of Best Bits from episodes 41-49: Michael E. Gerber on creating a legacy David Taylor on being the best you Martin Goodyer on the single strong idea Heather McGowan on visualizing information Emma Serlin on the psychology…
Back in 2012, Kelly Pietrangeli and her friends had a brilliant idea for a book. Project Me was all about helping busy mothers balance their lives with more effective time management, productivity skills and goal-setting, using tools techniques they’d developed for their own lives. They began to write, but then: ‘It…
Amy Wilkinson pulls off an extraordinary feat with The Creator’s Code: she interviewed 200 top entrepreneurs to discover what had made them successful, then rigorously distilled down her findings into 6 universal skills – the Code. The research, on ‘the biggest data set currently in the entrepreneurship world on high-scale or…
When Barbara Gray thought about pulling together the research she’d done over her years as a top-rated equity analyst into a book about the fundamental disruption within the fast-moving market, she asked some friends for advice on publishing. ‘The publishing model is broken, Barb,’ they told her. ‘Sorry.’ She did have…
