‘We need, at the moment, mavericks. We need people of independent thought, courageous, wanting to do things differently, but we need to do that in service of others.’ Mavericks write their own rules. Modern mavericks write their own rules of success. Ed Haddon, author of The Modern Maverick, helps people…
In a sense writing a business book – any book, really – is quintessentially about finding and using your voice. You’re talking across time and space to a reader for a conversation that lasts for hours; admittedly a bit of a one-sided conversation, but it’s not possible to talk to…
When Lucy Ryan’s research revealed that midlife women were walking out of corporates in droves at the same age that the men around them were stepping into senior leadership positions, she knew it would make a great PhD topic. There was a massive data gap, and a clear benefit to…
“In everything we write, we choose a voice.” Poets and novelists talk a lot about their writing ‘voice’, but nonfiction writers, and especially business book writers, can write a full manuscript without giving it a thought. Which is a shame, because as Anne Janzer – copywriter, ghostwriter and business book…
“When we’re talking about Do Deal, we’re really talking about the verb of how you deal with people… as an ongoing kind of living thing.” Richard Hoare didn’t set out to become an expert on negotiation. In fact his first attempt at negotiation, when he was offered a poorly paid…
‘I’m not going to live to be 10,000 years old, so I’d rather just write material that someone’s actually going to use. So top-down writing works for me because it’s a very economical way to write.” Dr Rachel Lawes is the world’s leading expert in semiotics and its application in…
When your work is about experience – helping people access a different physical and emotional state so that they can reconnect with their embodied, instinctual wisdom – you can do it most effectively when you’re in the room together. How can you possibly translate that somatic, relational, experiential work into…
“What’s important about creativity is not novelty, but difference. I want something different from what is happening now, and difference is much easier to discover because difference means different from now.” There’s a lot of mystique around creativity, but for practical people – people like scientists and engineers – being…
“It’s not thinking on your feet, it’s listening on your feet. Yes and, what are you saying? How can I build on that? How can I move in the direction that we are going to go together?” If the thought of trying to be funny at work brings you out…
No, not the Michelangelo biography by Irving Stone, but the highs and lows of the maddening, marvellous process of writing a business book. In this best bits episode I pick out the pearls from the last few conversations, and this time the common theme is the pain and pleasure of…
