‘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…
‘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:…
‘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 And I wonder how many business books are going to feel out of date.’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…
‘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…
‘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 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…
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…
‘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…
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…
‘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…
