‘The problem that you have here, it’s not a writing problem. It’s a thinking problem.’
When Adrian Hornsby faced the challenge of how to convey complex business information in a way that resonated with readers, he drew on his background in writing fiction for theatre to bring dense business concepts to life. But he quickly learned that using a story to convey information was the exact reverse of what he needed to do. The result is the award-winning Disruption in Action, winner of the 2023 Life and Work Business Book of the Year award.
As well as a masterclass on storytelling, we talk about writing as a thinking tool, learning from feedback, and the decision of Adrian and his co-authors to self-publish and the advantages – and challenges – it brings.
Disruption in Action website (on Spark Optimus): https://www.sparkoptimus.com/disruptioninaction
Adrian’s website: https://www.adrianhornsby.com/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
‘Kickstart Your Writing’ Workshop January 2024: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/666359076937
WriteBrained: A 28-day exploratory writing adventure: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course?courseid=writebrainedcourse
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones:
I’m here today with Adrian Hornsby, who is an award winning writer of books and theatre across a rich kaleidoscope of interests. His books include The Good Analyst: a groundbreaking study of social impact measurement, The Chinese Dream, which investigates the rapid urbanization of 400 million people, and most recently, along with Alexandra Jankovich and Tom Voskes, Disruption in Action, named as Smart Thinking Book of the Year at the 2023 Business Book Awards. I actually have a copy right here. Gorgeous, isn’t it? So, first of all, welcome, Adrian. It’s great to have you here.
Adrian Hornsby:
Thanks so much for having me.
Alison Jones:
Good to see you and congratulations on the award. How are you feeling?
Adrian Hornsby:
Thank you very much. Well, good. It was a thrill.
Alison Jones:
Yes. Still smug?
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, I’ve been blown away, I think. Really? I do actually feel a little bit bad because I sort of felt being shortlisted was quite a win. And then the dinner was coming around and my co authors, Alexandra and Tom, said, shall we come over? Because they’re based in Amsterdam. And I said, It’s really not worth it. We’ve just got to show up for the dinner, I’ll put on the black tie, do the business and kind of shake some hands, you save yourselves the time. And then, of course, when the award came through, then who was on the stand?
Alison Jones:
I’ll take all the glory.
Adrian Hornsby:
Anyway, so I got the red carpet photos for the whole experience. But, yes, it was a real surprise and a thrill and when you sort of write a book, you spend a lot of time in a bubble and then you kind of put it out into the world and it just kind of disappears a bit. It’s not your book anymore.
Alison Jones:
It’s co-created with the reader. What’s going to happen to it after next?
Adrian Hornsby:
Absolutely. Yes. I don’t know. You see some things online here and there, but you have an event and it sort of feels, oh, it’s happened and somebody read it and they liked it and all of that stuff was great affirmation.
Alison Jones:
Yes. Well, let’s go back to first principles. What was the premise of the book? What was that kind of itch, that sort of moment of creation where you go, do you know what, we should write a book on disruption in action. How did that happen?
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, it’s a good question. And there’s a bit of a backstory to this in that this book follows, to some extent it’s a sequel to a book from 2018 that Tom and Alexandra sort of made and they helped with called Make Disruption Work. And that one is much more of a, it’s sort of based around a model. And so, like many business books, and Tom and Alexandra kind of forged this model, which they call the 5D model, of how to make disruption work for you as a company. So what you need is, you need to discover, define, determine, drive, and delight in the change and with these five models, then this kind of is the sort of structure for the book. Under each of these D’s is a bunch of principles as how you apply it.
Adrian Hornsby:
And the book essentially sort of sets out this model and puts it out into the world. So we made that book together in 2018, and it was a bestseller in Holland, where they’re based. It was kind of everybody was very happy and it did well and so forth. But there was an interesting point of learning from it, which was that after it came out, Tom was on a book tour, kind of shopping it around, presenting it in places. And he was at a leadership summit in New York, and he was presenting about the book, and he was working his way through the five D’s and under the fourth D, drive, how you drive the change into organization. Then he had a slide about hiring a new digital leader. And he pointed out that the thing that you mustn’t do is to just go and hire a digital guru. It just never works out.
Adrian Hornsby:
And on the slide then there was a cartoon of a digital guru in a lotus pose with a little iPhone around his neck and a slash through it. So he knew this was a bad idea. So anyway, Tom did the presentation and afterwards he was chatting with people and sort of schmoozing and mingling, and the CEO of a large industrial, sort of global giant came up to him and said, Tom, I love the talk. So insightful, very smart, great insights. Can we have lunch sometime? So Tom said, of course. Fantastic. So they exchanged business cards.
Adrian Hornsby:
Tom flew back to Amsterdam feeling very happy about things, looked like a big fish. And a couple of weeks later, he hadn’t heard anything. So he thought, all right, let’s follow up on this one a bit. So he sent him an email and said, hi, how are you doing? And a couple of hours later, very quickly, he got a reply back. The CEO said Tom, I haven’t forgotten you. Really excited. We actually have huge news. I think you’re going to like this a lot, but I can’t reveal it quite yet.
Adrian Hornsby:
So just give me another couple of weeks and you’ll get the press release. Sure. Okay. A couple of weeks later, the press release comes through, headline, Tom, look at this. And there was big announcement. They just hired a new digital leader. And guess what? It was the biggest digital guru in the industry. So this was something of a learning point for us.
Adrian Hornsby:
And then we kind of thought the guy was at the presentation, he saw the slide, and yet the mistake occurs. And you have this sort of bizarre feeling that you’re presenting PowerPoints, but the world isn’t changing. What could be going on here? So anyway, we sort of remembered that and a couple of years later, in 2020, obviously the pandemic happened. Everything digital went vertical. So digital working, digital streaming, digital commerce, everything was going insane. And Tom said, okay, we really need to do another book about digital and we’ve got to kind of catch this wave. And I said, all right, so what have we got? What are we going to talk about? And he said, OK, well, I’ve been crystallizing our ideas and I’ve been working on that PowerPoint deck.
Adrian Hornsby:
I’ll send it through to you, see what you think. And so he sent me through a 368 slide deck and I sort of started grinding my way through it. And there was a lot of ideas in there, lot of opacity, a lot of abstract language. But as I was crunching through it, then I could sort of parse out most of the slides fitted under one of the five DS. I could sort of post it out quite neatly. So I got on a call with Tom again and I said, this is all good stuff, but also it feels like it’s all in line with the 5D model that we’ve already talked about. The principles hasn’t changed. And Tom said, well, that’s true, the principles haven’t changed.
Alison Jones:
Which you’d expect.
Adrian Hornsby:
Which is what you’d expect? And I said, well, that’s great. We want that.
Alison Jones:
We’ve validated our principle.
Adrian Hornsby:
Excellent, we validate our principles. But how are we going to get out of the loop of sort of we do another book. It’s going to be the Wedding Party too. And Tom said, I hear you, I hear you, but I just know we’ve got another book in us because we’ve learned so much. And I said, well, like what? And he said, well, you remember that CEO who a couple of years ago hired the digital guru? I was speaking to him last week, we’re still working together, it’s such a mess. And he started telling the story of what happened and how the rest of the leadership responded. And as he was talking, I said, Tom, that’s really interesting. And I also said, I bet if we told that guy this story a couple of years ago, it would have gone in much deeper than just the principle.
Adrian Hornsby:
We don’t learn from abstract principle, crystallizes knowledge we already have, but it doesn’t allow us to absorb new knowledge in nearly the same way. It just doesn’t have the same feel. And Tom said, well, of course, and this is something that we know. So Tom and Alexandra, they regularly organize CEO roundtables where they get high level leaders together in a closed room and people share war stories and this is the highest value information. People talk honestly about what really happens. You kind of discover all this stuff and this is why these people attend them, because you really get the real learning out of it. But as Tom said, this stuff is all unprintable. We can’t reveal everything about a client.
Adrian Hornsby:
People lose face. There’s confidential information about companies. And I said, okay, there’s a trick here that we can use and that is we can fictionalize the stories. We keep the core points the same but we create a made up company. We change the names, we sort of move some characters around and that way we can use the art of fiction in order to tell the truth in the way that a typical case study either anonymizes or erases all of the juicy stuff. And so we use this idea. We had this approach of saying all right, let’s have really frank conversations about case studies inside companies. We’ll go to the companies, we’ll get the real information.
Adrian Hornsby:
And Tom and Alexandra, I should mention as well, are management consultants. They work with a bunch of the biggest companies in the world. They go deep inside. They manage these digital transformations and they’ve done over 1000 projects at this point from ten years in business. They’ve seen these things play out over and over again and they’ve got these juicy stories. And so we just kind of shared them, interviewed all of the people together. And then I moved some people around, collapsed some cases into sort of archetypes and made these stories.
Alison Jones:
Amazing, really insightful view into how you did it. Thank you. That’s really fascinating. So what I’m noticing is you’ve got all the underpinnings in place. You’ve got the case studies from real life. You’ve got the model and the principles and the expertise and the credibility. The thing that’s different about this book, I think and what I’d love to get a bit more information on from you is how you transmute that into the lightness of touch of the storytelling. Because there’s a sort of journalistic, almost heavy quality to case studies which is the absolute opposite of what you’ve got here.
Alison Jones:
It’s funny. There’s lots of dialogue. There’s the running joke about Shall I pour you a schnapp? So that means you’re out the door. There’s just this lovely it’s fictionalised in a way that if you tell somebody to fictionalise stuff and they are not an expert fiction writer, they will do it in a really heavy handed way. How do you get that playfulness, that lightness of touch, the thing that really keeps somebody reading and engages them? That’s a big question.
Adrian Hornsby:
It is a big question. There’s a deep point around this, which is one, I think it helps that I also write fiction work in theater. I’ve got a background of trying to engage audiences in the fiction world. But I think as well as that, even with that background, I had a significant revelation when I was working on this book, which was I think it’s worth talking about. Because when we started, when we kind of I had this story approach idea and I thought I could pull it off and wanted to make it funny and readable and all that kind of stuff. But I had the initial concept that what we’re going to do is essentially what we have is a bunch of dense business information that we’re trying to convey and I’m going to use a story as a vehicle to get that across to the reader. And so all I need to do is I’ve got my vehicle, the story, I just kind of pack in the business information, drive it through. And the way that I went about this was I interviewed the sources involved from the top level people, Head of Implementation down to the shop floor, got all the perspectives, wrote up a story which would typically be around sort of 3000 words and then I sent it back to the sources to get their take on it.
Adrian Hornsby:
One is obviously I want to make sure nobody felt burnt. And then also, was it accurate? Is what I’m coming up with true here? And so the feedback people were generally happy with stuff, but they’d always kind of say, okay, well, this detail here, there’s a bit more to it to understand that you need this. And so there’d be sort of more stuff added or this insight here is good, but also in another situation. So stuff would kind of come in and I’d work that into the draft and I’d be up at five, 6000 words to send it back around to people and there’d be more feedback, 7000 more nine. And the story was getting longer and longer. And the problem that I had was exactly I knew that this lightness of touch was disappearing, it was getting swamped and the story was becoming gruesome, it was grindingly unreadable. And I sort of thought, well, I don’t know what to do because my vehicle, if the story is like this kind of old Jalopy truck and I’ve got 17 mattresses stacked on top of it and the truck’s kind of bouncing along and a wheel pops off and it goes in the ditch and I lost the reader, but I don’t know which mattress to take off because all of the business information is good.
Adrian Hornsby:
It’s going to be checked with lots of people and say, yes, well, I don’t know what to take out. And so I was a bit of a loss and I didn’t kind of know. We sort of talked about where we could go and so I pulled in a good friend of mine, who’s also an extremely experienced and excellent editor called Jeremy Mercer, and I said would he like to help me out with where do we go? And so he sort of ground through the stories and we got on a Zoom call and he said OK, Adrian, first of all, let’s take story two, the acquisition, just tell me the story. And so I started trying to sort of fumble my way through it and got lost. And I could feel where he was losing interest or confused and so on. And this process of having to sort of do it live and what happened was Jeremy and I developed this technique where we’d bounce the story back and forth between ourselves until we could make it into a four minute anecdote that we could both tell and be giggling when we told it.
Adrian Hornsby:
And that was like the click moment. And then I could go back and write the story. And the real revelation was that this idea I’ve got business information to convey and the story is a vehicle, is totally the wrong way around. I have a story to convey, and the business information is the vehicle. Right? The information is what drives the story forward. So every time I’m in a situation where a character is faced with a decision, they need some information to figure out what’s going to happen next. So that’s where the information comes in and it drives you to the next decision. And then something else happens.
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, why? Information is required. And that’s what keeps you driving forwards. And every time a piece of information drives the story forwards, it’s relevant, it’s good, it’s what the reader wants to hear. Every time there’s a piece of information which isn’t driving the story forward, it’s got no business being in the story. And so at that point, suddenly my 17 mattress problem just evaporated and the scales fell off because I had this incredibly powerful tool to know what to keep in and what to get rid of. And so at that point, I just chucked out all of the stuff that wasn’t moving my characters forward. I got down to this story and suddenly it turns into a total burner. I mean, the page is just like flying by because every time something, a corner is turned, the information you need is that.
Adrian Hornsby:
And so that made the stories work much better. They came right back down to size. The lightness of touch sort of comes back through again. It’s fun. It’s nice to read. But the really interesting thing was that after I’d done the seven stories, which the book is based around, and then the end of each story, then the learnings which were extracted, which I did deductively, I said, okay, what have we really learned from this story and pulled it out. Then I gathered together all of the learnings, all of the little inside boxes, and compared them to the 368 slide deck that we started with, and I just crossed things off and everything was covered. And the amazing point was that if you have a couple of different situations of which these real business problems are playing out, and you just talk about the information you need to know for each one, and you do a bunch of them, everything you need to know will naturally be covered.
Adrian Hornsby:
And you dissolve all of the problems of the repetition and the boringness and so on and so on, because whenever information is pertinent, it’s there. And you trust that rule, and by the time you get to the end, you’ll have covered your basis.
Alison Jones:
It’s just a brilliant masterclass in how you use storytelling in business writing, because you’re right, I think most people see they have it the wrong way around, see the story as the way that they are presenting this information is in a story format, but actually, if you prioritize the story, it just changes your mindset completely.
Adrian Hornsby:
I love that it changes your mindset completely. And it’s such a lesson that don’t worry about the information. If you really need to know it, the story will require it.
Alison Jones:
Yes and you’re right, because I find this often with people who are writing about their own life as well, they know it so well that they bring in all these details and well, I should just explain that. The story, it’s now lying dead on the floor.
Adrian Hornsby:
But it’s also the discipline of having someone else outside the book, outside the industry, doing it out loud and you just see when Jeremy’s eyes were glazing over.
Alison Jones:
You might lie to yourself, but you cannot lie.
Adrian Hornsby:
This isn’t relevant, is it?
Alison Jones:
Brilliant. I want to talk about the publishing as well, because it’s a very beautiful book. It’s full colour if you’re looking at it on Zoom, I’m just going to find a colour. There you go. I’ve got some color and pictures and stuff. That’s probably not the best example. Sorry.
Alison Jones:
There you are. There’s a nice one. And it’s a lovely with sort of cartoons. Cartoons, yes. There’s a lovely cartoon of somebody looking very dismal at some point which I liked a lot. So tell us about the publishing journey. What was your thinking and decisions and the process around that? There he is. Sorry, I’ve just found my dismal person.
Alison Jones:
There he is. Terrific.
Adrian Hornsby:
Oh, yes, the hang dog walk. The hang dog walk. It was interesting. So on this front then, my co authors, Tom and Alexandra, were really driving the process and they were quite clear that we should self publish, which was quite a big decision, and it was also an elective one. You know, we have links with a couple of business schools. There was definitely a route to go through a university press and put it out like that. And the decision to self publish was really threefold, I think. One is that it gave us much greater control over timeline in particular.
Adrian Hornsby:
You don’t have to wait a year. This stuff is relevant. It’s hot now, we want to put it out. We finished writing and we printed and published within a month of finishing the manuscript. It was super fast. The other thing, of course, that you get is amazing editorial control. You can decide to, according to, you make your own budget and then say, all right, we do want colour, we do want a nicer binding.
Adrian Hornsby:
We do want to kind of make it the object that we want to make, and content wise, do all of the stuff that we need there. And then the other thing, of course, is that it comes through Spark Optimus, which is the business that Tom and Alexandra co founded, and they wanted to very much make it a Spark Optimus product. So it’d be something that they’d be able to have as their kind of branding, have a piece of their identity, be able to give it to clients, and also have control over who you give it to, where you do giveaways, who you make special deals with. Let’s say a company that they’re working with wants 500 copies for all of their senior managers across Europe. All of that stuff is much simpler if you don’t have a publisher in the way. So there were a lot of tangible, good reasons to self publish. And so that’s the route that we went down. Having said that, there are drawbacks, and I don’t think it’s realistic to say that there aren’t. I mean there’s sort of one version of the world in which to be able to get great distribution.
Adrian Hornsby:
Now you can just upload your book to Amazon and it’s going to sit there, which is true, right, but there are 500,000 books on Amazon and 490,000 of them are just sitting on an endless shelf.
Alison Jones:
Yes, there’s more than 500,000. It’s more like 3 million.
Adrian Hornsby:
But yes, there you go. Well, no, in your category.
Alison Jones:
In your category, yes.
Adrian Hornsby:
And so at that point, then, how do you get visibility within the Amazon cockpit? There are millions of little knobs and levers and tweaks and publishers have real knowledge and they know how to figure this stuff out.
Alison Jones:
And also, Amazon isn’t the end of the world.
Adrian Hornsby:
Amazon is not.
Alison Jones:
Amazon is a big part of the book trade, but there’s huge part of it beyond that.
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, completely. So how do you get relationships with bookstores? If you wanted to go and do a reading if you want to go and do a presentation, if you want to approach, and with a lot of those approaches also for sort of physical book distributors, then if you’re self published and every time you’re going into one of those conversations, you’re always a little bit defensive and a little bit behind the eight ball. And having an external publisher, it gives you all of these people. There are however many, dozens and dozens of books come out every week in the UK and people are desperately looking for a way to filter down which ones they should be interested in. And so if you have a publisher, then that can help you a little bit to kind of get that first conversation in.
Alison Jones:
You just encapsulated there all the kind of moving parts of a decision that any business owner takes, I think. It’s about control, it’s about speed to market, it’s about distribution muscle. Also, actually, what you didn’t mention there is translation rights. So that’s another thing that a publisher does and quality control and so on. But it’s also about how you use the book in the business because if you’re buying it at author discount from a publisher, that’s a really expensive way of buying multiple copies.
Adrian Hornsby:
Absolutely, yes. And if you’re thinking, I mean, depending on how many copies you want to have a control over, then, yes, it can be versus printing it yourself and just having those books. And you don’t have to ask someone every time and so on. And so there isn’t a single answer for different people and the routes are right in different ways. I think on the translation rights, which is also a really good point, with this one we now have an edition coming out in Germany in September, so a great delight. And with that we are going with a German publisher because again, they know the market, they’ve got the presence, they could figure out the translation. And I think the bonus that we have is having had the English language edition come out and do well and get this award, then we had greater leverage to be able to then start getting the German translation.
Adrian Hornsby:
It means that we’ll be at the Frankfurt Book Messe. To some extent there is a way in which, having done the English edition self published, then it’s a block to get into the publishing world with subsequent editions.
Alison Jones:
Yes, it’s so fascinating. And I guess the takeaway is you have options, which is it does make life more complex, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You have options in a way that you maybe didn’t do 20 years ago. So it’s exciting. I always ask my guests for their best tip. I’m really, really interested. If somebody’s just at the start of their business book writing journey. I guess I’m asking also it’s a long time since you started writing, but what do you wish you’d known when you started? What would you tell them?
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, no, it’s definitely an easy one, in a sense, because I think, so I read English Literature as a degree and came out of university, and you have this idea that the literary tradition has this concept of Milton’s il Penseroso, you’ve got a sort of a genius in a tower with an oil lamp who works for years and years and delivers a masterpiece which just kind of drops out perfect, and then everybody studies it for how wonderful it is and so on. You wouldn’t dare to suggest that Milton was confused or got a line wrong or anything like that. And I think this model can work. But for that to be successful, you need to have tens of thousands of little Penseroso’s sitting in towers pushing out bad books and the failure rate is enormous to get the occasional masterpiece that comes out. And you can figure out that what you’re working on is not a masterpiece without spending ten years on it. Right. Really the point here is get feedback. But the point at which you get feedback can be a lot earlier than after you’ve written the whole book polished it.
Adrian Hornsby:
Spent hours and hours and hours, just early stage as you’re writing chapters. Yes, concept, make sure that you can say to somebody else what you’re talking about and you give your drafts to somebody outside the writing process, preferably outside the subject area as well. Get them to give you feedback. And when they give you feedback, usually people will try to be supportive and they’ll try to give helpful suggestions. And usually the suggestions that people have, not always but very often they’re bad. Right. And it’s not their job, it’s not the job of your reader to solve your problems.
Adrian Hornsby:
But what they do do is they tell you where your problems are. If a reader is confused at a certain point, has a burning question that you haven’t answered, or most importantly, if they’re just flat bored, you need to know that and you need to get that information as you’re writing so that you can start. When you’re writing a book, typically people write a book because they are I want to write a book because I’ve got something to say and I’ve got a voice and it’s very me orientated. It’s the wrong approach. A book, you’re in the services industry. You are serving a reader and you need to be in touch with that reader. What are their problems? What are they upset about? What are they not understanding? And where are you losing them? You’ve got to stay in touch with that.
Alison Jones:
I think that’s possibly the main difference between writing literary fiction and writing a business book, is that literary fiction is much more about self expression, it’s much more about you bringing your uniqueness to the world and the people who love that will love that. Whereas writing a business book you’re serving, if it doesn’t make sense to the people you’re writing for, there’s no point in this book.
Adrian Hornsby:
Yes, absolutely.
Alison Jones:
That feedback.
Adrian Hornsby:
And I think it’s also, I’ve read stacks and stacks of business books now, and a lot of them are very, they’re hard to read. They’ve got a bad rep. And I think that there are a lot of different reasons people put out a book. And the worst one and most typical one on some level, is that it’s a big business card. There were dozens of books that I read where I felt that if the point of this was to create a business card and the person who’s on the cover is far too busy to write it, and the person who’s writing it doesn’t have any relationship with the reader. And in between the covers is just kind of like placeholder text. Then you’re kind of missing the point by reading the book in the first place because nobody ever expected this book to be read. That’s why it’s so bad.
Adrian Hornsby:
But if you’re going to write a book that you actually want to spend time on it and money then make it work for a reader.
Alison Jones:
Yes. Wonderful. And also, the writing process is so valuable, isn’t it? People who sort of delegate are missing out so much.
Adrian Hornsby:
Yes. The thing which I find a lot is that when people often think they have a, it’s like, I’ve got great ideas, but I’m not a fantastic writer. I’ve got a writing problem. So I’ll just kind of pull in a writer and burble at them and they can just turn it into perfect prose. And as they’re burbling, then you got to listen. Well, the problem that you have here, it’s not a writing problem. It’s a thinking problem. Right.
Adrian Hornsby:
When you try and write, it exposes how incoherent all of the stuff you’re saying is. And that’s why the thing falls apart when you get to the writing stage. When you write, the discipline and the level of demand upon the clarity of thought is just that much higher. And you sort out your ideas when you write something.
Alison Jones:
Yes and that’s why you do it. Yes.
Adrian Hornsby:
That’s why you do it. Yes.
Alison Jones:
Love it. I always ask people to recommend a book as well. So, Adrian, what book would you recommend that people listening read, if they haven’t already?
Adrian Hornsby:
Well, many people would have done, actually, but I hadn’t and when we started on this book then, it was my co author, one of my co-authors Tom Voskes said, you know, have a look at Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson, which is a total classic. And it’s interesting because we were doing a book about digital business, and everybody kind of thinks it’s very sort of like up to the minute and tech, very 21st century. I hadn’t read, knew about Parkinson’s Law, but I actually read the book. It’s very funny. It’s very charming. It’s about, people who haven’t heard of it, 1950s business administration, particularly in the British Civil Service. And the amazing thing is, it’s so pertinent and it’s so relevant and it’s so recognizable.
Adrian Hornsby:
It’s on the money. Because, of course, what Parkinson is writing about is people and trying to get people to cooperate and do a project and do useful work as opposed to meaningless work and the situations that arise out of that. And that’s the same in the 1950s as in the 2020s and will be for decades to come, even with all this generative AI coming in, businesses are about people cooperating, and that’s certainly what we knew we wanted to write about in this book. We’ve done a book about principles. This one’s about people.
Alison Jones:
Yes. Brilliant. I haven’t read the book either, so that’s a great call.
Adrian Hornsby:
It’s really fun. It’s fun.
Alison Jones:
Yes, I bet it is. Brilliant. Thank you. Wonderful recommendation. Now, Adrian, I’m going to guess you’ve got quite a lot of places to point us, but if people want to find out more about you, more about Optimus, more about the book, give me all the links and I will put all the links on the show notes.
Adrian Hornsby:
First and foremost, the book itself is disruptioninaction.com. So you can go there and you can see, among other things, even if I say so myself, a delightful 1 minute video trailer as well as the quotes, the blurbs and the links outwards and the publisher and the business behind the book itself is Spark Optimus. So sparkoptimus.com. And that’s the business of my co authors, Alexandra Jankovich and Tom Voskes. And then for me personally as an author, I also have my own website, which is adrianhornsby.com.
Alison Jones:
Fantastic. Not actually as many as feared. That’s brilliant. I’ll put those all up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. What an absolute joy to talk to you Adrian, thank you so much for all those insightful, just the way that you have talked about the writing of the book really brings it alive and is so practical and useful for anybody who’s undertaking the same journey. So thank you.
Adrian Hornsby:
Thanks so much for having me on and that it was a pleasure to write the book and it’s fun to talk about it. Actually, I’d say one last thing about another thing, which is also super important when you’re writing a book is enjoy it. If you’re bored, your reader will be too. They can sort of sniff that out. You really should be enjoying writing.
Alison Jones:
Great last tip. Just about to press stop. Brilliant, got it in under the wire. Amazing. Thanks Adrian.
Adrian Hornsby:
Thanks so much.