‘ We’ve invented a new genre, at least that’s very modestly what we would like to believe. We’re calling it Professional Advice Narrative Tales, and we’ll leave you to figure out that acronym.’
For the new generation entering the workplace, reading a traditional business book has all the appeal of a colonoscopy. So longtime colleagues and collaborators Dr David Oxley and Dr Helmut Schuster realized that if they were to get across their insights and advice, the only way was through storytelling.
The result? The series of Shey Sinope books, which explore the complexities, conundrums and constraints young professionals face as they navigate the modern workplace in a lighthearted, readable, engaging way. It’s a fresh perspective that speaks directly to the experience of embarking on a profession career; the absurdities and challenges, but also the profound need for meaning and fulfilment.
But we all know that writing a standard busines book is hard enough – how on earth do you go about writing fiction collaboratively? Find out here.
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Alison Jones: I’m here today with Drs Schuster and Oxley, who are longtime collaborators and former work colleagues. They are optimistic futurists, advocates for next generation talent, pioneers of new approaches to work, enthusiasts for new technology adoption, and crusaders against entrenched thinking.
Their first book, A Career Carol, was highly commended in the Business Book Awards 2024, and their latest book, A Groundhog Career, can someone wave that at me, continues the adventures of Shey Sinope.
Thank you, Helmut. Marvellous. Oh, and there’s the mug. Brilliant. So, first of all, welcome to you both and, well, congratulations on the award.
Congratulations on the publication of the second book in the series.
David Oxley: Oh, thanks so much. Great to be here.
Helmut Schuster: Thank you so much.
Alison Jones: It’s really, really good to have you here.
And there’s, it’s such a, I mean, I don’t know where to start really, but tell me a little bit about the format of the books and the reason you chose that because this is not your granny’s business book, is it? This is a business fable. It’s such a different approach. So just tell us a little bit about the origination of that.
David Oxley: I think it started with us discussing how we can help many of the entrepreneurs and young business professionals that we were either coaching or had some sort of working relationship with, who we felt were underserved by the existing business literature, there was a sort of almost a cry of… a yelp every time we would suggest, why don’t you read this? Or why don’t you read that?
It was like a visit to a dentist. I think at some stage someone said, it’s like having to go and get a colonoscopy trying to get through one of these books. So we were trying to rack our brains to say, how do we address that? How do we make some of that accessible?
And then there’s also this question of things have changed. Careers now and particularly generation Z and young professionals think of life as blurring the lines between work life and personal life and how do you provide some wisdom, advice, some help, if you will, coaching. And so it started a little bit with this combination of how do you make business advice, career advice more accessible and how do you engage an audience that is somewhat underserved?
And then there’s a piece of us that both said, how do we make it fun because we’re both interested in trying to make the writing process engaging for us. So it was trying to put those three pieces together.
Alison Jones: I love the fact that reading a business book might be likened to a colonoscopy. I’d love to refute that, but, you know, we’ve all read those books, haven’t we? But tell me how the character of Shey Sinope emerged, Helmut.
Helmut Schuster: Well, can I basically just like basic detail a bit on what David just said? I mean, the process was, and we always have good process, we basically decided over breakfast to write books. That was not planned. It was just basically just like the way it happened. And then we had a little process where we had like five book titles or five ways of writing a book.
And then we went through like a voting process and David probably still remembers that. And so out came the concept of having something very practical, very pragmatic. And I think at the time we then decided that might be a great thing to do. Now, I think David manipulated me a bit into that because he long had created the concept of basically A Career Carol and the character of Shey Sinope.
So I pass back to you. Why is it Shey, the main character? You’ve told me a few times before, but actually that is credit to David. The name Shey Sinope was basically his invention and I love it.
So that was one of the few things we didn’t even discuss. I said, yes, love it. Great. David.
David Oxley: I mean, it sort of emerges, doesn’t it? I think, you know, as one writer to another or speaking to other authors, there’s some creative component to it. The character himself was something that we discussed, the idea of someone about to embark. And so the question of trying to put the context around about to graduate from college.
It could just as easily have been an apprenticeship or it could have been some other step between either that sort of last step of being an adolescent, having sort of guardianship and stewardship by parents and then stepping out from under the wing. But we went with graduation and we went with this sort of individual who’s a little bit introverted. We’ll get on to how the character came about in terms of whether that he is based on any one of both of us, or you know, as is often the case, different pieces of our respective lives.
But the idea of having this trepidation about stepping out into professional life was something that we said, that’s where we want to start. We want to start this first book about Shey Sinope, the character, where the professional life is not yet something that they’ve trodden down. They’re about to, but they’re intimidated by it. And the character Shey Sinope came out of this monologue that we were developing around someone who was sort of rejecting some of these notions that what are you going to do with the rest of your life? What profession are you going to choose?
And feeling that, you know, that they were going to use a combination of sarcasm and obtuse sort of language to try and get out from underneath that sort of level of expectation. And Shey Sinope is essentially something that we played with.
Shey is essentially an extension of shy, shy; Sinope, cynic, from the Greek derivative, and so the idea of bringing together the idea of this shy cynic who is about to embark on life, that that came together as, I’d like to say it was some some lovely inspiration but it was an iterative process a little bit around Does this work? Does that work? I didn’t want it to sound like a specific Anglo Saxon name. I didn’t want it to sound like something that had connotations with any specific cultural background. I wanted it to be reasonably neutral and speak as widely as possible to as wide an audience.
Alison Jones: It’s really interesting as the mother of kids who are kind of at that stage and just coming up to that stage. I very often hear, you don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like to work these, you don’t know what, and in a sense, of course, every adolescent in history ever has said that to their parents, but in another sense, they’re right, because the world of work is so different and the expectations on them and the expectations that they have, I think, are very, very different.
So just, I mean, you work a lot with young people. Why is this so important? Why do we need to equip them for what they’re about to face?
David Oxley: Why don’t I start with that? I think a lot of the writing that we’ve done is around reflecting on real problems that entrepreneurs and professionals in their mid to late twenties, early thirties were struggling with. So it’s based in reality and it’s designed to tackle the problems that people were facing.
The backdrop to the first book was also the pandemic and the social isolation that people were feeling. And then I have this sense that a lot of the career expectations that we superimpose on people are wrapped up in societal expectations in this sort of grandiose sense that you should instinctively know what you’re going to do with your life, and it’s going to have some sort of grand plan, it’s going to have a massive impact, and it’s inbuilt into some of these questions that well meaning relatives will often ask, you know, what, as I say, what …
Alison Jones: …what are you going to be when you grow…
David Oxley: …are you going to do with the rest of your life?
It seems so intimidating. So, some people are blessed with some innate sense that they’re going to do something and change the world. A lot of us aren’t. A lot of us sort of evolve in our late teens, early twenties, and part of it is experimenting. And so, what we wanted to put at the heart of this was this idea of discovery by exploration, of trying things, of experimentation, of not feeling that you must have an answer to the existential question of what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my career? What should I do with it?
And it’s okay just to take one step at a time, you know, that I in my own career too, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Helmut, I think has a more definitive answer to that question, but I always felt that it was, I’m just going to take one step and it was like opening a door and you went into another room and that room was slightly bigger and that had a number of doors. But you didn’t know what was behind the doors until you entered one. You pick one at random to some extent, walk through it. And then there was another big room with other doors that were adjacent to that. And so we were trying to reflect, you know, it’s okay just to think about things one step at a time.
At some point you need directionally to start to think about what path you might want to tread. And there are choices to be made, but at the ages of 18 through 24 -25, it’s okay not to have answers to those. Just getting started is big enough.
Alison Jones: And I know that A Groundhog Career particularly focuses on the stuff that you meet behind those doors, the ways in which you are pulled out of shape perhaps in your career. So again, just how does that reflect, what are the, what’s changed, I guess, in Gen Z and in the people coming into the workplace now, that means that we really need to address this.
Helmut Schuster: I do believe, and as David said, I mean, the whole book is basically inspired by our own experiences, either our own or like people in our family or basically circle of friends. And I think the key thing is, which is so important, universities simply do not prepare us for the real life, work life, they don’t.
They educate and you believe you might be CEO and do strategic work. Reality is, you basically start crunching numbers, sit in the office endless hours, have a boss you might like, but most likely a boss you don’t like that much. And I think our books are very much creating a certain sense of realism to manage expectations.
And like in Groundhog Career, basically the assessment center experience, I used to start my career in Enkel, and I quit because I found it awful and the stress and everything. I couldn’t cope with it. And then I had a assessment center and I thought I did awful. I really thought I flunked it. They would fire me.
And then when I basically handed in my resignation, the guy said, HR Director said, Oh, that’s a pity. You came out by far as the best and the highest potential out of the assessment center. And I think that was such a big moment that I think we need to do a better job in helping the next generation to prepare them, what they’re going to expect, but also do a bit of handholding.
And this is more important than ever because it is a jungle out there. It is very difficult to enter corporate reality.
David Oxley: And if I could add to that, Alison, I think there are several things that are very different. I mean, the first is that there is, we’ve just come through a pandemic, but there’s almost an epidemic of disillusionment with work. A lot of the statistics that have come out of the research around employee engagement about, the level of fulfillment or satisfaction of work are quite startling.
There was a Gallup survey just two years ago that said 60 percent of people at work are not fulfilled, but 20 percent are actually feeling that work is a source of misery in their life. And I mean, reflecting on that is quite interesting.
Then you’ve got CIPD saying that as many as 90 percent of us are not engaged in our work.
And there are various other surveys over the space of the last 12 months that have suggested that somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of us are unhappy on balance with the majority of our job. And so the question becomes what’s driving that? That seems, if you look at it over the 25 years that Gallup have been doing their survey, with all of the efforts that companies have put in to try to improve the employee proposition, it’s counterintuitive. You would have thought that things have got better.
The reality is they’ve actually got worse. People are more disillusioned today than they were in 2000. So what’s driving that? So A Groundhog Career is really dedicated to try and unpick that. What’s going on, what’s going on in our personal lives, what’s going on in our professional lives, what’s going on in the broader societal context, that’s driving these feelings that on the one hand apparently, we’re comfortable suffering for work, and that’s something in of itself that’s worth unpicking. Why do we feel that we have to suffer for work? Isn’t there an alternative?
And then on the other side, you’ve got this explosion of opportunities, you know, the gig economy, the notion of remote working, you know, everything from sort of being able to work in social media all the way through to working remotely in a more traditional office setting and that choice is part of the reason that we believe that people are more disillusioned. They see more and more opportunities to do different things, but they feel it’s out of reach. They’re not sure how to navigate from where they are to these other things that look more fulfilling.
So A Groundhog Career is really dedicated to trying to help people make that transition or to figure out how they could navigate that path to a more fulfilling existence for themselves.
Alison Jones: And one of the things I find really exciting about it and one of the reasons I love the book so much is that we have a lot of books that talk about the crisis of engagements and you know how to be happy at work and they’re all very valuable and there is the colonoscopy argument, isn’t there? I don’t want to read another book about this.
Whereas something about fiction, that invitation into this sort of imaginative world that gets under our defenses and doesn’t speak just exclusively to the rational, helps us to see things, you know, by identifying with the protagonist in a novel, you learn a little bit about yourself. You know, that’s always been the case. I love that you apply it to business books. And I love that particularly this, I think, you know, when you were talking about the lobby with the doors and in a sense, it is different to I think what it has been. I had a clearer sense of what door was next when I was entering my career. And now I think there’s not only a selection of doors and you’re not sure what’s behind them, but you’ve also got this creeping sense that whatever is behind the others, that you didn’t pick, was better than this one, was more exciting.
So that sort of ability to imaginatively engage and think, well, you know, how do I solve the problem of my own lack of engagement and lack of enjoyment is really, really, really profound. Yes.
David Oxley: Storytelling is something that, again, I think Helmut was about to jump in there, I’ll pass over to him, but we think we learn more from reading a story than being told something. And so one of the things we were very concerned about is that we didn’t want to write a book where we tell you what you should do, that for us seemed too instructive and who are we to tell people what they should do or what they’re missing out on.
So we thought it much better to go, well, here’s a story, extract from this, whatever you will. There are lots of different things you could extract and we’re inspired to some extent by reading fiction, you know, contemporary fiction about business settings, but in a way they allow you to interpret or take things from it.
And it’s in a way your imagination, I think, fits your context or allows you to use those things.
Alison Jones: It’s an act of co-creation.
Helmut Schuster: Yes, the thing is, you know, we found it almost very absurd that every leadership book or business book tells you about the importance of storytelling and to engage the audience. And then you read like 270 pages, yes, which does not include too many stories. So I think that’s where we said storytelling is an essence or essential part of our books would be such a great idea.
And we also said, well, there are lazy readers and there are, like, not so lazy readers. And then we said we wanted a very brief summary, as we call the Blinkist, for the lazy reader. So you can only pick part of the book and you still get some key messages. I think that is quite important. , But the other thing is I think in particular, Groundhog Career, and we really enjoyed writing the first book, but we do believe that Groundhog Career is probably a step up.
We really enjoyed writing it, working on it. And recently, David and I had a conversation about, like, best business books. And I said, actually, the best business books are never the business books. It’s basically biographies about entrepreneurs because it tells you a story. It tells you basically the failures, the importance of resilience.
I’m currently reading this great book called Supremacy, which basically tells the story of the two epic figures in AI. And it’s about storytelling. And so we were all inspired by that, storytelling is part of our books and I think we enjoy the writing. And I think it seems to work.
Alison Jones: I want to ask you about the writing, because goodness knows it’s hard enough to write a business book when there’s two of you. I mean, in a way it’s easier because you’ve got some accountability and somebody to sort of bounce off, but writing fiction jointly, how does that work?
Helmut Schuster: David, you go
Alison Jones: Yes
Helmut Schuster: …engineer behind the fiction writing. But you tell the process what we do that might be interesting for the reader.
David Oxley: Yes, I think, I mean, we enjoy very similar things, but we get enjoyment when it comes to writing out of slightly different things. I love the storytelling piece. That’s something that when we talked about writing a book it was, well, you know, if we’re going to write a book, then we are going to write the book and it’s going to be something that is part of our identities and the idea of storytelling was at the root of it.
So when we start each of our books it’s always started with, well, what’s the story? How do we take, so, well, two things. What’s the, essentially the challenge, the professional challenge that we’re trying to come to terms with. In the first book, it was sort of graduating from school and getting your first job.
But in this Career Carol, it’s the danger of those first 10 years of getting carried away. And so what we wanted to do was to try and make sure that that was one, the anchor. And then the question is, how do you tell a story that fits that? So I love the idea of A Groundhog Career, groundhog day, the idea of repeating the same day until you get it right.
And the idea that the protagonist doesn’t know at the outset that they’re on the wrong path, that the universe somehow has trapped them in this sort of time bubble and said, aha, no, you’ve got it wrong. Try it again. And so, you could play out so many different scenarios and then have fun with the absurdity of work.
I think sometimes we would talk over the, Helmut and I have worked together for what seems like an eternity, but a long time. And we would often have conversations about, isn’t it absurd how this works? Or isn’t it absurd that something that was well intended actually ends up being quite silly.
It, you know, it creates all sorts of very odd behaviors. Isn’t it odd that people behave this way? And so The Groundhog Career gave us the opportunity to really play out some of the absurdity that we see in professional life, the behaviors through Shey Sinope and some of his interpretation of how people are maneuvering around him.
So I think the storytelling piece in terms of how we wrote it, it was based on like a three or four page storybook. Almost like a sketch of this is roughly what the story is going to be. And then, you know, over the space of about two or three months, we just churned out chapter after chapter.
We would review each chapter at the end of it and say, is this going in the right direction? Helmut would give notes and we would incorporate those and then the second part of the book was very much more sort of… a much more of a deep dive. It was more of our analytical minds coming up with the behavioral science that was underpinning the story.
Helmut Schuster: Yes maybe I think back to your, you ask about the process. I think it’s very iterative, just for example, we are just already now iterating book four. So we, I’m not sure we’re allowed to say that, but we’re currently having conversations.
Where is the book going to take place? What is the age of Shey? Who are going to be the main characters? So there’s a long thought process before we actually go into the writing. And I think that works extremely well. Extremely well to get this, you know, sometimes we have like different ideas, sometimes we have similar ideas and we also need to work it out.
So, before anything goes into writing, I think there’s probably already a frame in our head and they probably overlap 80%. And then when one of us does like the writing, we go, Oh, this is interesting. I didn’t get this 20%, but it works very well. But I think the reason why it does work as David said, we’ve been working together for a very, very long time.
I think we complement each other very well. I’m not sure I would recommend that approach to two people who have never worked together. So it works for us, but it might not work for everyone.
Alison Jones: No, I can absolutely see you are extraordinary. You’ve almost created a kind of third entity, which is Drs. Schuster and Oxley isn’t it? It’s different to the two of you individually, and I think…
David Oxley: …yes, we’ve…
Alison Jones: …it’s branded.
David Oxley: We’ve invented a new genre, at least that’s very modestly what we would like to believe. We’re calling it Professional Advice Narrative Tales, and we’ll leave you to figure out that acronym.
Alison Jones: Yes, we need to work out a BISAC code for that. Okay, great.
Now, I always ask my guests, and I’m going to have to, you’ll have to sort of share it between you. What’s your best tip? So for somebody listening here that, I guarantee there’ll be relatively few people who’ve ever thought about writing narrative business fiction with a co writer, it’s, you know, it’s not a sort of common way of doing it, but it will have really struck people as a really interesting way of doing it. So just generally, you know, kind of what, I guess, what do you wish you’d known at the start or what would you tell somebody who’s thinking about embarking on this journey?
I’ll take Helmut first.
Helmut Schuster: Okay. Well, basically, firstly, don’t overthink it. Just do it. That’s my first advice. Like, just do it. Just do it. If it feels right, just do it. That’s the first thing.
Secondly, only do it with somebody where you feel actually comfortable. I think I wouldn’t do it with a stranger but it does work. The third thing is actually when you do that, I think it’s really, really important, and I think it’s even better that you work on a book with another person.
I really think two brains are always smarter than one. And I think it’s better. So my big advice is actually you need to have somebody in the process who basically challenges you, thought partners with you. It will lead to a much better outcome. A really much better outcome.
And then the other thing is just enjoy and write.
I really think don’t overthink it, write, write, write and then basically discuss it.
So write, write, write is probably my key advice.
Alison Jones: I love that. And I particularly like the fact that you emphasise the enjoyment. Because that really comes through with everything you do. And it was really clear in the intro as well. That kind of enthusiasm, the enjoyment, the playfulness. Love it.
David, what about you?
David Oxley: Yes, I think I wouldn’t have started writing had it not been for the discussions that Helmut and I were having that we reached a point in our discussions where it’s, well, why don’t we do something about it? If there isn’t business literature out there that fulfills this need that we are feeling and that we are witnessing, then why don’t we do something about it?
And then that discovery of well, I don’t know if we can do it, but why don’t we try felt actually really fun. It was a, we talk about fulfillment in work, going back to those horrible statistics that I shared with you earlier. And one of the things that we’ve often reflected over the last three or four years that we’ve been in this writing collaboration, is how much fun it is. It is extraordinarily fun. It’s fun because we discover stuff about ourselves. It’s fun because some of the things we write make us laugh. And I think I mean, that sounds very indulgent, but I think you have to start there.
You have to start with, well, what is it that you enjoy? What is it that you think is fun? And then you translate that a little bit to, well, perhaps one or two or three or a few other people might also find it fun. And so that process, Helmut describes it as iterative and it is. You go through this circle of invention.
But the one thing that I think has kept us grounded is just the two of us trying to lift one another up when we get a little bit disillusioned, that we’ve hit some sort of block, or that, you know, we’re struggling with something and then, you know, we’ll give the other person the encouragement they need.
I think it would be a very difficult thing to do in isolation because I mean, everyone’s wired differently, but in our case, it’s always been you know, the other person has been the encourager, the provocateur, the person who has sort of challenged it or just said, well, I’ll write this next piece. So let me try and take over and so then it ends up being a relay race.
So I think all of that has been very, very helpful to have someone sort of in your corner all the time. So it’s worked for us, but again, you know, we seem to work and I think therefore that wouldn’t necessarily work in every instance.
Alison Jones: And you laugh a lot, which is great fun for those people working with you .
And I’m going to stay with you, David, and ask you to be really ruthless and restrict yourself to one, please. But what book would you recommend? Not allowed to do any of the Shey Sinope books, sorry.
What book would you recommend to somebody listening?
David Oxley: Yes, I can’t say the next Sinope book
I really enjoy, and this gives away a little bit, the third book. But I really enjoyed reading recently the You Are a Thing and I Love You. I don’t know if you’ve read that book. It’s about artificial intelligence. And it’s an author in the U S who’s written about how silly some of the artificial intelligence is.
And she set out to showcase how artificial intelligence models given the task to come up with dating lines. Came up with this: ‘you are a thing and I love you’. Which I thought was a great pick up line. But she also said something along the lines of that what we weren’t aware of is that in the digital apps that did all the deep learning. They trained the deep learning. I think it was one of the big models. I won’t name the big model, but they trained them on trees to recognize different trees in Africa. But all of the trees or many other the trees had giraffes in them. So then the software couldn’t recognize giraffes. And I thought that this was hilarious that they couldn’t recognize giraffes.
Anyway, so I found that book very, very funny. And it inspired us in different ways, which will become apparent in six or seven months from now.
Alison Jones: Great title as well. Thank you. Brilliant. And I haven’t heard of it, so thank you for that.
Helmut, what about you?
Helmut Schuster: Well, basically right now and I think I always have like every year probably a different favorite book and then like every week, every month, but right now I think it’s really, it’s basically Parmy Olson and she wrote a book called Supremacy. I mentioned before and basically tells the story of AI and basically Sam Altman story and Demis Hassabi story about like two different countries.
One is British. One is American. About their upbringing, you know, how they grew up, how they discovered the passion for AI and, you know, what their intent was.. And the reason why I like it so much, it tells the biography, the life of the person behind it. Big entrepreneurs, the big leaders, it basically tells the story when they were young, when they were basically in school.
And there’s so much to learn. So that’s currently my favorite book. And I would recommend highly to everyone just to have a look into that. It’s a good
Alison Jones: Thank you. And big, big clues as to the next in the series there as well, which we’ll come on to that later. Marvellous.
And if people want to find out more about Drs. Schuster and Oxley, where should they go?
David Oxley: So we have a website and that’s probably the best first stop. So Doctors Schuster and Oxley and spelt out rather than the ampersand but that’s the first stop. We’re on LinkedIn. We have a fantastic newsletter, which, you know I think I’m completely unbiased in saying it’s the best newsletter that at least the two of us can produce. That goes out, it’s very controversial, so signing up for that.
And then obviously Practical Inspiration has all of our book information and the books are available on Amazon.
We do have a little social media presence on Instagram and we have a related channel on TikTok, which is the Shey Sinope Stories, a friend of ours who is enacting certain scenes.
So all of those places would be good, but start with the website.
Alison Jones: Perfect. And I’ll put that link up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com.
Thank you both for your time today. I’ve so enjoyed, well, working with you, but also just talking to you today. It’s been brilliant. And I think we’ve covered some really interesting stuff, that sort of intersection of work and writing and storytelling.
And it’s just absolute, pure Extraordinary Business Book Club gold. So thank you.
David Oxley: Thank you!
Helmut Schuster: Thank you. Thank you very much.
