In some ways every week on the Extraordinary Business Book Club we’re talking about the results of a book-writing experiment – and many books are themselves the results of fascinating experiments in business and life. In this Best Bits episode we don our white coats and safety glasses and head…
The best business books include powerful stories that get across key points in a memorable, engaging way. What if we could make those stories accessible to more people, more easily? That’s the vision that prompted Shuhrat Ashurov to create Storypack, a microlearning app that gives people in business access…
The young Tom Cheesewright found his purpose in life when his mother bought him a copy of the 1979 Usborne Book of the Future. Now he’s an Applied Futurist, focusing not on teleportation or interstellar travel but on identifying what is going to take an organisation out at the knees…
‘Think about your audience. What stones do they have in their shoes? And what possibilities do they dream of?’ And with this great advice from his editor ringing in his ears, Mark Burns and his co-writer Andy Griffith planned, wrote, rewrote, tested, revised and edited their way to their final…
As a journalist, Mike Sergeant’s job was to communicate complex issues clearly and quickly. He had to find within huge geopolitical issues the human stories that listeners could connect with. Today he uses that experience to help business leaders communicate more powerfully. Mike believes that PR is simply storytelling –…
“There’s this comfortable way of thinking that we’re programmed by evolution to enjoy, which is thinking in patterns. That makes life so much easier and so much more approachable, when we rely on lessons we’ve learned in the past, when we observe other people and we do the things that…
Matt Watkinson described Nigel Wilcockson, publishing director at Random House Business Books and his own editor, as the brains behind many of the best business books he’d ever read. Nigel is more modest about his role: ‘a good editor is more like a mentor… there in the background to offer…
Matt Locke tells a good story. He does, after all, run The Story conference, and his content studio Storythings helps businesses including Google and the BBC tell better stories. Right now he’s fascinated by attention: how we measure it, and how it’s changing. In this episode we bring all that…
‘How can I write books that people will read all the way to the end, they can open at any page and find something interesting or useful or inspiring or actionable, and they’ll come back to again?’ And with that question, Bernadette Jiwa – author of Difference: The one-page method…
When Patrick Vlaskovits told his dad he was writing a book called Hustle, his father was baffled: ‘Why would you want to write a book about stealing?’ And that’s part of the interesting thing about this book – it’s about giving things a name, or in this case taking back…
