The Extraordinary Business Book Club

If you need some encouragement to write in your own voice, this could be just what you need. Norm Laviolette could have called his book 'Developing a Creative Mindset': instead, he stayed true to his…

The last few episodes of The Extraordinary Business Book club have included some extraordinary conversations about business and books, and one thing that's become clear is that you need to be fuelled…

'Today, if you always do what you've always done, even if you do it faster, you're going to get left way behind... it's not knowledge that's power and it's not even the use of knowledge that's power:…

'We wanted to create a monster global sisterhood of amazing women who have each other's backs.'

Old Boys' Networks have been the invisible scaffolding on which high-flying men have build their career…

Jonathan MacDonald is extraordinary in many ways: a victim of bullying as a child who grew up to practise 'radical forgiveness', the youngest ever Chairman of the British Music Industries Association…

'The discovery process is everything. It's the whole project.'

Andrea Clarke describes the three months she spent writing her book as being in 'a pure content vortex... I felt like I was on a natura…

'We've got more ways to communicate with one another than in any time in human history, and yet we've completely forgotten how to communicate with one another, or at least how to communicate in a mea…

'If you ask people do they have a plan for the week, do they know where they need to be, do they know the clients that they'll be meeting, they've prepared for that... Then you say, "What are you goi…

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 interstel…

You might not think of yourself as 'a creative', but if you're an entrepreneur or a business book author that's exactly what you are, insists award-winning jeweller Harriet Kelsall: you're creating s…

What if you had some help writing your book: a collaborator to transcribe your ideas, do the grunt work of researching huge amounts of material, bounce ideas off, give editorial feedback and even pro…

A few of the stand-out moments from the last few Extraordinary Business Book Club episodes -  this week we're asking.... why? Why write a book, when it's so damn hard?

Here's why.

• Mark Burns on the …

'Improv is always, "Let's just start something now. We don't know where it's going to go, but we'll start now. Whatever tools, whatever cast we have." That's what writing should be as well.'

Neil Mul…

Think you're in a profession that doesn't lend itself to writing a book? Della Hudson trained as a chemist and is now an accountant, but her book The Numbers Business: How to build a successful cloud…

'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-w…

Self-development books are big business - but is it just navel-gazing on the hand or esoteric theory on the other? 

'At the end of the day people want something that's pragmatic, and they can actuall…

When we talk about 'the future', we're subconsciously distancing ourselves from some indefinite, hypothetical construct. But in reality, argues Whitney Vosburgh and his co-author Charlie, we are cont…

Something a bit different this week: I buttonholed some of the top voices in the book industry at last week's IPG Spring Conference and asked them:

What is it that authors need to know but publisher…

'What is the business case for being unsustainable?'

Professor David Grayson has been involved in social enterprise before it was even a thing, and over the last few decades he has acted as the consc…

'[The principles behind the book were those of] the lean startup: build, measure, learn, which meant running experiments, testing stuff with users and iterating and improving... treating it as a whol…