The Extraordinary Business Book Club

'We need, at the moment, mavericks. We need people of independent thought, courageous, wanting to do things differently, but we need to do that in service of others.'

Mavericks write their own rules.…

In a sense writing a business book – any book, really – is quintessentially about finding and using your voice. You're talking across time and space to a reader for a conversation that lasts for hour…

When Lucy Ryan's research revealed that midlife women were walking out of corporates in droves at the same age that the men around them were stepping into senior leadership positions, she knew it wou…

'There's all this academic, peer-reviewed, time-tested academic evidence as to how we should invest, and yet we have a whole industry that is trying to get us to do more or less the very opposite.'

T…

"In everything we write, we choose a voice."

Poets and novelists talk a lot about their writing 'voice', but nonfiction writers, and especially business book writers, can write a full manuscript wit…

"When we're talking about Do Deal, we're really talking about the verb of how you deal with people... as an ongoing kind of living thing."

Richard Hoare didn't set out to become an expert on negotiat…

'I'm not going to live to be 10,000 years old, so I'd rather just write material that someone's actually going to use. So top-down writing works for me because it's a very economical way to write."

D…

When your work is about experience - helping people access a different physical and emotional state so that they can reconnect with their embodied, instinctual wisdom - you do it most effectively whe…

"What's important about creativity is not novelty, but difference. I want something different from what is happening now, and difference is much easier to discover because difference means different …

"It's not thinking on your feet, it's listening on your feet. Yes and, what are you saying? How can I build on that? How can I move in the direction that we are going to go together?"

If the thought …

Catherine Garrod led Sky to become the most inclusive employer in the UK. Her message is clear: if you're not consciously including everyone, you're unconsciously excluding someone. And the rewards o…

No, not the Michelangelo biography by Irving Stone, but the highs and lows of the maddening, marvellous process of writing a business book. In this best bits episode I pick out the pearls from the la…

'Everything at its core has to be one of those three things: a great insight, a great story, or a great practical approach.'

Adam Bryant, creator of the New York Times's Corner Office column, has int…

'What you leave behind is what you write... no one talks about the article that changed their life, and they're not read for decades after they've been written. [Books are] foundational.'

Working at …

'A book is a job title that stays with you for life. I will forever be author of The Solutionists... This is your long tail. This is how you remain having influence in the world over time.'

If you ev…

Publishing as an industry has more than its fair share of extraordinary people, but there are few to rival Richard Charkin. Over his 50-year career he's worked in almost every area of publishing from…

'I thought I was sitting down to write a book. I was not sitting down to write a book. I was sitting down to create idea stewardship. And that's a much bigger exercise.'

Melissa Romo is passionate ab…

Really recognize who your audience is... [and] parcel up the pieces, the topics, the themes according to their needs. Not according to what I know, but what they need to know.'

Susan Doering's career…

'I have worked with a coach in the past who used to tell me things that have been very helpful, like it is your responsibility to the book to try and communicate its concepts out there, if you believ…

'A lot of writers tend to shy away from the gritty parts of [entrepreneurship], the pain parts, the price part. I thought, Why not, I'm going to go for it. So I did.'

If you're an entrepreneur, you…