"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 from now."
There's a lot of mystique around creativity, but for practical people - people like scientists and engineers - being able to have good new ideas reliably is vitally important in a fast-changing world. Luckily, there's a process for that, and Dennis Sherwood has put it into an award-winning book.
In this generous and thoughtful conversation, we talk about that process for discovering difference (which makes, incidentally, a GREAT exploratory writing prompt), and we debate the order of writing and thinking. Fittingly, we land in different places here: what do YOU think?
"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 of trying to be funny at work brings you out in a rash, don't panic: I have it on good authority from Neil Mullarkey that there's no need to dress up as a chicken or do karaoke. And he should know. Co-founder of Europe's top improv troupe, the Comedy Store Players, Neil has spent many years sharing the principles of improv with business leaders to improve their confidence, communication, and creativity.
Neil's new book In the Moment is a call to embrace the importance of listening and co-creating in the moment, a key principle of improv. It's not about being funny per se, but rather about fostering collaboration, navigating ambiguity, and embracing vulnerability. In this context, humour enhances human connections, builds rapport, and fosters creativity - the elements, in fact, that we need most in our workplaces today.
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 of conscious inclusion are extraordinary, from employee and customer satisfaction to future-proofing organizations in our ever-evolving world.
When it came to publishing her book, Catherine was determined to walk her talk, ensuring both language and design were as accessible as possible. She also reveals how she managed the delicate dance between perfectionism and deadlines, and learned how important it is an author to keep your sights on the reader and the difference you want to make.
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 last few conversations, and this time the common theme is the pain and pleasure of writing a book, the unrelenting difficulty of it, and the extraordinary joy and meaning it provides. Often all in the same moment.
Whether you're agonising over your manuscript or feeling ecstatic about the progress you're making you'll relate to all of this, and if you're lacking motivation, you'll find it here in spades.
With insights from:
Imagine what Michelangelo could have achieved if he'd listened to this...
'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 interviewed a LOT of top leaders, but not in the way they expected. He ask them about leadership, rather than strategy, and their own leadership in particular: questions that allow them to articulate answers they haven't seen before.
In this fascinating conversation we explore how he's built on this journalistic approach to write a series of books, and how writing in public builds credibility, expands networks, and creates a perpetual motion machine for authorship.
If you're interested in leadership and writing, and if you love a good metaphor riot, this is unmissable.
'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 the intersection of research and application, Professor Alex Hill has learned that it's not enough to have the 'Ta Dah' moment - you then need to have a good answer to the 'So What?' question. In this thoughtful conversation we talk about the principles of organizations that endure, the importance of naming ideas (and how to help people NOT misinterpret them), and the life-changing significance of finding out what it is you want to leave behind.
'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 ever feel like the problems of the world are overwhelming and that you are powerless against the injustice, apathy, greed and prejudice out there, this is the conversation you need to listen to. Solitaire Townsend is a solutionist par excellence, and she empowers other people to become solutionists too, no matter how insignificant they think their own actions might be.
And part of having an impact on the world, it turns out, is stepping up to write a book that will exponentially increase your influence. Don't get angry: get writing.
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 children's book to scientific journals, and has not just witnessed but been instrumental in steering the industry from its gentleman's club background to the hi-tech, diverse, commercially competitive sector it is today.
But after decades of senior leadership in major publishing houses, he's just taken on his greatest challenges: launching a start-up publishing company and writing a book himself. I asked him how that's going, and why he decided against an index...
'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 about the opportunity that remote working presents - inclusion, access to talent, quality of life, etc etc. But as a remote worker herself, as well as the leader of a distributed team, she also knows it's not all 'roses and tulips'. Missing from all the discussion of remote work she was hearing was the emotional fallout she recognized in herself and others: guilt, paranoia, loneliness depression and boredom. If we don't solve for those, all the fancy collaboration systems in the world won't help us do our best work and be our best selves.
The result is Your Resource is Human, a deeply researched and highly practical handbook for making remote work work at the relational level. In this conversation, she tells me what it took, and what it means, to shape and share those ideas.
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 progression mirrored that of many women: a successful early career, derailed by childcare commitments and domestic expectations, followed by a period of 'happenstance' - doing jobs as she was asked, discovering her own skills, and starting to build her confidence and qualifications along the way, until she'd created a place in the world where she could excel and where she loved what she was doing.
And then she wrote the book she wished she'd had herself, to help other women achieve the same.
Along the way she discovered how to shift away from academic writing, how to structure ideas, and how to learn to love the long, long process of marketing a book...
'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 believe it is that helpful, you need to be sharing it with people. These are the things that I repeat to myself every day as I prepare to post one thing on Instagram.'
Writing a book means marketing a book, and marketing a book means becoming visible as an author. And that isn't always easy, even when you have a huge following.
Eloise Skinner knows what it takes to write books (But Are You Alive? is her third), but she also knows that the writing alone isn't enough. To share her hard-won insights into what gives life meaning, which she's discovered through an extraordinary professional and personal life - including her work as a lawyer, as a psychotherapist and existential therapist and her time in an urban monastic community - she had to get comfortable being uncomfortable. In this thoughtful conversation, she tells me what that involves, and how she gets over herself to get her message out there.
'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'll know about the price that you pay each day to sustain your enterprise: sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes without even realising it. And you'll also know about the pain that's often involved. But did you realize that there are different types of pain, and that they demand different things of you?
In this deeply personal and practical conversation, Steven Adjei offers a thoughtful way of assessing and responding to these various different kinds of entrepreneurial pain. We also discuss the too-often unheard lessons from African entrepreneurs, how to enrich the prose of a business book with poetry and music, and the vital importance of balancing compassion and competence.
When you run a small business - especially a retail business - it can feel very much as if a tiger has not just come to tea, but moved in. It's always hungry, often unpredictable, and it makes you feel a little, well, nervous.
Luckily, Catherine Erdly is an expert in taming tigers, and in this week's conversation she shares with me some of the ways in which she helps small retail businesses do the same (and why that matters for everyone).
We also talk about why the tiger is such a powerful metaphor, and how to write about difficult topics in an accessible way.
It's GRRRRREAT!
In a world where so many opt to lean back - to disengage, scroll the feed, consume and comment rather than create, plug into the playlist rather than connect - here's a rousing call to lean in to the work that matters. As a colleague, a leader, a writer and a reader, what does it mean to lean in, and how do we keep ourselves from leaning in so far that we end up falling over?
Hear from:
An unmissable, unforgettable best bits episode.
'You need a higher level of challenge and truth telling if you have set the bar high for yourself and your organization.'
Liam Black has become known as the 'gloves-off mentor' for his no-nonsense, straight-talking way of supporting social entrepreneurs and purpose-driven leaders. When the work you do matters so much to people's lives, it can be hard to see situations objectively, or to keep any kind of work/life balance.
But capturing that voice in a book isn't easy. In this characteristically direct conversation, Liam shares the awfulness of writing - those wet Wednesday afternoons when the words die on the page - and the joy when the magic happens, the vulnerability of putting your book out into the world and the way it creates new connections when it's there.
Probably the most truthful conversation about writing you'll hear all week.
'We've all been missing a trick, because sport has been showing us day in, day out, not just how to improve, perform and achieve, but how to do so on a sustained basis, in a way that ensures that we can consistently deliver results when it matters.'
Catherine Baker qualified as a tennis coach before she qualified as a lawyer, and throughout her career has been fascinated by the interconnectedness of sporting and professional excellence. In her new book Staying the Distance, though, she argues that by drawing lessons for business only from the high performance we see, we're missing out on the reality that underpins that performance: what elite athletes do when noone's watching, the routines and rest that allow them to sustain that performance.
It turns out this is also true for writing...
The Independent Publishers' Guild annual Spring Conference is one of the highlights of the year for the book industry. I seized the opportunity to speak to six movers and shakers in the world of books to put to them the questions that you'd have asked if you'd only had the chance.
You're welcome.
Discover:
'Work fits into this bigger thing that we call life. And if you are more joyful in work, that will spill over and you will be more joyful in life.'
You may not have used the terms 'WorkJoy' and 'WorkGloom' before, but I bet you immediately know what they mean, AND which is your most common daily experience. The good news is that you have much more control over that experience than you might think.
In this week's conversation, Beth Stallwood talks to me about how we can find ways to bring more joy into our working lives, and how those lessons spill over into the work we choose to do for ourselves, such as, say, writing a book. Discover your own power - it was there all along - and also how to build the squad that will support you: the cheerleaders, challengers, comrades, creators, connectors and conjurers who will transform your writing experience into something altogether more joyful.
"People don't just pick up a book once, read it, put it down, and then that's the end of their relationship with that idea.... we can move in a person's life in multiple ways."
Sarah Stein Lubrano describes The School of Life as 'a modern press': books are vitally important, but they're only one part of a wider ecosystem of ideas. There are many lessons here for business book writers, and many ideas too: how might YOU build in experiential strands, and opportunities for your readers to learn and reflect for themselves alongside their reading?
And what does it look like to be actively engaging for good in a content landscape that is so often based around distraction and monetizing the consumer's attention?
A fascinating interrogation of the role of books, and indeed the nature of authorship.
This is a podcast about business and business books. You might think this is unpromising territory for talk of love: but you'd be wrong.
No hearts and flowers here, but real, thoughtful, passionate insights into what it means to be in relationship with those we work alongside, how we express love as part of leadership, and how passion fuels the work we do.
With contributions from Professor Lucy Easthope, Yetunde Hoffman, Dr Deb Mashek and Richard Fox.
'Seeing somebody need you, seeing somebody in pain, is not necessarily traumatizing: not being able to help them is a moral injury that is traumatizing. So I also wanted to challenge ideas of what hurts.'
Most of us run away from disaster. Similarly, we try to avoid painful emotions.
For Professor Lucy Easthope, expert and adviser on emergency planning and disaster recovery, heading towards the most traumatic diaster scenes as others flee in the opposite direction is par for the course, as is leaning into the rawest human emotions of grief, horror and anger.
How do you do this every day and stay not only sane but cheerful? And how do you write about it in a way that readers can bear?
In this truly extraordinary conversation, we explore courage, clarity, how writing helps both ourselves and others, and why books should be available on prescription.
If you only listen to one podcast this week, make it this one.
'We as individuals are systems ourselves, aren't we?... And so when we diagram ourselves using a work model, we often see for the very first time how these elements interrelate.'
You may be familiar with the Business Model Canvas - but have you ever thought about using it for yourself, rather than your business? Dr Tim Clark did, and discovered that this simple but powerful visual tool had astonishing power to help move his own and others' thinking forward.
Words are powerful, but visual thinking can help us see things differently, and in their totality.
In this fascinating conversation we talk about what it's like to adapt someone else's model, the difficult of creating a highly visual book, and the inescapable fact that writing is Really Hard Work.
'When I went into [writing a book], people were telling me, oh, it's going to be so lonely. you're going to lock yourself in a room... nothing could be further from the truth. This was the most collaborative process from day one.'
If you want to do work that matters, the unavoidable truth is that you're going to need to collaborate with others at some point. And that can be the most joyful, creative, energising experience.... but very often it isn't.
What IS it about collaboration that's so damn hard? Turns out that even with the best collaboration tools and project processes, in the end it all comes down to relationships. The good news is that you can learn to collaborate better, and Deb Mashek has spent years researching exactly how to help you do that.
The other good news is that you can bring those collaboration skills to the process of writing your book, and make it not only better but more fun along the way. Find out how....
It's easy to get caught up in the fluff - in work and life. Whether it's focusing on the font family rather than the purpose behind the brand, the endless social media scroll rather than the deep thinking we know we'd rather be doing, or the drive to answer just one more email rather than stopping to rest, we're all guilty of losing sight of the really important stuff.
In this Best Bits episode, I look back over my recent conversations and pick out some insights from these extraordinary thinkers and writers on how we can - and indeed must - focus on what really matters.
With contributions from:
Food for thought, indeed.
'I'd done a lot of reps before I started writing the book, and that helped enormously.'
Ollie Henderson would like to talk to you about work-life balance. Specifically, he'd like you to understand that you will NEVER reach a state of perfect equilibrium, so why beat yourself up about it? Instead, he'd like you to consider the idea of work and life as a flywheel, working together, moving you forward.
In this conversation, he shares some deeply personal insights about what that has meant for him, and also how he pivoted not just his work/life but his approach to writing as a way of exploring ideas and building community. If you're considering starting a newsletter, launching a podcast or writing a book in 2023, this is for you.