The Extraordinary Business Book Club

Steven Van Belleghem sees opportunities to experiment everywhere. When he works with brands like Google, Microsoft, and Disney to help them combine technology and behavioural trends to create outstanding customer experience, but also when he writes. He wrote the first business book to include augmented reality, he writes fiction to explore the possibilities of the future, and his latest book features a specially composed soundtrack. He's also developed a unique approach to structuring and writing his books, which he generously shares in this conversation, and encourages us all to find the courage and curiosity to experiment for ourselves...

No business can ignore social media influencers these days, they're part of the fabric of our lives both personally and professionally. But what are the opportunities and the pitfalls for the influencers themselves and for the brands that work with them? Sara McCorquodale set out to answer that question, and along the way discovered the very human stories behind the public faces. She also discovered that the resilience she'd developed as a journalist stood her in good stead through the research, and shares some tips on how to approach that for first-time writers. Fascinating from both a business and a writing perspective. (How very Extraordinary Business Book Club.)

Having interviewed hundreds of CEOs as a journalist, James Ashton started to notice some patterns. He got curious. In this fast-changing world, where leadership is more challenging than ever, what kinds of leaders have emerged and how do they respond to those challenges? A fascinating conversation about leadership itself, but also a practical glimpse into how a professional journalist organises and structures ideas to create a powerful book.

"Organizations, not government... hold the key to change in the world, and therefore when we write, we've got to write with the business, the organizational leader in mind." We talk a lot about engagement, empathy, psychological safety in the workplace. But what we're really talking about, claims Yetunde Hofmann, is love. Love is a difficult word to use in the context of business. It makes us uncomfortable. But if leaders embrace it as a 'core capability', it has the power to transform our relationships within, between and beyond our organizations. As well as this profound stuff, we talk about the mechanics of interviewing and the power of leading with questions rather than statements. A powerful, affirming and thoughtful conversation.

As a project manager, Rob Kerr was accustomed to evaluating options and allocating scarce resources for maximum impact. The magic happened, however, when he started taking those tools out of the office and applying them to life: 'We were making better decisions as a family. We were being a bit bolder with our choices... I thought, okay, this is working for us.' So Rob brought together his framework for bringing project management into real life and united it with his passion for entrepreneurship to create Project Future, a tool to help would-be entrepreneurs evaluate their options and set up a successful business. Along the way he learned a huge amount about writing, collaboration, illustration, and overcoming his fear of appearing on video...

We often say that something raises more questions than answers as if that's a bad thing - but perhaps it's a more dangerous state of affairs when we have more answers than questions. Many of the recent conversations in the Club have focused on the power of writing to identify and explore good questions, and the work that needs to be done to communicate the answers. Hear from: Gillie Bolton on the power of reflective practice to allow us to range more freely as we explore; Sarah Rozenthuler on capturing questions in real time; Dave Coplin on the power of open questions to create unexpected connections; Pippa Malmgren on exploring big questions with other big brains; Jonas Altman on involving other brains even when they're not in the room; Alise Cortez on exploring questions with a wide range of others in public; Uri Bram on making the answers to questions as easy as possible for readers to access; and Jasper Sutcliffe on communicating the value of your answers to readers asking the right questions.

'The writing process took about four years and the actual material gathering for the book probably took more like 15 years...' Sarah Rozenthuler, psychologist, leadership consultant and pioneer of purpose-led leadership, has been working for many years now with individuals, teams, and organizations. In this week's conversation we discuss how purpose plays out at those three levels, and also how writing Powered by Purpose drew not only on her own experience but involved the input of a team of supporters and challengers. We also discuss how her practice as a reflective practitioner enabled her to capture insights and questions that would otherwise be lost over those years.

"As writers, what we need to do is find an occasion when that usher is off duty and we can get up there and nip behind the curtain." Gillie Bolton essentially founded the discipline of reflective practice, having discovered for herself that writing allowed her to go behind the curtain that separates so much of our mind's inner workings from the 'stage' that we present to the world. She tells me more about how her own journey, about why six minutes is the perfect length of time for an initial exploratory writing session, and how her Quaker values infuse her own writing and work. A joy of a conversation.

'It is good to speak to the future, the future will listen.' Those were the words of Ptahhotep, an ancient Egyptian vizier, who lived back in the 25th century BC. He was right - more right than he probably imagined in his wildest dreams: because he wrote those words down (well, OK drew them as hieroglyphs), he is heard so many thousand years later. But writing as speaking to the future isn't just about writing for posterity. In this episode we explore exploratory writing - the kind of writing you do for future you, rather than a future reader. How can we use writing as a tool and framework to help us think more clearly and more creatively? This kind of writing - where you are your only reader - is your secret weapon in a world where the future is so uncertain and the pace of change so fast.

'I have a lot of enthusiasm. I bring in so many things and often the reader [is] like, where are we going?' Jonas Altman finds writing hard. Which is lucky for us, because he's done the work to discover a way through, and he generously shares it all in this conversation. From identifying the protagonist to finding flow, from working with an editor to a more fluid approach to footnotes, he sets out his writing journey with soul and humour. Uplifting listening.