The Extraordinary Business Book Club

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:  Steven Adjei on the nature of pain;  Richard Charkin on the visceral vulnerability of becoming an author;  Melissa Romo on the challenges of making the complex simple;  Catherine Erdly on detail wrangling;  Susan Doering on the relentless work of marketing;  Eloise Skinner on dealing with the soul suck of social media;  Adam Bryant on the all-consumingness of writing a book; and Alex Hill on why we do it at all.  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.