Before the 20th century, no human ever experienced speed. By the end of it, it seemed we couldn’t get enough of it. Fast food, fast lane, fast track, fast buck. But fast just doesn’t cut it these days: welcome to superfast. Ironically enough, this is not a particularly quick read: it comes in at a […]
Continue readingThe summer is a great time to catch up with some reading, but put the chick-lit and the crime thrillers down (at least for a while) and pick up some really nourishing brainfood. I’m delighted to introduce the inaugural Extraordinary Business Book Club Summer Reading List! These are the books I’ll be taking in my suitcase […]
Continue readingYou see? I stop with the having-to-post-every-day thing and suddenly I don’t post for a month! But here’s a wonderful reason for a blog: I took a trip down the M4 last night to be with Fabienne Vailes, author of The Flourishing Student, at her launch event at Bristol University. She gave a talk on […]
Continue readingAnother great quote today from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (and no apologies – it’s genius and the only reason I’m not quoting the whole thing at you sentence by sentence is my high regard for copyright law): ‘The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that […]
Continue readingAs part of my book-for-every-year-of-my-life challenge, I’ve reached 1976 and William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well (although I’ve cheated slightly as I bought the 7th edition, published 2006). William Zinsser is the guy with the great quote – ‘Writing, learning and thinking are the same process.’ – but I didn’t know too much about him […]
Continue readingYesterday I focused on the entrepreneurial aspect of Warren Knight’s story (you can listen to the full interview here), but today I want to mention an interesting aspect of his approach to publishing his book Think #Digital First: he very consciously took the decision to use a partner publisher, to buy in their expertise but […]
Continue readingCreating a book cover is an exciting part of the publishing process, but also a notoriously difficult one. Sometimes authors know exactly what they want and are able to give the designer a clear brief: most times it’s a dance that goes backwards and forwards a few times. I’ve found creating my cover a particularly […]
Continue readingAs well as running and blogging every day I have another daft habit game I’m playing with myself: ahead of my 50th birthday in two years’ time I’m reading a book from every year of my life. I started back in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, and I’ve taken in so far Grendel, The Dice Man, Stepford […]
Continue readingThe FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist has been announced: https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2017. It’s heavy on finance and economics, with a side dose of technology. Only 4 of the 17 books on the list are by women, but that’s a fair or even a better-than-fair reflection of the numbers of business books written by women in […]
Continue readingWe’ve known for some time that the way we communicate on the internet is changing. For decades the dominant communication medium has been text: emails, web pages, chat. Gradually images, video and audio have been gaining ground, and the recent explosion of voice-controlled assistants mean that the primary way many people now interact with online […]
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