On Wednesday I carved out a few hours to focus on planning for 2017: usually what happens is I block out a day in the diary for this kind of thinking and then it gets eaten up by the to-do list. This time, however, I used my new-found understanding of myself as an Obliger (see […]
Continue reading‘The Curve comes in three parts. You have to find an audience. That probably, but doesn’t necessarily, involve free. You have to earn the right to talk to them again. It’s no good having a newsletter that you get people to sign up for if they immediately unsubscribe because your content is boring and rubbish. […]
Continue readingThere are lots of business tools that are useful for writers of business books, and this one is particularly helpful towards the end of the strategic thinking piece, as you prepare to move over into content marketing and more specifically into writing your book. A positioning statement is the pure distilled essence of your strategy […]
Continue readingI received a very lovely and unexpected email today from David Taylor, author of The Naked Leader series, Visiting Professor of Leadership at Warwick and Ulster Business Schools, and one of the top business thinkers in the world. I interviewed him recently for The Extraordinary Business Book Club (the episode, which is a belter, by the […]
Continue readingI read a superb piece by Joanna Pieters this morning: Creators, We Need Your Strength Today, written in response to the US election. ‘As a creator, your voice has never been more important,’ she says. ‘You have energy that the world needs, right now.’ I recommend a read. It got me thinking about creativity more […]
Continue readingThis week in The Extraordinary Business Book Club I spoke to Amy Wilkinson, author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraoridinary Entrepreneurs. It’s a fascinating interview, not least because she explains how she went about turning 5 years of research and 10,000 pages of interview transcripts into 6 elegant principles. (And of […]
Continue readingYou might think that SWOT analysis is a management consultancy cliché, but with a little bit of a twist it can be a surprisingly useful tool for business book writers… Read today’s Birds on the Blog post to find out more: http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/so-what-a-twist-on-swot-for-business-book-writers/
Continue readingOne of my favourite tools for business thinking isn’t one of the models I learned on my MBA course, it’s a poem from Rudyard Kipling: I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. And it all starts with […]
Continue readingLast year my son had a pair of football boots he absolutely loved. They were blue and orange, comfortable, and made him feel like his hero, Arsenal player Aaron Ramsey. Wearing them he learned to chip and dodge and feint. Theirs were the first laces he successfully tied in a double bow himself. He hung […]
Continue readingHow do you cut up a birthday cake? If you’re like me until last year, you cut out wedges – a segment of arc tapering to a fragile point – and unless you eat the entire cake in one sitting (which can happen, of course) you’re left with a tricky shape to wrap in cling-film, […]
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