Books I recommend
Belonging
By Owen Eastwood
A deeply insightful book about team dynamics and high performance.
Not the end of the world
A book of hope amidst the gloom. Data scientist and senior researcher at Oxford, Hannah Ritchie looks at the facts of humanity’s response to the climate crisis and concludes that things are much better than we think they are.
Insanely simple
By Ken Segall
Subtitled ‘The obsession the drives Apple’s success’ this is about the principles that guided Steve Jobs as he built Apple
Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
A masterwork by Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford.
Messengers
8 ways to get heard by Stephen Martin & Joseph Marks
“The messenger is the message” is the mantra of the authors, behavioural scientists from Colombia University and UCL. They examine the qualities that not only make people make us listen to some people and not others, but also form a large part of whether we accept the message itself.
Bounce
A thoughtful book by the reliably thoughtful Matthew Syed about the relationship between ability and hard work.
The Trusted Advisor
By David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford
The trusted advisor is someone a client turns to for wise counse, including in areas outside their specialist subject.
Factfulness
Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think by Hans Rosling.
A timely and highly readable account of why facts are so important.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
The daddy of behavioural science, Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman walks through 25 years of research into how we make decisions.
Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth, an economist with positions at both Oxford and Cambridge, puts forward an argument for replacing GDP as a measure of economic success with the model that respects both the planet and its people
Influence: the psychology of persuasion
By Robert Cialdini
A classic which spells out the seven primary levers of influence
What we think about when we try not to think about Global Warming
Norwegian academic Per Espen Stoknes details the five psychological mechanisms we use to avoid confronting the facts about global warming and how these can be mitigated. A really important book for anyone concerned about the climate crisis and frustrated by people’s reluctance to engage with it.
Start with why
By Simon Sinek
A book-length elaboration on Sinek’s massively popular TED talk.
Drive
Dan Pink explores the relationship between motivation and performance.