Ever since I can remember I’ve always loved reading, from Biff and Chip books back in junior school, to transitioning to something more substantial like Lord of the Rings.
I’ve gone from fiction books to business books, and I thought I’d share a few with you here. Some are about building businesses and others are about creativity. They've all been massively valuable to me, it's amazing that for around £10 you can learn so much from them. Enjoy.
1 – Oversubscribed
An unbelievabe book that talks about flipping the concept of a business, to a campaign driven enterprise. This book is for the business world now, it talks about using technology and what people want in the 21st century. Daniel Priestley talks about how to build a business where people want to work with you and how to get to that point.
2– Creativity Inc
Who isn’t a huge fan of Pixar films? This was an interesting read as it talks about how Pixar have built a creative culture, how they make great work and how to keep creating industry leading work. This is a great book for creatives and other businesses alike.
3 – Influence: The Psychology Behing Persuasion
Working in the branding and design is all about knowing how to influence the human mind. Even though this book is thirty years old, it talks about various communication ideas that can help people be moved to a decision. Some of the ideas in this book did scare me at first, as you realise that as humans we can easily be influenced.
4 – Invisible Power: Insight Principles at Work
When I read this book it changed my life. Aren’t we all looking for the edge in business, how to be better, more effective and more creative. This book uncovers how the human mind actually works – I’m going to say no more. Buy this book for yourself and your family (trust me).
5 – Black Box Thinking
This incredible book by Matthew Syed talks about high performance individuals and organisations – and how they achieve groundbreaking progress. In a nutshell the idea in this book is about failure, and how we need to change our perception of it as a culture. As failure, and learning from it leads to progress, not just in business, but civilisation as a whole – in government, healthcare and aviation etc.
6 – High Trust Selling
When I graduated from uni, I couldn’t sell a thing, so I picked this book up and in a none sales way – it taught me that sales is about service, and more importantly it’s about people. No business would still be running it if didn't have sales coming in.
7 – Start With Why
I bought this book after seeing the popular Ted talk by Simon Sinek. He talks about how decisions should always start with why, and how businesses should talk about their why rather than what they do – because people are attracted about why businesses exist rather than just what they do.
8 – Damn Good Advice
Smaller books are always the best. This book provides great advice for anyone working in the creative industries. George Loius is a well known advertising creative, in the book he shares some of his secrets on creating great work and how to make an impact.
9 – It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be
Another brilliant book by advertising legend Paul Arden, this book kind of merges between self help and about working in the advertising industry, it’s full of age old wisdom and plenty of advice that I’ve acted on in my professional life.
10 – Rework: By Basecamp Founders
Basecamp is a project management software that helps business work more effectively. Founders Jason Fried and David Hansson share concepts about how they’ve built a multimillion pound software business using techniques and ideas that are relevant to the 21st century.
