Episode 459 - Beyond Belief with Mike Porteous
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
Release Date: 06/30/2025
Episode 476 - A New Year invitation: explore more
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'You have a choice about how you put content out into the world in 2026, and that choice isn’t just a business choice, it’s about who you are and what’s important to you.' It's the time of year when we traditionally think about the changes we want to make in our lives to help us become the people we want to be. In 2026, I think we also need to think about what we want to KEEP doing for ourselves, even though AI tools might be able to do those things more quickly and easily. Writing is a great example. From exploratory writing - early-stage, messy, private thinking-onto-the-page -...
info_outline
Episode 475 - A Christmas pause
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'Christmas is so many things, but it is also quite simply a moment of pause between the year that's ending and the year ahead. And as every writer knows, pauses can be extraordinarily powerful.' It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but Christmas is also very often a hot mess of busy-ness, stress and tricky relationships. So in these few days as the excitement/expectations build, here's an invitation to press pause, just for a few minutes, and try something a little different. Because Christmas - together with the odd days of Twixmas that follow ahead of the new year - is a...
info_outline
Episode 474 - It's Not Magic with John Amaechi
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'Almost every experience that I have is a story that I'm going to tell.' We often think of great leadership as ‘magic,’ but the truth is that's a convenient excuse. Great leaders aren't born that way - they become great by leaning in to what John Amaechi describes as ' a very boring set of skills and a huge amount of personal effort'. John's own background in the NBA showed him that the most extraordinary athletic achievements are the result of dull, consistent, mundane practice. That makes greatness accessible - though not necessarily easy - for anyone who chooses it. One of the most...
info_outline
Episode 473 - Story-Centred Leadership with Zoë Arden
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'The research shows that it's stories that are the most powerful mobilizers of change.' What does 'story' mean to you? Zoe Arden asked that question of more than 100 people, beginning her research, as she encourages us all to begin our stories, by listening first. Leaders have at their disposal more facts and data than ever before, but the research and our lived experience confirms that facts and data are not what we need to catalyse real change. Our brains are wired in such a way that only stories have the power to mobilise us into action - they are, in Zoë's words, both levers of...
info_outline
Episode 472 - Cut-Through with Dominic Colenso
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'When you read a book... it's like when you watch a TV show or go to the theatre; you don't think about all of the work that went in behind the scenes.' I don't know about you, but I couldn't claim any of the following distinctions before I turned 26: flying a spaceship, losing a million dollars, being fired by Simon Cowell or dodging paparazzi. Dominic Colenso, author of Cut-Through, ticked off all of these in the course of his acting career. Life is a little calmer now that he's discovered how his acting skills could translate into a unique framework for effective business...
info_outline
Episode 471 - AI in publishing with George Walkley
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
' This technology isn't going to go away. We need to figure out what role it has.' George Walkley is a legend in the publishing world. Over the last three decades, and particularly at Hachette, he has not only witnessed but helped shape the digital transformation of the industry, and these days he's focused on how publishers respond to the challenges and opportunities of AI. While the book itself has proved remarkably resilient as a technology, technology has transformed the ways in which they are written, discovered, read and published. What are the ethical and practical...
info_outline
Episode 470 - The emotional labour of writing a book
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
When we talk about writing business books, we usually focus on concepts, models, clarity, structure, impact. But alongside the head work is a whole invisible heap of emotional labour: behind every sentence lies a secret history of fear, doubt, frustration and occasionally joy. In this Best Bits episode, we're bringing that emotional undercurrent front and centre. Because writing a business book, just like starting a business, isn’t simply an intellectual exercise. There's a profound inner journey behind every book, from the creative spark of the idea, so often born of frustration, through...
info_outline
Episode 469 - Rebrand Right with Rachel Fairley & Sarah Robb
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'If you haven't diagnosed where the problem lies in the first place, how do you know which lever to pull?' If your idea of a rebrand is a new colour palette and an updated logo, think again. Too often, superficial design changes don't just fail to deliver growth, they actively damage the brands they were intended to bolster. Rachel Fairley and Sarah Robb have helped some of the world's biggest companies refresh their brands from the inside out. They argue that rebranding is more a strategic undertaking than a design project, and it's definitely NOT something that should be driven by a...
info_outline
Episode 468 - Another Door with Eleanor Tweddell
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
’That's all we've got as well in this age of AI… we have to put heart and soul into what we create.’ When someone cheerfully tells you that when one door closes another door opens in the midst of the rawness of redundancy, you’d be forgiven for wanting to punch them. Eleanor Tweddell certainly did. But then she made a conscious decision to ‘lean in’ to the idea of another door. It turns out that opportunity is often disguised as messy chaos – it’s all about how you choose to view it. Eleanor shares how her ‘Another Door’ blog, podcast and book came about – the idea...
info_outline
Episode 467 - Smart Conflict with Alice Driscoll & Louise van Haarst
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'The absence of healthy conflict is a large part of why people will leave jobs, because it's not where the growth happens.' How do you feel about hard conversations at work? Our approaches to conflict are often less than smart. Whether your tendency is towards avoidance or aggression, unless you're actively rejecting 'enforced harmony' for an environment in which people are able to disagree well, you're not getting the best out of your individuals or your organization. (Plus, given that most people are so bad at it, mastering hard conversations is the ultimate leadership edge.) Alice...
info_outline'I see confidence as something that's rooted in how we feel before any words, something which touches on sensations.'
What do you think of when you think of sports coaching? Elite lean performance machines preparing to break records?
Mike Porteous has competed and coached at elite level as a triathlete, but he believes that coaxing new swimmers from the shallow end is just as important an act of coaching as taking an elite to a new world Ironman time.
His vision of coaching is centred on confidence - and all the messy, emotional reality that surrounds human ambition, at whatever scale. To allow people to go beyond what they believed themselves capable of - in sport and in life - the coach needs to build confidence in three directions: the athlete's confidence in their own ability, the athlete's confidence in the coach, and, crucially, the coach's confidence in themselves.
There's an obvious parallel to the book-writing process, and the slow-burn confidence demanded of authors to grapple the uncertainty and believe that their message is worthwhile. If you're involved in coaching, in whatever capacity, and particularly if you're writing about it, this is for you.