Episode 459 - Beyond Belief with Mike Porteous
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
Release Date: 06/30/2025
Episode 479 - Startup Different with David Sinkinson
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
' An author might be thinking, I can't wait till the book is out on a bookshelf... I would suggest focus on the experience of the writing and the pleasure of actually writing the book and the satisfaction you're going to get in doing that.' David Sinkinson, SaaS entrepreneur, podcaster, and co-author of Startup Different (all of this done in partnership with his brother, Chris) is a big fan of business books. On long commute after long commute they taught him pretty much everything he needed to know to start and succeed with his own business, and one of the reasons he wrote his own book was...
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Episode 478 - Bridging the Gap with Catherine Xiang
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'I think that flow is quite important. It's almost like a cultural logic.' Intercultural communication is always complex, but for Western leaders seeking to build relationships as a way in to the mighty Chinese market, it's particularly tricky. From seating plans to changing job titles to how to ask for a solution to a problem, there are very different assumptions and unspoken rules. Which is why Catherine Xiang, UK Director for LSE's Confucius Institute for Business, wrote Bridging the Gap: An introduction to intercultural communication with China, named Specialist Business...
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Episode 477 - Autonomous with Henry King
The Extraordinary Business Book Club
'Our businesses have been designed for us by us, for humans by humans, and that's what the big change is now.' What's the real promise and transformative power of AI in business? In their new book Autonomous: Why the fittest businesses embrace AI-first strategies in digital labor, Henry King and his co-author Vala Afshar make the case that organizational design will be transformed by agentic AI, with intelligent agents and humans collaborating seamlessly. It's an empowering vision: just as autonomous vehicles will democratize and expand humans' ability to move around, they argue that...
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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 -...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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'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.