Brief moments of discomfort
The Discomfort Zone: How to Get What You Want by Living Fearlessly by Farrah Storr (Little Brown, £13.99, paperback) revolves around a simple enough idea: only by stepping outside your comfort zone can you reach your full potential. That could mean putting yourself forward for a new challenge, asking for difficult feedback, nailing a presentation or getting a dream job. Whatever the scenario, Storr says you have to push through these “brief moments of discomfort” to make real progress in your career. Storr is editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in the UK, and was one of just seven BAME women to be named on a 2017 list of the UK’s 1,000 most powerful people. By transforming your fears into bite-size, manageable pieces, she claims, you can overcome them – and even learn to enjoy the experience.
Testing personalities
Mention personality tests, and the name Myers-Briggs quickly crops up. But few know the story behind this staple weapon of the HR department. The test was conceived by Katherine Briggs, an American academic heavily influenced by psychologist Carl Jung, and her daughter, Isabel Myers, a best-selling crime writer. Their first version was sold in 1943 to a US government department, training spies to go to war. What’s Your Type: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (HarperCollins, £20, hardcover), by Merve Emre, is a biography of the pair and their somewhat eccentric lives, as well as a fascinating history of personality testing.
Opportunities to listen
For 35 years, Ambi Parameswaran was a leading luminary in India’s advertising industry. He got to meet and develop relationships with many of the country’s leading marketers and top business honchos, and he came to the realisation that if you turn those interactions into opportunities to listen, you’ll learn a great deal along the way. In Sponge: Leadership Lessons I Learnt From My Clients (Westland, £9.95, paperback), Parameswaran relates many of those conversations in anecdotal form. He recalls the attention to detail with which Ratan Tata, eponymous chairman of Tata Group, scrutinised a ‘shiny new car’ – the Indigo Marina – before it went on display. He tells how he won his first account in the city of Chennai simply by spending a couple of hours in the Connemara hotel bar chatting to the owner of Spencer’s department store. And one of the key lessons the author learned about Indian advertising along the way: “There are only three things that sell in advertising … celebrities, kids and dogs.”
Speak up in safety
Fear of speaking up is common in many organisations, as individuals anticipate the criticism and the commitment that comes from putting your head above the parapet. It has negative consequences for the organisation, though, as good ideas and valuable feedback often fail to come to the surface. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley, £22.99, hardback) describes how a culture of candour can be built, in which people feel safe to speak up. Its author, Amy C Edmondson, is a professor at Harvard Business School and has studied why teams at companies such as Google perform better than others. She comes to the conclusion that creating ‘psychological safety’ – a place where you can take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed – is a key component. And that’s good for individuals, too.
PODCASTS
The Disrupters
This is the name of the BBC’s new business podcast on its recently launched Sounds platform. It’s hosted by Kamal Ahmed, former BBC Economics Editor and recently appointed Editorial Director of BBC News, and entrepreneur Rohan Silva, and promises in-depth interviews with other leading entrepreneurs to find out the secrets of their success. Among those to be featured in the first season are Demis Hassabis, co-founder of AI researcher DeepMind; Justine Roberts, founder of Mumsnet; and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.
bbc.co.uk/sounds
The dream
Multi-level marketing programmes, aka pyramid schemes, are one of the rogue elements of the business world, seducing members of the public into parting with their savings by offering the illusory promise of easy money. There are few winners and, for many, the consequences can be financially devastating. In this new podcast by internet radio service Stitcher, presenter Jane Marie tries to find out why people get sucked in again and again.
www.thedream.fm
Household name
Business Insider’s new podcast tells the lesser-known stories behind giant brands of the past few decades. Reporter Dan Bobkoff discovers that TGI Friday’s was the Tinder of the 1960s; reveals how Donald and Ivana Trump helped to sell Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza; visits the last Blockbuster video store in Alaska; and recounts how Coca-Cola helped Vicente Fox become Mexico’s President. And then there’s the curse suffered by the family who own Jell-O.
uk.businessinsider.com/household-name