Books and podcasts

Smart (and fun) summer books and podcasts to enjoy

Make time to sit back and relax with Project’s recommendations to keep you entertained and enlightened

Send your own recommendations to emma.devita@thinkpublishing.co.uk

Anthro-Vision: How anthropology can explain business and life

Gillian Tett (Random House Business) Navigating infighting within teams, calming clashes between stakeholders and massaging egos are part and parcel of managing a project. But instead of turning to management gurus for advice on how to deal with the human side of work, what if we took our lead from cultural anthropology? In her new book, FT editor-at-large Gillian Tett argues that, when it comes to people management, we should borrow tactics from anthropologists, who these days are just as likely to look at an Amazon warehouse as the Amazon jungle. If projects are about people, anthropologists’ insights are valuable.

Connect: Resolve conflict, improve communication, strengthen relationships

Guy Lubitsh and Tami Lubitsh-White (FT Publishing/Pearson) Effective communication is an important project success factor, but it’s also one of the hardest things to get right. In this book, siblings Guy and Tami show how the ability to connect with each other will help you take your communication skills to the next level. Connect will help you understand what connection is and what type of connector you are, and give you a simple model to connect better with others in an honest and meaningful way. If you’ve ever wanted to understand your strengths and weaknesses as a communicator, this book will help you get there. A book to keep to hand for when arguments erupt (at home or at work).

Anxiety at Work: 8 strategies to help teams build resilience, handle uncertainty, and get stu done

Adam Gostick (Harper Business) Adam Gostick, author of The Carrot Principle, identifies two common forms of anxiety at work. The first, anxiety disorders, are not tied to specific events or concerns in the lives of sufferers. The second type is transient anxiety caused by external factors, such as overload, fear or a prolonged crisis. The bad news, according to Gostick, is that anxiety is leading people to make more mistakes, to reduced productivity,

APM’S FROM THE FRONTLINE

APM’s new series, hosted by Project editor Emma De Vita, provides an up-close and personal account by professionals working on projects at the forefront of thinking and action, whether it’s helping in the fight against COVID-19 or pushing technology to its limits, like NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover project. First up is Nick Elliott, who led the UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce. He recounts what it’s like to work on such an urgent mission in the full glare of the public eye.

JANE GARVEY & FI GLOVER’S FORTUNATELY… WITH FI AND JANE A collection of random and unrelated ramblings that are irresistibly smile-inducing. The two Radio 4 veteran broadcasters use their podcast to go behind the scenes with other radio stalwarts and media types, while chatting about everyday annoyances like printers – but in a funny way. Their topics range from the big to the small, all of which are tackled with that self-deprecating humour that can’t help but cheer you up. Guests include Fearne Cotton, Tom Allen, Fiona Bruce and Richard Osman.

MICHAEL MOSLEY’S JUST ONE THING If time is tight, what’s the one thing that you should be doing to improve your health and wellbeing? Doctor Michael Mosley introduces his new series, in which he reveals surprisingly simple tips that are scientifically proven to change your life, from taking a brisk early-morning walk or a one-minute cold shower to learning a new language or eating fermented foods. Each episode is just 15 minutes long, but crammed with advice on what you should be doing and how, as well as giving an outline of the scientific evidence that proves it’s a practice worth trying.

growing burnout and poor employee health. A first step in reducing tension at work comes in the form of honestly acknowledging the frantic paddling going on under the surface in a team. The second step, mitigation, comes from leaders beginning to offer support for people to work through their feelings and build resilience for the challenges to come.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A guide to mindful living

Ryunosuke Koike (Penguin) Japanese Buddhist monk Koike has written this guide to overcoming overthinking. He argues that overthinking is a disease that a ects our ability to function properly. He believes that all the failures we experience may be attributed to excessive thinking and negative thoughts, and that the only way to gain control of our thinking is to practise stopping it. Koike shows us how we can use Buddhist principles in our daily lives to help us prevent our thoughts from getting tattered due to overuse, and to recharge our energy.

Noise: A flaw in human judgement

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein (Harper Collins) Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors seek to apply his revolutionary ideas around human error and bias to real-world organisations. The ‘noise’ in the title refers to ‘system noise’, the distractions that humans and organisations are susceptible to and lead to variability in judgements that should be identical. The book tackles the way noise in organisations can affect good judgement, and provides remedies for how it can be quietened.

Evolving Project Leadership: From command and control to engage and empower

Gordon MacKay (APM) This book first establishes a vision of what good project leadership looks like and then offers concrete steps to achieving it. Building on the inclusive leadership message summarised in the APM Body of Knowledge 7th edition, the book shows how outdated command-and-control behaviours are seldom effective in today’s delivery environment and can actually be counterproductive to project success. As an alternative, the book shows how the effective project leader evaluates the self, the team and the organisational culture to cultivate fit-for-purpose project leadership behaviours such as empowering team agility, synergy and collaboration. A must-read for aspiring leaders.

HBR’S IDEACAST Wide-ranging yet deep-thinking, this series of podcasts from Harvard Business Review gives you plenty of food for thought on work and careers from top-flight academics and corporate heavyweights. Listen to Bill Gates discuss how business leaders can fight climate change, or learn how to stop micromanaging, prevent burnout in your team or how to talk yourself up without turning people o . There is plenty to think about here – just don’t do too much of it (see The Practice of Not Thinking, above, or listen to episode 790, ‘Quit Overthinking Things’, natch.)

LAURIE SANTOS’ THE HAPPINESS LAB A professor of psychology who ran one of Yale’s most popular classes ever – ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ (its free 10-week online version on Coursera has had more than 3.3 million people sign up) – also o ers up a podcast that delves into some of the fascinating topics she covered with her students. It’s time to scupper some of the myths about what leads to happiness that we have fallen for, whether it’s more money, a better job or a more svelte body. Instead, let’s focus on the surprising small practices that bring improvements in real wellbeing, like saying thank you.

MATTHEW SYED’S SIDEWAYS Author of the best-selling Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed explores the ideas that shape our lives. His gift is to make connections between big ideas and our daily lives by telling the stories of remarkable individuals and the di erent approaches they took to life. Learn how the career of Swedish pop music maestro Max Martin can teach us about collaboration, or why hierarchy might damage our happiness but is an inevitable part of any group organisation. The genius of the greatest organisations is to fuse the benefits of hierarchy with the bottom-up dynamism that underpins innovation, he finds.