This document contains summaries of several books on various topics. It discusses books about innovation, marketing, economics, habits, leadership, and more. For example, one summary explains that a book about humane workplaces argues companies should shift from command and control to humanized management, and outlines eight pillars of creating humane capital, such as having a higher purpose and self-organization of employees. Overall, the document provides high-level overviews of the main ideas and arguments contained in multiple business and self-help related books.

1. 20 FROM 20
THE BEST BOOKS OF 2020

2.  A library of 425 books
 A blog
 A series of printed books
 One-page summaries
 One-sentence summaries
 Training programmes
 Motivational speeches
 A fertile source of new ideas

3. Pirates embodied a code that
was far more advanced than
most companies today.

4. • The world economy defies comprehension. A constantly
changing system of immense complexity, it offers over ten
billion distinct products, doubles in size every fifteen years,
and links 7 billion people. Nobody is in charge of it, and no
individual understands more than a fraction of what’s going
on.
• This book is effectively 50 short sections. 4 examples…
• The plough: because it enabled people to stay in one place
for the first time.
• The gramophone: along with all subsequent recording
formats, it enables artists to be experienced without going to
a concert in person.
Barbed wire: enabled the ownership of land to be designated
and enforced, particularly with regard to livestock.
• Seller feedback: has allowed many online services to
circumnavigate concerns about trust.
• You need a pirate mindset to create change, and that means:
1. Rebel - draw strength from standing up to the status quo.
2. Rewrite – bend, break but most importantly rewrite the rules.
3. Reorganise - collaborate to achieve scale, rather than growth.
4. Redistribute - fight for fairness, share power, and make an
enemy of exploitation.
5. Retell tall tales – weaponize your story, then tell the hell out of it.
• Pirates cause good trouble. They challenge the authority of the
establishment and its ownership of new ideas. They innovate at
the margins, free from the order of the ordinary. They have a
dual focus of fortune and fairness. Their acute focus on micro
needs inadvertently creates macro solutions. They tell their
story at scale through subversive tactics. They don’t accept
pointless rules.
• Pirate ships had three main conditions:
1. No plunder, no pay. There was no pay for underperforming
bosses.
2. Open incentives for going beyond the call of duty – being the
first to spot a ship on the horizon could earn reward.
3. Fair shares for all crew members – regardless of status or
colour.

5. Staying small is the next big
thing for business.

6. • Remaining small can provide the freedom to pursue more meaningful
pleasures in life – running a successful business that focuses on getting
better rather than bigger. Doing this on your own terms allows you to avoid
the headaches that routinely arise in the day-to-day grind of a traditional
growth-orientated business.
• A company of one* questions growth first, and then resists if there is a better,
smarter way forward. The question should always be what can I do to make
my business better? not what can I do to grow my business larger?
• The main traits of a company of one are resilience, autonomy and control,
speed and simplicity. The build to sell mentality, in which growth is seen as
the sole purpose, is flawed. 74% of high growth tech start-ups fail.
• Growth and scale at all costs is a broken, outdated, and unsubstantiated
model that disregards what research has told us about the hazards of growth
and scale.
• The system and structure needed to cope with growth is sometimes
described as feeding the beast, or a hungry ghost – a creature with an
insatiable appetite that is always looking for more. It’s the disease of more.
• Overhead =death. The less you have, the freer you are. Work out the upper
boundary of what you need and stick with that.
• Growth as a one-dimensional metric for success is useless in the absence of
real reasons for it. It is usually desired from the start because of inflation,
investors, churn, or ego. Growth equals success as a philosophy leads to
vanity metrics – measuring social media followers, subscribers or clicks, but
not the stuff that really matters. This is often called collecting not connecting.
You can’t own an audience, because they don’t think about your company all
the time.
• *It doesn’t necessarily need to involve just one person.

7. It is
Mainstream economics has
led us astray in seven critical
ways but it is possible to use
an economic model that
meets the needs of all and the
planet.

8. • The title of the book is based on a doughnut-shaped model invented by the author. The
ring of the doughnut is the safe and just space for humanity, contained by a social
foundation of well-being that no one should fall below. Should they do so, they would fall
into the hole in the middle (critical human deprivation). On the outside of the ring lies the
boundary of an ecological ceiling, beyond which we should not go because we create
critical planetary degradation.
• There are seven ways to think like a 21st century economist:
1. Change the goal. Stop being fixated on GDP or national output, and instead use
Doughnut economics to bring all of humanity into its safe space.
2. See the big picture. Economics is not a circular flow diagram of a self-contained market.
It needs to be an embedded economy, emphasising the core role of the household, the
partnership of the state and the creativity of the commons.
3. Nurture human nature. Rational economic man is a myth. Human nature is far richer
than this. We are social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent on
the living world.
4. Get savvy with systems. Supply and demand curves don’t work and there is no
mechanical equilibrium. We need systems thinking with feedback loops that embrace
dynamic complexity.
5. Design to distribute. The old adage was that it has to get worse before it gets better, and
that growth will eventually even it up. This notion is wrong because growth does not reduce
inequality. Economies need to distribute far more of the value they create.
6. Create to regenerate. Economic theory has long portrayed a ‘clean’ environment as a
luxury good, only available to the well-off. This is untrue. Ecological degradation is simply
the result of degenerative industrial design. We need to be regenerative by design.
7. Be agnostic about growth. GDP curves are always portrayed as relentlessly upward, but
they don’t work out like that. Nothing in nature grows for ever. We need economies that
make us thrive, whether or not they grow.

9. GOOD HABITS BAD HABITS
You can make positive changes
that stick to change your
habits.
ems.

10. GOOD HABITS BAD HABITS
• This is all about the science of making positive changes that stick. It explains that
we have a second self that does things without thinking 43% of the time. That’s a
habit, not a conscious decision.
• Our non-conscious self is always forming habits that enable us easily to repeat
what we have done before, but we have little conscious experience of forming
these habits.
• Top-down processing is when we try to control our unwanted habits with our
better intentions. It doesn’t always work, because intentions don’t have much
bearing on achieving them. Persistence holds more sway.
• Bottom-up processing means that we mindlessly respond to environmental clues
in the world as we find it.
• A working definition of a habit is a mental association between a context cue and
a response that develops as we repeat an action in that context for a reward.
• A shorthand version is automaticity in lieu of conscious motivation. It turns the
world around you – your context – into a trigger to act.
• Habit refers to how you perform an action, not what the action is.
• The introspection illusion is an overriding confidence in our own thoughts,
feelings and intentions. We overestimate the extent to which we actively decide
to do things. That’s the invisibility of habit.
• Procedural memory is based on the automatic scripts our brains piece together
when we repeatedly do the same thing in the same way.
• The good effects that we popularly ascribe to self-control are more accurately
described as situational control. We don’t achieve admirable outcomes by
exerting willpower. We do so by forming powerful habits to automate our
behaviour to accomplish our goals – good habits.

11. There is a new way to market
like you give a damn by
harnessing the power of cool
to make money and do good.

12. • There are three big cultural shifts going on:
Generational: Millennials and Gen Z have new expectations of brands.
Technological: technology has disrupted advertising.
Spiritual: there is a crisis of meaningfulness in marketing. “The fact of the matter is
that consumers don’t trust marketing.” (Morton Albaek)
Great marketing optimizes life. The new model of marketing is to make money and do
good by harnessing the power of cool.
• To do this, brands (Commerce) need to work with nonprofits (Conscience) and
artists (Culture).
“Every time you spend money you’re casting a vote for the type of world you want live
in.” (Anne Lappe)
The seven principles of how to market like you give a damn are:
1. Know your purpose: great companies have a higher-order purpose than just profit.
2. Find your allies: build coalitions with allies who have similar purpose.
3. Think citizens, not consumers: treating people as ‘consumers’ creates a low-quality
one-dimensional relationship with them.
4. Lead with the cool, but bake in the good: you need great design as well as a great
story to make it all work.
5. Don’t advertise, solve problems: add value to peoples’ lives by solving problems,
don’t just advertise at them.
6. People are the new media: 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and
family. That’s what marketers should be striving for.
7. Back up the promise with the proof: people can spot bullshit so provide tangible
evidence of the good that you claim to be doing.

13. Green swans can take us
exponentially to breakthrough
solutions through regenerative
capitalism.

14. • A Green Swan is a profound market shift that delivers exponential progress in
economic, social and wealth creation. Black Swans are problems that lead
exponentially to degenerative breakdown (They are sometimes said to occur
gradually, then suddenly. Green Swans take us exponentially to regenerative
breakthrough. We need to rein in the first and accelerate the second.
• An Ugly Duckling is an early-stage concept which could go either way.
• There are also Grey Swans, which may have been predicted, but then ignored
for too long. They can erupt in ways that can rock the world.
• This is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, the planet and
prosperity. Capitalism in its current form is broken. Capitalism, democracy and
sustainability are fiercely contested territory. They need to be transformed to
adopt green swan characteristics and help regenerate our natural, social and
economic worlds through regenerative capitalism.
• Impact investing intentionally seeks measurable social and environmental
benefits. This is at the heart of regenerative capitalism. It is different from
socially responsible investing which traditionally avoids those inconsistent with
the values of the investors (tobacco, arms, etc.)
• We need to embrace uncertainty and discomfort, experiment with new economic
and political models, identify opportunities for 10X solutions (improving things by
10% won’t do), and use the Sustainable Development Goals as a North Star to
guide it all.

15. Innovation is the main event of
the modern age and we need to
change our thinking on the
subject.

16. • This book provides a full history of innovation in most fields, including
energy, public health, transport, food, communication, and computing. It
also covers less usual topics such as the invention of the dog.
• The essential elements of innovation are that it is gradual, it is different
from invention, is often serendipitous, is recombinant, it involves trial and
error, is a team sport, is inexorable, it prefers fragmented governance, and
increasingly means using fewer resources rather than more.
• It is a bottom-up phenomenon that is the mother of science as often as it is
the daughter (in other words, many innovators don’t understand the
science of what they have created – that comes later).
• Innovation cannot be forced upon unwilling consumers who aren’t ready or
don’t want it. It increases interdependence and it does not create
unemployment.
• Big companies are bad at innovation because they have too many rules
and too much bureaucracy. Multinationals have absorbed the mentality of
planners rather entrepreneurs.
• Innovation meets resistance if it is viewed as subversive, when it is
demonized and delayed, when scares ignore science, and when
governments and the law stifle it. Clergymen forbade their parishioners
from eating potatoes in England as late as the 18th century for the
magnificently stupid reason that they were not mentioned in the bible.
• Innovation is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the
world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance. It is the most
important fact about the modern world but one of the least understood.

17. HUMANE CAPITAL
It is our moral and ethical duty
to create humane workplaces.

18. HUMANE CAPITAL
• The traditional business model is broken. We need to shift from
command and control to humanized management. The book
provides a series of case studies from the public and private
sector, SMEs, and non-profits.
• Out of this fall 8 pillars of humane capital, which are:
• Mindset: move from viewing people as resources to them being
the unique asset that creates all value.
• Motivation: from lifeless to reluctant to enthusiastic.
• Higher purpose: a lack of it derails everything.
• Alignment of values: employees need to be engaged enough to
want to change
• Alignment of people and systems: everyone needs to be ready for
the shift.
• Self-organisation of employees in communities: hire right-minded
people and let them get on with it.
• Caring ethos: from fear and ignorance to common good and
humanity.
• Organizational learning process: the process never stops.

19. NON-BULLSHIT INNOVATION
Many companies think they
can innovate through jargon
but they just don't get it.

20. NON-BULLSHIT INNOVATION
• The founding editor of Wired UK is exasperated by the amount of bullshit in the
innovation industry: talk of change agents, co-creation gurus, ideas portals, make-
a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley. This is
mostly innovation theatre and corporate nonsense that has very little to do with
delivering real change.
• He scours the globe looking for inspiring stories from those creating genuine
innovation and real change – radical ideas from the world’s smartest minds. Some
of their approaches and suggestions include:
• Embrace unmet needs: live with the customer to find out what’s needed.
• Empower your team: hire great people, then get out of their way.
• Hire pirates: give these rule breakers autonomy and air cover, allowing them to
challenge the conventions in your company.
• Turn products into services: strip back your core purpose to work out how to serve
customers, not just churn out products.
• Enable moonshots: set up a unit that has autonomy from HQ to look at brand new
approaches that could make a really big difference.
• Incubate tomorrow’s business: don’t muzzle the talent, however threatening their
activities are to today’s business revenue.
• Prototype and measure: the power of a tangible prototype can be profound – make
that a priority.
• Find your blind spots: prepare to see your current assumptions cast away.

21. People with experience of
many fields are often more
fulfilled and successful at
solving tricky challenges than
experts.

22. • Most of what you have read about how to succeed in life is wrong. From the
10,000 hours rule to tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any
field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice, and that
if you dabble or delay you’ll never catch up with those who got a head start. It’s
not true, so don’t feel behind.
• In fact, the way to succeed is to sample widely, gain a breadth of experiences,
take detours, and juggle many interests – in other words, develop range. In most
fields, it is generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel. Failing a test is
often the best way to learn, and frequent quitters usually end up with the most
fulfilling careers.
• The cult of the head start is wrong. Less of the same can often equal more.
• Too much grit means people stick at things for too long, even when they aren’t
enjoying it or necessarily achieving much.
• Flirting with your possible selves is the way to find out what you are really good
at, or really want to do. Switchers are winners.
• Outsiders can have an advantage looking in on something experts have been
trying to solve, because they have wider perspective. Experts are, of course, no
better at forecasting than non-experts*. Experts in silos are often outthought by
people who can bring in thinking from outside a particular domain. So being a
deliberate amateur has advantages.

23. Psychopaths are everywhere
but you can beat them at their
own game by understanding
how they operate.

24. • Some people are exceptionally manipulative. They enjoy controlling others, often
with their charm, and will do anything to get what they want.
• The original Psychopath Checklist was created by Robert Hare, one of the most
respected researchers of the subject. It requires the scrutiny of 20 behavioural
characteristics, scoring them as happening never (0 points), sometimes (1) or always
(2). These range from glib and superficial charm, grandiose (exaggeratedly high)
estimation of self, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness and lack of empathy, through
pathological lying, cunning and manipulativeness, poor behavioural controls and
need for stimulation, to serious issues such as juvenile delinquency and criminality.
Common manipulation techniques include:
• Arbitrary positive enforcement: giving strong praise, and then sometimes withholding
it.
• Love bombing: over the top initial adoration, followed by withdrawal.
• Negative reinforcement: the manipulator stops doing something you don’t like when
you start doing something they do like.
• Unfathomable smokescreens: shifting the focus from the actual issue by claiming
that you are the problem.
• Having your feelings turned against you: putting pressure on someone’s weak points,
particularly ones that they are not proud of.
• The triangle drama: enthusiastically talking about or introducing a third party.
• Gaslighting: distorting someone’s sense of reality and making them question their
own sanity (from the 1944 film Gaslight in which a husband drives his wife mad by
secretly changing the lighting and many other environmental elements whilst denying
it).
• The silent treatment: passive-aggressively refusing to comment at all.

25. When talking to strangers we
need to understand that
transparency is a myth, we
default to truth, and we don’t
know the context, so we may
well judge them incorrectly.

26. • There’s a lot we should know about the people we don’t know. Strangers
are never simple, and misreading them can have disastrous
consequences.
• As ever with this author, the book covers a wide range of examples from
history, psychology and infamous legal cases to paint a picture of
encounters and misunderstandings. Strangers are not easy and it’s a
messy problem.
• Puzzle number 1: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is
lying to our face? We are notoriously bad at this (Chamberlain and Hitler
are often cited).
• Puzzle number 2: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make
us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them? (Judges
are more likely to make inappropriate parole and sentencing judgements
when they meet defendants).
• Truth-Default-Theory (TDT, coined by Tim Levine) is where we tend to
take people’s word for it. Evolution should have favoured people able to
pick up subtle signs of deception, but it hasn’t. Instead we default to the
assume it’s the truth. Around 50% of the time, we are fooled by liars.
• Transparency is a myth – an idea we have picked up from television that
makes us believe we can read people. Facial Action Coding Systems
(FACS) don’t help much either. There is a whole industry that looks at
whether we can read people’s faces, but we aren’t good at it.
• On top of these errors we often add another: we do not understand the
context in which the stranger is operating. Coupling and context are
therefore vital components.

27. Gaining the attention of potential
customers is much more
complicated than the media
industry would have us believe.

28. • This is all about how media works in a modern context dominated by fake news, fast
facts and seriously depleted attention stamina. Rather than simply heralding
disruption, this is a conversation about the myths we need to leave behind and what
the scientific evidence actually says.
• The concept of viral marketing is utterly flawed because of the nature of the sharing
distribution (a reverse J-shape curve). The likelihood of a video spreading to millions
from a small seed is highly unlikely.
• Hyper personalisation creates a web of one or a filter bubble, in which you just see
the same stuff all the time.
• A brand’s customer base typically looks like a banana (a reverse J-shape distribution)
technically called a Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD). There’s no point in trying to
increase the purchasing of already heavy users. Big brands have more loyal users but
they are loyal to several brands not just one. This NBD Dirichlet shows that the path
to growth is less a marketer’s choice than a statistical certainty.
• Advertising impact is therefore small but positive. It doesn’t persuade, it provides
publicity.
• Attention and viewability are not the same thing. Viewability is a media owner output
(ability to see advertising), whereas attention is a consumer output (whether they
watch or not). For example, a youtube ad could have 25% coverage of a viewer’s
screen (a quarter of it) with 100% pixels (the whole ad in view). If the pixel level falls
to, say, 70%, the brand name could be missing from the ad.
• STAS is short term advertising strength. The greatest uplift in sales impact is when a
viewer moves from a non-attentive state to a low attention one. In other words, high
attention is not essential for success.

29. You can change anyone’s mind
if you correctly understand the
five barriers to change and
remove the roadblocks that are
preventing it.

30. • Catalysts are change agents who know it’s not about being more persuasive
or providing more information. It’s about removing roadblocks and reducing
barriers to change. Instead of asking ‘What could I do to try to convince
someone?’, ask ‘Why haven’t they changed already? What’s stopping them?’
• There are five main barriers to change, or roadblocks:
1. Reactance: when pushed, people push back. Catalysts encourage such
resistors to persuade or convince themselves
2. Endowment: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – people are wedded to what they
are already doing. Catalysts highlight that inaction isn’t as costless as it
might seem.
3. Distance: too far from their backyard, people tend to disregard. New
information only works if it is within someone’s zone of acceptance, but if it
is too far away it actually increases opposition and is therefore
counterproductive. Good catalysts shrink distance
4. Uncertainty: Seeds of doubt slow the winds of change. People hit the
pause button if they are uncertain about what a change will yield. Catalysts
overcome this by making things easier to try.
5. Corroborating Evidence: sometimes the recommendation of one person
simply isn’t enough. Catalysts find reinforcement from collective proof.
• In summary, catalysts reduce Reactance, ease Endowment, shrink Distance,
alleviate Uncertainty, and find Corroborating Evidence. The stages form the
acronym REDUCE

31. Doing the right thing can be
the key to competitive
advantage.

32. • Ethical behaviour by businesses is often seen as the corporate and social
responsibility icing on the cake – nice to do but never really essential. Changing this
to make ethical behaviour a primary focus is vital for long-term competitive
advantage.
• This needs to go deeper than something managers do out of a sense of moral duty.
They need to build trust through ethical behaviour and regular, honest
communication.
• There are many types of ethics, but the four main types are:
1. Deontology: rules based, right and wrong actions, consequences of actions are not
important (so long as you have done the ‘right’ thing). The rules give a strong reference
point, but strict interpretation can lead to injustice.
2. Consequentialism: consequences of actions are more important than the actions
themselves, judgement of good versus bad, greatest good for the greatest number
(utilitarianism), ends justify the means. Focus on outcomes frees us from restriction of
rules, but could lead to cheating in order to get the right outcome.
3. Pragmatism: ends and means cannot be separated, no hard and fast rules, each
situation is different, an experimental approach. This is practical, but it can be difficult to
know what correct behaviour is.
4. Virtue ethics: deliberate choice, collect the facts then decide, practical wisdom,
cultivation of virtue. Reliance on self rather than rules is admirable, but requires people
with sufficient virtue and wisdom.
• The thread running through all of this is moral responsibility: being ethical is down to
us. Overall, there are three ethics tests:
• ~ Are you treating others as you would want to be treated?
• ~ Would you be comfortable if your decision were to be publicised?
• ~ Would you be comfortable if your children were observing?

33. We can survive the climate
crisis if we take urgent action
now.

34. • The authors were involved in forging the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. In this
book they define the 20s as the critical decade. Two dates should be seared into
everyone’s mind: 2030 and 2050.
• By 2050 at the latest, and ideally by 2040, we must have stopped emitting more
greenhouse gases than the Earth can naturally absorb (a balance known as net
zero or carbon neutrality).
• By 2030 we must have halved global emissions. If we don’t, then we are highly
unlikely to halve emissions every decade and so hit the carbon neutral target in
2050.
• Climate change should be of concern to all those who care about health, economic
stability, investment value, and intergenerational justice.
• In just the last 50 years we have catapulted the Earth into the Anthropocene, the
age of man, with excessive exploitation of resources.
• The book presents two scenarios:
1. Dystopian: based on the trajectory we are now on, with 3.7 degrees warming
by 2100. Bad air quality, unbearable temperatures, water scarcity, etc.
2. Tolerable: The world we must create, limiting warming to no more than 1.5
degrees. This is still attainable but the window of opportunity is closing.
• To achieve this we need three specific mindsets:
1. Stubborn optimism: the steadfast confidence to solve big problems based on
the bad news in front of us.
2. Endless abundance: perception of scarcity causes us to over-exploit natural
resources fearing that they may run out, whereas endless abundance
acknowledges that they do renew if properly managed.
3. Radical regeneration: many of the world’s assets can be regenerated.

35. Too many leaders abdicate
their most important
responsibilities because they
are leading for the wrong
reason.

36. • As with the author’s other books, this is a short, fictitious business story (called
a fable) that illustrates a point and is followed by a pithy summary of what
needs to be done.
• Too many CEOs spend the majority of their time on things that they shouldn’t,
including reviewing ops and financials, driving marketing and sales
programmes, handling the board, and so on. These all need attention, but not
by the CEO.
• Much of this is displacement activity which allows the CEO to avoid what they
really should be doing, but probably don’t enjoy as much, or at all.
• There are two leadership motives:
1. Reward-centred: the belief that being a leader is the reward for hard work;
therefore the experience of being a leader should be pleasant and enjoyable, free
to choose what they work on and avoid anything mundane, unpleasant or
uncomfortable.
2. Responsibility-centred: being a leader is a responsibility, so the experience of
leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of
personal gratification).
• There are five vital things that reward-centred leaders omit (it is important to
note that this is not a list of the primary responsibilities of a leader):
1. Developing the leadership team
2. Managing subordinates (and making them manage theirs)
3. Having difficult and uncomfortable conversations
4. Running great team meetings
5. Communicating constantly and repetitively to employees

37. It is often possible to solve
problems before they happen.

38. • We all have a tendency to work around problems by being
resourceful and improvising. We are so used to dealing with
emergencies that we don’t stop to think about how we could
prevent them in the first place.
• We have the capacity to solve some of our thorniest issues if we
start to think about the system rather than the symptoms – if we
start to think upstream. First, there are three barriers to overcome:
1. Problem blindness: “I don’t see the problem,” or it just seems
inevitable.
2. Lack of ownership: “That’s not my problem to solve.”
3. Tunneling: “I can’t deal with that right now.” When people are
juggling a lot of problems, they adopt tunnel vision. Short-term,
reactive thinking prevents long-term planning.
• Anyone leading upstream change needs to address 7 questions:
1. How to unite the right people?
2. How to change the system?
3. Where to find a point of leverage?
4. How to get early warning of the problem?
5. How to know you’re succeeding?
6. How to avoid doing any harm?
7. Who will pay for what doesn’t happen?

39. There is a better way to select
leaders than a deeply flawed
system that rewards arrogance
over humility and loudness
over wisdom, to the detriment
of competent women and men
who don’t fit the stereotype.

40. Feeling (feel good)
Fluency (be recognisable)
• Research shows that men are more likely to be overconfident, narcissists, and
psychopathic than women. These traits help them to achieve a leadership role,
and then hurts their performance when in it.
• Women have higher rates of transformational leadership, personal
effectiveness and self-awareness than men. All driven by higher emotional
intelligence (EQ). Good leaders require:
• 1. Intellectual capital – domain-specific expertise, experience and good
judgement.
• 2. Social capital – the network and connections at their disposal.
• 3. Psychological capital – how they lead when using their capabilities. This
includes their bright side (what they do when at their best), the dark side (less
desirable traits) and the inside (their values and moral compass).
• 75% of people quit their jobs because of their direct line manager, and 65% of
Americans say they would rather change their boss than get a pay rise.
• What if these two questions are causally linked – that most leaders are bad,
and that most are male. Or, would the prevalence of bad leadership decrease if
fewer men, and more women, were in charge?
• Most leaders are inept – unaware of their limitations, overconfident, abrasive,
and very much in awe of themselves. Ironically, people tend to equate
leadership with the very behaviours that often signal bad leadership.
Overconfidence is a classic example – often cited at interview as the reason
why a man got the job.
• Confidence has become a surrogate for competence. There is no relationship
between the two.

41. No one is listening but you can
improve your life if you do.

42. Feeling (feel good)
Fluency (be recognisable)
• This book asks the reader: When was the last time you listened to someone, or
someone really listened to you? As a society we have forgotten how to listen.
• Modern life is noisy and frenetic, and technology provides constant distraction
(some people are now officially addicted to distraction.) So we tune things out
or listen selectively – even to those we love most. We have become scared of
other people’s points of view, and of silence. People are uncomfortable with
gaps in conversation. It’s called dead air.
• At work, we are taught to lead the conversation. On social media we shape our
personal narratives. At parties we talk over one another. So do politicians. No
one is listening.
• Listening is about curiosity and patience – asking the right questions in the right
way. It has the potential to transform our relationships, improve our self-
knowledge, and increase our creativity and happiness.
• We listen best when we are in sync with the other person.
• We use assumptions as earplugs, thinking that we know what the other person
is going to say. The closeness-communication bias means that we
overestimate our ability to know what those closest to us are trying to say.
• We think faster than we speak, so there is a speech-thought differential.
• None of us is ‘woke’ or fully awake to the realities of people who are unlike us.
One can only speak for one’s self.
• Listening to opposing views makes us more entrenched, not more open-
minded. Many people now show the traits of hyperpartisanship. Good listeners
have negative capability – the ability to handle uncertainty without becoming
irritable. Look for evidence that you might be wrong.

43. • Be inquisitive
• Make the time
• Understand the lines of argument
• Have a point of view
• Inform your work
• Enjoy the debate
• Ask Kevin to speak or train

44. More at: greatesthitsblog.com
Ask Kevin to speak or train: 07979 808770
kevinduncanexpertadvice@gmail.com
Twitter @kevinduncan