Book Of The Future

Lots of people get stuck on the big idea, whether it's for a new business or a next step at work. It’s easy to believe that what separates the successes from the failures is that moment of inspiration. But the reality is that the answer often lies much more in execution. In hard work. It’s that cheesy but accurate Thomas Edison quote: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Loads of people have good ideas. But they will remain just ideas unless you learn how to execute. How to take that idea from your mind, beyond a powerpoint presentation or a business plan, to something real and functioning. Helping us to explore this topic in this episode, we have someone who has taken their ideas and made them real to great success, not once but twice. Jennie Jonson MBE is the CEO of My First Five Years, the next-generation parenting app designed to combat anxiety and give parents evidence-based tools, knowledge and support. Within a year of founding in 2021, MFFY had raised over £1.5m in seed-funding and is now growin

A critical part of the creative process is the ability to refine things, whether your own or others. Whatever it is you are creating, there’s almost zero chance that the first draft will be perfect. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing, drawing, designing in 3D, making music or a video, the editing process is absolutely critical. But it’s not necessarily one that comes naturally. We get very attached to our own creations. And it’s not always easy to tell other people that their work needs improvement and change. No-one likes to hear that their baby is ugly! So it’s hugely important that we think and talk about this skill, and train ourselves to improve it as part of our career development. To help us learn how to refine our ideas, as ever in this episode, we have a real expert. Sarah Butler is the acclaimed author of Ten Things I've Learnt About Love, Before the Fire and Jack & Bet. Her writing has been translated into fourteen languages. She is a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at Mancheste

In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we're looking at recombination: how to bring old things together to make something new. To help us to get our heads around mixing and remixing, we have a real expert in the studio today. Graeme Park has been one of the biggest names in the house music scene since the late 1980s. Well known for his residency at the Hacienda and long stints on a number of major radio stations, Graeme remixed tracks by the likes of Brand New Heavies, New Order, Eric B & Rakim, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.  Graeme has most recently been one of the founding forces behind Hacienda Classical, bringing together classic dance tunes with a full live orchestra. He has even found himself behind the microphone, going back to his musician roots. Here's what we learned from Graeme: Remixing is a creative art! Just because you're working with existing components, it doesn't mean this isn't real innovation. Recombining things can fulfill that creative urge.Seperate the technical skills required

Just before we take a break for the summer, we jumped on a call to chat through what we have learned from the season so far. we're about half way through and we've learned from some incredible people. Our first segment was all about Curation: how to discover and qualify information. The BBC's Chris Warburton joined us to talk about how to ask good questions.Psychologist Dr Simon Moore taught us about all the different ways of listening.Dr Lauren Kirwan helped us to understand empathy better - what it is, and what it is not.Gemma Milne talked to us about the importance of scepticism and our responsibility to challenge and ask questions.Elections analyst Professor Rob Ford helped us to understand the meaning in people's words - even when they don't say what they mean.Finally, data scientist Caroline Keep taught us how to extract meaning from numbers. Then we kicked off our segment on Creation: how to make new things. Fashion designer Supriya Lele shared where she finds inspiration.And start-up investor Jon

In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we speak with Jon Bradford about iteration: how do you take an idea and improve on it? Jon Bradford is co-founder & managing partner of Dynamo Ventures, an investment fund focused on supply chain and mobility. Jon is one of the most experienced early stage investors in Europe and launched the first accelerator bootcamp outside of the US in 2009. He went on to launch many more start-up programmes, earning him the title “Godfather of European Accelerators”. Between this work and his own entrepreneurship, Jon has helped to refine many raw ideas into successful businesses, so he’s the ideal person to talk to us about this part of the creative process. Here’s what we learned from Jon: Every proposal, every idea is a promise. You’ve got to make it and then deliver on it.Delivering a whole idea in one go is too much. Break any vision down into bite-sized pieces - each of which is a little ‘promise’ you can keep in its own right.At every ‘chunk’ there’s an opportu

This is the first episode in our six part series on creativity and everything that entails. We're starting with inspiration: where do original ideas come from? And how can you have more of them? We're convinced that inspiration is not something innate. It's a skill that we can develop by exercising it. And we need to. We operate in a noisy market of ideas, where original thinking is required to stand out. Where machines can knock out facsimiles of other people’s ideas fast and cheaply. So we have to keep creating new ideas to stay ahead. As always, to help us understand the skill we’re focused on, we have a special guest who relies on their skill for their own success. Supriya Lele is a fashion designer described by The Face as “one of the UK’s brightest design talents” and her eponymous label counts Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid as clients. Her style has spanned noughties nostalgia, rave-ready party wear, and inspiration from her Indian heritage. Here's what we took away from our conversation with Supriya: Be

In putting this podcast together, we had a whole range of fascinating conversations, not all of which fitted into the standard format for this series, where each episode is focused on a particular skill. One of those conversations was with Korn Ferry, the global consulting firm.  Korn Ferry works with companies and leaders to help them put in place the optimal structures, roles, and responsibilities, hire the right people to fill those roles, and advises them on how to reward and motivate their workforce. So as you can imagine, it’s a company that has a huge amount of interest in, and expertise on, the subject of this podcast: how to future-proof your career. And they've kindly agreed to sponsor this special episode as well. Joining us from Korn Ferry for this episode to share their expertise are Ben Frost, who works with the company’s clients on issues like pay and talent management, and Sue Simonett, who leads the company’s technology practice. Listen in to find out what these two experts think about: W

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we speak to Caroline Keep, a data scientist, a teacher, a maker, and a researcher in machine learning. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Times Education Supplement teacher award, and a founder of Liverpool Makerfest. We spoke to Caroline about how you extract meaning from data, and how we can all be more engaged in the effort to decipher the world around us. Here’s what we learned. Data is the real world, quantified Don’t think of data as just endless spreadsheets and numbers. It’s a representation of the real world and the things that matter. Understanding the data is a way to understand the world. Understanding data is a process Caroline talked about multiple steps in the ‘data cycle’: Start with discovery: play with the data at your disposal to get a feel for itCreate a hypothesis: what are you trying to test?Discuss your idea with other people and gather perspectives, check your reasoningClean your data: the real world is messy an

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we speak to professor of politics at the University of Manchester and frequent contributor to the BBC and other media, Rob Ford. Rob is the co-author of Brexitland with Professor Maria Sobolewska, and the author of The British General Election of 2019.  We spoke to Rob about how you extract meaning from people’s words, even if they don’t always say what they mean. Here’s what we learned. Think of leaders as politicians Business leaders and politicians have a lot of the same pressures, particularly when they are trying to satisfy multiple audiences. It’s one thing leading - and championing - a single team. You can be absolutely partisan. But when you have to satisfy people across the company, customers, and shareholders, and deal with lots more information, it’s a very different situation. So people in senior positions are likely to be more conservative, more political.  Who is the audience? Think about the speaker’s audiences. Who do they need to impress or

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career we’re talking about scepticism, the willingness, and the discipline, to question what we see and hear. And to have the skills to find the facts amongst the opinions and beliefs.  As always, we’ve invited an expert guest to speak to us, and this time it’s Gemma Milne, writer and researcher, and author of the excellent book Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It.  Gemma gave us loads to think about, in terms of how we improve our sceptical skills. Here are a few of the key takeaways from the conversation: The skill of scepticism has never been more important There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. And it’s not just on social media. We need a level of awareness to all the places that people through motivation or ignorance might share hype or inaccuracies. Scepticism is accessible. It’s something we can all do You don’t need deep expertise in a subject to be sceptical. That’s not to dismiss expertise or e

In this latest episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we tackle the tricky topic of empathy. What is it? How do you use it? And can you grow - or shrink - your empathy?  We all think we know what empathy is, but as ever, we ask a real expert. Dr Lauren Kerwin is a Harvard- and UCLA- Trained Psychologist with over 20 years of experience treating borderline personality disorder, autism spectrum disorders, depression, anxiety and trauma in teens and adults. Lauren also has lots of experience in a corporate context, providing executive coaching and organisational psychology support to highly successful start-ups through to their public listings, with a particular focus on employee selection and training, information sharing, and interpersonal interactions. Understandably this incredible CV has seen Lauren featured on CNN and the Today Show, and in Forbes, HuffPost, and the New York Times, to name but a handful of news outlets.= We learned loads from Dr Kerwin, so here are the top tips that I took away: Emp

Thanks for listening to this episode of our Future-proof Your Career. After each episode I’ll be collecting my notes from our guest here. In this episode we spoke to Dr Simon Moore. Simon is a doctor of Psychophysiological Psychology and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. He leads a team of researchers at IB, a business he founded to help brands to better understand their customers and employees. Here are my key takeaways from the conversation: What are you listening for? Simon highlighted that we often go into a conversation or interview situation with a bias. We’re not neutral as listeners, we often want something from the conversation. Be aware of this. Consider your biases and your own objectives and try to see the conversation through that lens. There are different modes of listening Sometimes you might be listening in an informational mode, looking to fill in the blanks on your mental questionnaire. Sometimes your mode might be more empathetic, where you’re trying to

Thanks for listening to this first episode of our new season of Talk About Tomorrow, focused exclusively on how you can Future-proof Your Career! After each episode I’ll be collecting my notes from our guest here. In this episode we spoke to Chris Warburton, award-winning BBC journalist. radio presenter and host of a series of excellent podcasts including Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, The End of Days, and most recently, Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game, about Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto. Chris covers a huge range of topics for the BBC, from major sporting events, to politics, to once even a live heart transplant. So he was the ideal person to talk to us about how you ask good questions. Here are my key takeaways from the conversation: Create a personal editorial policy Think about how your own behaviour and presentation when you’re asking questions. Do you maximise the chance of getting the right answers? For example, think about: What tone should I be using?Do I have the rig

Welcome to Future-proof Your Career, your guide to the most important skills for a long, successful working life. This special season of the Talk About Tomorrow podcast will explore in depth the idea of the Three Cs, three skill groups that are critical to success, in a business or as an entrepreneur. The ability to curate information, create new things, and communicate ideas. In each episode we explore a facet of one of these skills, alongside a guest.

Tom and Katharine talk about laziness: as a motivator for innovation and as a challenge to wasted effort. Are you lazy enough to be useful? Plus, it’s the end of this season for the podcast. Five seasons now! All very different in length and format. But this has been the first with a co-host and though we’re biased, we think it has been great! We’ll be back for season 6 tackling some new topics in a few months.

Katharine and Tom discuss the concept of Net Luxury - an approach to addressing climate change based on the continuing reluctance of many people to make real change. Can we convince people to cut back? Or can we make saving ourselves (the planet will be just fine) seem even more appealing than you'd think it ought to be?

The shape of the most successful organisations is changing. Companies are shrinking and distributing their work across partners and semi-autonomous units, giving them scale, agility and reduced risk. As usual, Tom explains and Katharine interrogates!

The shape of the most successful organisations is changing. Companies are shrinking and distributing their work across partners and semi-autonomous units, giving them scale, agility and reduced risk. As usual, Tom explains and Katharine interrogates!

Tom and Katharine discuss our response to the explosion of choice faced by the modern consumer: the return of the intermediary, offering advice, direction and editorial input. Why do we value influencers? What role for AI in the future of our decisions on music, travel and finance? Find out in this episode. Note: the book reference in the episode is Barry Schwartz's 'The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less' from all the way back in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

We've spent the last twenty years trying to eliminate friction from the interactions between brands and customers. But is this always the right approach? In this episode we talk about the concept of 'good friction', those moments where you want to slow and deepen the conversation.