Start the new year with a book: business and career edit

A powerful new approach to taking risks in your career and thriving (even when you fail).
In this impactful book, one of tech’s top leaders, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, offers a completely new perspective for anyone afraid of making the wrong career choices. Sharing the misfires, unexpected forces, and surprising outcomes of her own journey and that of other leaders, she reveals the secrets of successful risk-taking and charts the hidden dynamics of enviable careers. Packed with insider strategies, tips, and provocative insights, this candid and refreshingly new roadmap to risk-taking will have you on track and moving toward your dreams like never before.

Are you a leader who aims to drive real growth for the people within your organisation and at the same time deliver exceptional customer service that sets you apart from your competitors? Cultureneering is a philosophy and framework that Ian Fuhr has spent four decades developing, and which he perfected while building the Sorbet Group, Africa’s largest beauty salon chain. This book takes the reader on a journey of personal development and unpacks the unbreakable link between culture and service. It reveals the tools required to build a company culture that is good for its people, its customers and, ultimately, for sustainable growth.

One of the most successful sports coaches ever, Eddie Jones took three separate nations to Rugby World Cup Finals, and enjoyed a success rate with the England team of almost eighty per cent. An expert in guiding and managing high-performing teams, Jones believes that his methods can be applied to many walks of life. From fostering ambition to following your curiosity, Jones shares his methodology, much of it learned through conversations with other successful managers and leaders, including Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola. Leadership is the ultimate guide to being your best, in rugby and in life.

Make Brilliant Work is an inspiring guide to unlocking your creative potential, showing you the methods and techniques that will transform your efforts and help you produce your best ever creative work. From Roald Dahl to Steven Spielberg, and star architect Zaha Hadid: the figures in Make Brilliant Work will show you how to think for yourself, take risks and persevere to create brilliant work.

In Reset, Rebuild, Reignite, a follow-up to Pavlo Phitidis' first book, Sweat Scale $ell, his starting point is not how to avoid crises because some are inevitable. Instead, he shows how you can use any crisis to reset your business to get relevant, rebuild it to scale, and reignite it to accelerate growth by capitalising on the change and opportunities that any crisis brings with it. In the book, stories of business owners who have successfully turned crisis to their advantage are underpinned by Phitidis’ practical, action-oriented insights, tactics and strategies that will have you reading with a highlighter in hand, and will equip you to tackle any crisis that affects your business.

In Think Like a Breadwinner, financial expert Jennifer Barrett reframes what it really means to be a breadwinner by dismantling the narrative that women don't – and shouldn't – take full financial responsibility to create the lives they want. Featuring a wide variety of case studies from women at all stages of their careers and financial lives, Barrett shares the secrets of women who already think like breadwinners. Barrett reveals not only the importance of women building their own wealth, but also the freedom and power that comes with it.

In a world shaped by Covid-19 and characterised by fake news, manipulated feeds of information and divisive social-media agendas, it’s easy to believe that our time is the most challenging in human history. It’s just not true. It is a time of extraordinary opportunity. But only if you have the right mindset and attitude. Fear of the future breeds inaction and leads to strategic paralysis. Problem-solvers thrive in chaotic and uncertain times because they act to change their future. Winners recognise that in a world of growing uncertainty, you need to resort to actions on things you can control. And in this book, Whitfield shows how chaos and uncertainty breed opportunity in South Africa.

Launched out of Jeff Besoz's garage in 1994, Amazon is now one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. In Working Backwards, two Amazon executives lift the lid on how the company achieved such domination, and how products including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa came to be. Sharing the secrets of the company's fourteen leadership principles, meticulous hiring process and rigorous business principles, this is a must-read book for entrepreneurs.