Lauren Gemmell

For the last year or so I have been listening to many Audio books and podcasts. It started for two reasons, I realised that I wasn’t taking the time to learn new things (outside of work) and I wanted to use time out walking a young Whisky pup more effectively.

After a year, here are some of my favourites:

• Being Boss. Podcast for creative entrepreneurs, but generally useful for anyone that wants to get stuff done.
• The Creative Penn. Podcast for author entrepreneurs, aimed at self-published authors and how to grow their business and multiple streams of income.
• The Sell More Books Show. Podcast for author entrepreneurs, again aimed at self-published authors, but more focused on recent developments.
• Tech Forward. Podcast about diversity in technology, this is a newer one on my list, but I love the blend on entrepreneurship across many industries and roles.
• The Read to Lead Podcast, about the books on leadership you should be reading, each episode is a 30 minute overview with the author on a different leadership topic. I have bought so many audiobooks because of this one podcast!
• FT Startup Stories, another podcast of interviews but this time with founders of startups. Episodes cover a range of startups – not just tech ones.
• The Guilty Feminist. A great slice of feminist humour, I’m a feminist but…
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. It’s sort of obvious from the title, I read this to understand myself and others better, it was gaming changing for me.
• Ego-free Leadership: Ending the Unconscious Habits That Hijack Your Business this book again helped me understand why work or personal relationships have conflict. Understanding my own pinch-points has been super helpful in trying to move past them.
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity The first book at our Manager’s Book Club at work. Made me think a lot about the sort of boss I want to be, something I come back to time and time again.
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. While this may not be as relevant to the sort of team I run, maybe there are similarities with different divisions in tech organisations, could you get similar benefits if you merge tech and product teams?
• The Sales Acceleration Formula I switched roles earlier this year, and am now building out tools for internal teams, not quite sales, but close. I wanted to understand more about these functions and the sort of tools that help or hinder. But also how do you measure success?
• The Multi-Hyphen Method: Work Less, Create More and Design a Career That Works for You. To be honest I am not really clear how I ended up buying this book (surprisingly Ctrl Alt Del is not one of the podcasts I regularly listen to), but I am glad I did. If the world of work is changing, and what people expect from their jobs is too, it’s really interesting to hear more about how we should adapt.
• Being Boss, not the podcast this time but the book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I am already altering my boundaries, sticking up post-it note mantras and experimenting with my personal processes.