How to Get on With Your Colleagues

A guide to better collaboration

The most difficult aspect of work has nothing to do with profitability or deadlines or competition. It has to do with the immense and beautiful challenges of dealing, on an ongoing basis, with that often amazing but always complicated entity known as the colleague. Our colleagues can be the sources of our greatest joys and triumphs: they compensate for our weaknesses, enlarge our strengths and aggregate our energies. However, working successfully around others is neither intuitive nor simple: it requires us to communicate effectively, to understand our own minds and blind spots, to master our emotions and to see the world from other people’s perspectives. The School of Life has been working with organisations since its foundation, releasing the latent talents of employees and equipping them with the emotional intelligence required to succeed. This book compresses our learning into a series of lessons on workplace psychology. The result is an essential guide to more profitable, harmonious and happier organisations.

Skills Include:

• Part I: The Need to Get On With Others
• Part II: The Challenges
• Part III: Towards Harmony

Courier Issue 36

Our annual Design Issue has landed! From Paris and San Francisco to Melbourne and Mumbai, our Aug/Sept 2020 edition shows you how to make it work as a creative business – in industries from slow fashion and sustainable diamonds to ceramics and bespoke globe making.

Also in this issue:

-The creative process of Tolu Coker

-Make money outside of the studio

-Build a design collective

-Tech comes to the barbershop

-Flex your production up and down

-Meet the startup saviour

-Adopt a ‘commitment-to-buy’ model

-Pitch for work remotely

-Design stores (and hotels) from around the world

-Inside the new grassroots economy

-Nutritionist and painter Bianca Valle

-Seven steps to cult status

Offscreen – Issue 23

This book is about disruption. About doing things differently. About having ideas that will change the world. That will at least change your world. It’s also about delivering those ideas.

Do Disrupt is an interactive workbook that will help you create or refine your business idea and take it from concept to market. It will encourage you to define your customer, identify the competition... and then outsmart them. You’ll also find out why you need a chat with your Nan and a tape measure.

Newly updated for 2017, this expanded edition features a new introduction, a brand new chapter on how to create positive change from within a larger organisation, fresh insight on global trends driving disruption, how to generate ideas, boost creativity and define your purpose. 

If you're starting a new business or you're the rebel inside, it's not enough to shake things gently. It's about thinking big. Being innovative. Making a difference. 

Author: Mark Shayler

How can we make sense of a world where we have both too many billionaires and too many foodbanks? We're supposed to go to university, forge a career, get wealthier, buy a house - but why is that so hard for most of us to achieve?

Split makes sense of our world by looking at class society - delving into the deep-rooted economic inequalities that shape our lives. From the gig economy, rising debt and the housing crisis that affects the majority of people, to the world of tax havens and unfair inheritance that affect the few…

Now is the time to fight back against the 1%.

The Author: Ben Tippet is an educator, activist, and writer. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of Greenwich, researching the causes of wealth inequality in the UK. He is a researcher for The Transnational Institute and has written for Novara, Stike! and Economy.

Scaling up is something most founders aspire to, especially once the tricky start-up phase has been navigated. It can increase your reach and futureproof your business. But how do you ‘scale’? And how does it differ from ‘flipping’ for a quick profit or slower organic growth?

 Les McKeown advises industry leaders on how to achieve scalable, sustainable growth. In Do Scale, he draws from his decades of experience to provide a clear understanding of what’s involved, and the strategies needed to take your business (or not-for-profit) to the next level. You’ll find out: 

• What if means to scale – and if now is the right time
• Why founders need to 'get out of their own way'
• How to develop winning teams
• Your secret weapon for decision making

With practical advice and clear guidance, Do Scale is an essential manual for anyone looking to grow a successful and sustainable organisation – and turn it into something truly remarkable.

Author:  Les McKeown

A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimise these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfil our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve. Among other things, we learn how to grasp fragile and flighty thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear; at what times of day to try to work and for how long; how to make use of our boredom and instincts, and how to overcome timid and predictable approaches to the largest problems. The result is an operating manual to that most wondrous, though intermittent and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

Thinking Types Include:

• Strategic Thinking
• Cumulative Thinking
• Independent Thinking
• Philosophical Thinking
• ‘Mad’ Thinking
• Envious Thinking
• Analogical Thinking
• Empathetic Thinking
• Love Thinking
• Sceptical Thinking

About The School of Life for Business

These essays are thought pieces based on the topics covered by The School of Life for Business. We teach twenty emotional skills to help businesses thrive in the modern economy. We work with businesses to help employees function better together - to form more engaged teams, be more productive, dynamic, and work together in more innovative and entrepreneurial ways. We build emotional skills programmes for each organisation we work with, delivered by a world class faculty.

Dear Client
This Book Will Teach You How to Get What You Want from Creative People

Bonnie Siegler

In a world where every business, brand, product, and service needs a strong visual identity, it’s critical for clients and creative professionals to work together. And the key to success, as with any relationship, is communication. In Dear Client, award-winning graphic designer Bonnie Siegler offers an invaluable step-by-step guide to how to talk so creatives will listen, and how to listen when creatives talk.

Written as a series of honest, friendly lessons—“Know What You Like,” “Decide Who Will Decide,” “Focus Groups Suck,” “Don’t Say ‘Make It Yellow,’ Say ‘Make It Sunny,’” “Serve Lunch During Lunchtime Meetings”—it shows exactly how to deal with the subjectivity, emotional pitfalls, and occasional chaos of a creative partnership. Here’s how to articulate your visual goals and set a clear, consistent direction. How to give feedback that works and avoid words that inhibit creative thinking. How to be open to something you didn’t imagine. And most of all, how to have fun, save money, and get the results you want.

Courier’s ‘Work Better + Live Smarter’ issue is packed with stories, inspiration and tips for working and living on your own terms, plus a special 16-page step-by-step guide to launching a new business.

 Also in this issue:

 -20 observations and opportunities for 2020
-How to do business in China
-Portrait of an etiquette queen
-Inside the passion economy
-Audio porn heats up
-Making olive oil in Joshua Tree
-Trouva’s shopping spree
-Japan’s DIY chop stick brand
-A facelift for a Parisian shopping district
-Art co-ownership
-Design hotels from Venice to Edinburgh

Offscreen – Issue 22