your next favourite book
July 21, 2018

3 recommended podcasts to find your next favourite book

By Paul Laughlin

Given the interest in our post on note taking when reading, I’ll now explore podcasts to help you find your next favourite book.

During reviewing 7 Habits of highly effective people, I recommended not overlooking classics. Leadership books that have stood the test of time.

That advice still stands, but should not preclude also keeping a weather eye on new writers or books. To help you address contemporary issues, or just feel like the author is speaking to your situation, new books can help. Not least when reflecting on the latest technological or organisational challenges.

So, to help our growing reader base, in this post I return to the topic of podcasts. To share 3 podcasts that I have found helpful. Both for discovering new books and quickly assessing their relevance to my priorities.

Find your next favourite book: 1-3-20 podcast

This podcast is a great response to how leaders struggle to have time to find new books. Daniel Pink has designed every episode to recommend 1 book, with 3 key insights, in just 20 minutes. Hence the name.

You may recall my book review recommending “When: The scientific secrets of perfect timing”, Daniel’s latest book. Perhaps it is his experience as a successful author himself, that helps Daniel get to the core idea of each book.

I certainly find that this podcast is a great source of new books on leadership & personal effectiveness as a customer insight leader. If you are time poor, this would be my one recommendation…

The 1-3-20 Podcast

Want to learn from the best business books but don’t have time to read them all? The 1-3-20 podcast gives you the big ideas in twenty minutes or less.

Find your next favourite book: The Leadership podcast

An alternative approach is to select a podcast which covers leadership more broadly and also maintains a library of recommended books. This does not provide such a steady flow of new recommended books, but does give you opportunity to review a number of options at once.

Such an alternative is the leadership podcast, published by Jim Vaselopulos and Jan Rutherford. In addition to useful episodes, focussed on different leadership challenges, they maintain a library of recommended books for leaders.

Clicking on each icon in this virtual bookshelf, will bring up their short book review. Those short notes really should help you select which is right for you (from a mixture of classics & new books)…

The Leadership Podcast

Feel free to click on any of these books for a short note on what Jim and Jan think about these books. If they are on this page it is one of our favorites and they’ve been mentioned on the show. Many have been written by our current and/or future guests.

Find your next favourite book: Read to Lead podcast

My final recommendation is a podcast that proclaims the need for leaders to read, as espoused by Michael Hyatt & this blog.

In his “Read to Lead podcast”, radio journalist Jeff Brown interviews authors, to dig into the key insights from their books. This is a longer-form podcast, with episodes ranging from 25-50 minutes.

A range of subjects are covered in this podcast, from leadership to marketing to personal development. But all relate to books that could be relevant to a wide range of leaders. Worth a listen if a particular episode grabs you or covers a book you want to know more about…

Episodes Archive

Welcome to my Episode Archives. Here, you can quickly scroll through to find past episodes of the show, 10 episodes at a time. Simply click the arrows at the bottom right of the player to scroll through the library. If you’d like to browse episodes covering a specific topic or area (e.g.

Which podcast helped you find your next book?

I hope those podcasts help you ate your desire to read & grow as a leader. All 3 are in addition to my previous recommended podcasts:

If one of the podcasts recommended in this post helps you find a book that is really helpful, please do share that with us (using comments below or social media). I’d love to know which was most useful & perhaps invite you to share your own book review or recommendations.

Happy listening & keep reading (to parody the late great Bruce Forsyth, on dancing)