Starling Bank founder Anne Boden does not believe in having a mentor for herself because the ones she encountered discouraged her from taking risks. Her latest book, however, reads like a 224-page mentoring session, peppered with anecdotes and practical tips for any woman considering starting a company.
The bleak backdrop is that only 2 per cent of venture capital in the UK goes to female-founded start-ups. The Female Founders’ Playbook is not an attempt to fix the system or philosophically debate why that may be. It is Boden’s honest, at times cynical, account of the highs and lows and lessons learned in the decade she spent growing Starling before stepping down last year. Starling’s story is a case study of the challenges female founders face: the bank itself struggled to raise money for two years before she secured a cash lifeline from billionaire Harald McPike.
Drawing on her experience as chair of a government task force looking into female-led high-growth businesses, Boden also includes the voices of many women who have played a role in growing successful businesses, including venture capital investor June Angelides, skincare brand Child’s Farm founder Joanna Jensen and PensionBee founder Romi Savova. The step-by-step guide takes readers through the journey of growing and scaling a business from its inception to exit and what to do after an IPO.
Boden, who has been vague about her own plans for the future, offers her advice on everything from how to make the most of a networking event — even when you’ve forgotten people’s names — to hiring the right co-founder (hers left Starling along with a number of their employees to set up rival neobank Monzo). Perhaps most urgently, the book starts with a call to “all reluctant entrepreneurs”’ that aims to help women identify themselves as potential founders in the first place. Akila Quinio
Cultures of Growth is not so much a self-help book as a group-help book. Mary Murphy is a protégée of Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychology professor and architect of the concept of the “growth mindset”, a decades-old theory that people can change personal characteristics and abilities with effort.
Murphy’s contribution is to show how this individual mindset can be developed for whole organisations to enable their staff to thrive.
Over 260 pages, plus another 47 of notes and appendices, Murphy, now a professor at Indiana University, explains how a mindset culture can enable creativity, risk-taking and diversity to thrive in an organisation, as well as acting as a check on unethical behaviour. The final section focuses on helping business owners to identify mindset microcultures and evaluate situations to see how a culture of growth can be enabled or enhanced.
There are plenty of case studies and warnings about specific pitfalls, such as the pipeline problem when it comes to building a diverse workforce and the tendency for managers to go it alone. Although many of the leadership stories are about large companies, particularly in the tech sector, the book could be useful to heads of organisations of all sizes and types, from ambitious for profit start-ups to charities and public sector organisations. Jonathan Moules
The prospect of Donald Trump winning re-election must appal Barbara Kellerman, but if he succeeds, it will probably not surprise her. The Harvard professor’s previous book, The Enablers , explained “how Team Trump flunked the pandemic and failed America”. She points out in the prologue to her new book that “once bad leadership and bad followership set in, as they did during the first year of Trump’s tenure, bad became worse”. This is predictable. But “worse leadership” only becomes inevitable if uninterrupted. Bad leadership and followership develop gradually, she writes, but “they develop only if we allow it”.
Trump is mainly a ghost at the unpalatable feast she lays out. Her main courses focus instead on four other bad leaders — five, if you include Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s rise to power is depicted as the evil archetype of the four phases of development of bad leaders and followers: “onward and upward”, as the aspiring leader reveals a near-utopian vision of the future; “followers join in”; “leader starts in” by pursuing a bad course; and “bad to worse”. Kellerman then retraces these phases in the rise of two autocrats still in office — Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and China’s Xi Jinping — and two disgraced corporate leaders, Martin Winterkorn, chief executive of Volkswagen during the Dieselgate scandal, and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.
The case study approach is effective, and Kellerman is a good writer, but readers who know one or more of the stories may be tempted to skip over some of the lessons she draws. They include the importance of good followership, which she says has been badly neglected. “Those of us who are not in leadership roles have obligations” not to become bad followers, she writes, and to understand that we can and should choose to intervene against bad leaders in the early phases of their development. As she concludes, perhaps with an eye to the US electoral calendar, “time is of the essence”. Andrew Hill
Matthew Benham made a small fortune from trading derivatives for some of the biggest banks on Wall Street. He became richer still by leaving high finance to become a professional gambler. Then he bought the football club he supported as a boy.
Alex Duff, author of Smart Money , uncovers the history of Brentford FC with the fastidious care that has come from his own time supporting the club. The former Bloomberg News journalist avoids hagiography and digs into the chequered history of the club.
As English football prepares for an independent regulator mandated by the UK government, Duff’s history of Brentford is a reminder that unscrupulous owners are hardly a new phenomenon.
What has changed is the size of the pay cheques. Football teams are no longer clubs but companies. Benham is a rare example of a local owner at the elite end of football, which increasingly requires institutional money to meet rocketing valuations.
The missing element of Smart Money is an interview with Benham himself. Duff makes up for it by talking to just about everybody else he can, from past directors to former players and journalists.
Benham has been at the forefront of a data revolution in football, helping Brentford to outsmart richer clubs by using analytics to identify and buy undervalued players in order to reach the highest division in English football.
Brentford might be in the bottom half of the table, but the book reveals the bigger surprise is that they are there at all. Samuel Agini
Traditional gathering places are declining, making it harder to meet and socialise in person. As digital replacements and technological advancements rapidly evolve, it is common to feel more isolated, dislocated and displaced.
Award-winning architect Kevin Ervin Kelley presents a book that is an antidote to the anti-human digital future, offering a compelling vision for creating spaces that truly bring us together.
In an era marked by rapid technological development, it is essential to recognise that the roles humans play in society are undergoing a profound transformation. While technology does not have to remove our need for people and interaction, it will require people doing and thinking differently.
Kelley offers innovative concepts that enable people to connect and collaborate. These experiences facilitate the creation of pro-social environments that foster meaningful interactions and strengthen community bonds.
The book is divided into four sections: parts I and II establish a foundation for creating the types of experiences for people to gather together based on how humans see, perceive and interpret their environment. Parts III and IV provide ideas to manage the success of workplaces.
With real-life examples and practical recommendations, Irreplaceable is a call to action to foster cultures of belonging. Leo Cremonezi
Diversity, equity and inclusion have shot up the corporate agenda over the past the few years. This book suggests looking at “belonging” in a new, and potentially more effective way.
In You Belong Here , Kim Dabbs, a DE&I expert who has worked across the private and non-profit sector, draws on her personal experiences. Born in Korea, she was abandoned as a baby and adopted by a US family. With her work she is now in Germany. She acknowledges that the majority of culture-building programmes in organisations seldom explore this idea of individual identity.
She asks readers to consider belonging as an individual — what is belonging to you , not others? And how do you stop the cycle of retelling yourself negative narratives that form as a result of instances where you have felt “othered”?
Dabbs describes what she often told herself while growing up in the US: “I’m too Asian. I’m too outspoken. I’m not nice enough. I’m not quiet enough.” This began in her childhood and intensified when she started her career, as the social cues of others “reinforced these sound bites in my head”, she writes.
So how to take back control? It’s about exploring identity and reforming it in a more positive way.
She sets out a game plan that includes four identities that must be worked through. These are: lived identity, made up of the aspects of identity that are inherited when you are born; learned Identity, which includes the parts you’ve chosen or claimed; lingering identity, to which you default when you feel like an outsider; and loved Identity, where you find what you feel is authentic to you.
Providing guidance throughout, Dabbs prompts the reader with questions. She believes a better understanding of past experiences and how society has established systemic barriers to entry can help people design their future. “Instead of looking for a seat at someone else’s table, we have the tools to build a new one . . . we’re able to understand who we are at our core and how we want to show up in the world.” Janina Conboye