At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone – your boss, a co-worker, a customer, client, spouse, your kids, or even your friends. What is the smallest change you can make to your request, proposal or situation that will lead to the biggest difference in the outcome?
In The small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice — Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini — describe how, in today’s information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences.

Get a money makeover from the legendary FT columnist, Mrs Moneypenny, author of Mrs Moneypenny’s Careers Advice for Ambitious Women. Why do personal finances present such a hurdle for women? And what can we do about it?

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.

Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:

Susan Cain sparked a worldwide conversation with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. She inspired millions of people, and permanently changed the way we see introverts – and the way introverts see themselves. Now she takes the Quiet Revolution to a younger audience.

Bestselling Perfect CV is essential reading for anyone who’s applying for jobs. Written by a leading HR professional with years of experience, it explains what recruiters are looking for, gives practical advice about how to show yourself in your best light, and provides real-life examples to help you improve your CV.

An interviewer’s job is notoriously difficult. Having selected five or six candidates from as many as two hundred aspiring applicants, they have to find the right one to employ. Chances are all six are adequate for the position, so the interviewer must choose the one who shines above the others.

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork.

In the New York Times bestseller that the Washington Post called “Lean In for misfits,” Sophia Amoruso shares how she went from dumpster diving to founding one of the fastest-growing retailers in the world.

But why do we insist on seeing the obstacles rather than the goal? This is the question that bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their compelling and insightful new book.

We all know that change is hard. It’s unsettling, it’s time-consuming, and all too often we give up at the first sign of a setback.

But why do we insist on seeing the obstacles rather than the goal? This is the question that bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their compelling and insightful book. They argue that we need only understand how our minds function in order to unlock shortcuts to switches in behaviour.