The rulebook most leaders rely on was written for a slower world that no longer exists.

Next Gen CEO is not a book about management theory. It is about the raw mechanics of leadership – the principles that remain when the noise of the modern world is stripped away.

In 60 sharp, micro-learning chapters, Mike Soutar distils decades of experience as a founder, CEO, and the formidable interviewer from BBC’s The Apprentice.

These are the benchmarks Mike used to judge Britain’s most ambitious entrepreneurs and the hard-won truths he used to scale his own multi-million-pound businesses.

Inside, you’ll learn how to:
Lose more arguments – and become stronger for it.
Stop being everyone else’s problem solver.
Design teams that don’t need you in every room.
Stay on fire – without burning out.

No jargon. No waffle. Just battle-tested frameworks for a world where AI, distributed work, and economic upheaval are reshaping the workplace in real time.

Leadership is a behaviour, not a job title. The future will reward those who learn faster than the world is changing.

Are you ready to be a leader others choose to follow?

At the very heart of all the success and failure I’ve been exposed to – both my own entrepreneurial journey and through the thousands of interviews I’ve conducted on my podcast – are a set of principles that can stand the test of time, apply to any industry, and be used by anyone who is search of building something great or becoming someone great.

These are the fundamental laws that will ensure excellence.

They are rooted in psychology and behavioral science, are based on the wisdom of tens of thousands of people I’ve surveyed across every continent and age group, and of course, drawn from the conversations I’ve had on my chart-topping podcast with the world’s most successful people.

These laws will work now or in 100 years from now. Are you ready to get started?

The world can be a challenging place. It is often tempting to say ‘why doesn’t someone do something about it?’ But why shouldn’t that ‘someone’ be you?

You don’t have to be rich, powerful or a genius to make a profound and lasting difference to our world. All you need is an idea and the determination to make it happen. How to Change the World is the springboard to help you impact the world in the way you’ve always wanted.

From finding the money, to identifying the best people with whom to join forces, Jo Owen will help you launch, develop and scale an idea so that it has the most effective and meaningful social impact, and benefits as many people as possible.

Your idea can come from anywhere: from reading an article, talking to colleagues, or stumbling across a good idea that can be developed. Jo Owen champions that anyone can turn an idea into something that can have a meaningful and lasting impact on people’s lives and can perform the miracle of creating something great out of nothing.

‘Gripping and brilliantly told’ Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave

In June 2024, thirty-one years after it was founded in a diner, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of videogame equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process reinvented the computer.

Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors and his employees, Stephen Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.

The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved to supplying hundred-million-dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a rev-olution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the ‘next industrial revolution,’ as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars and new movies, art and books, generated on command.

This is the story of the company that is inventing the future.

‘Brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia … Exceptional reporting’ Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Nearer

‘Sara cuts through the noise to show that just six minutes is enough, if you have the drive, passion and consistency to achieve your dream’ Steven Bartlett

Have you ever wanted to start or grow your own business, but found that life keeps getting in the way?

Sara Davies, founder of the global craft business Crafter’s Companion and star of Dragons’ Den, is known for her no-nonsense, down-to-earth entrepreneurship. This book reveals her secrets to success in just six minutes a week.

Filled with stories from Sara’s own career, her 52 invaluable lessons span the year, teaching you everything you need to know to launch, run and grow your business.

From developing ideas and finding mentors, to overcoming hurdles and mastering time management, her quick tips and hacks are balanced with deeper actions to practise over the coming week.

No matter where you are on your entrepreneurial journey, you can turn your dream into reality, at a pace that works for you.

‘Astonishing. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s meticulous, comprehensive reporting turns an opaque mess brutally transparent’ Jia Tolentino, bestselling author of Trick Mirror

‘Gripping? Through fly-on-the-wall reporting, Character Limit takes readers inside Elon Musk’s tumultuous Twitter takeover and the disruption of a company, an industry, and the online public square. What a wild ride’ Bradley Hope, bestselling author of Billion Dollar Whale

In a world of viral ideas and emotion, who gets to control the narrative, who gets to be heard, and what does power really cost?

This is the story of the showdown between Elon Musk and Twitter and how the richest man on earth suddenly came to control one of the most powerful media platforms in the world. In Character Limit, award-winning reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac draw on exclusive interviews, unreported documents and internal Twitter recordings to provide a revelatory, three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk showed up to takeover Twitter, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers.

In part, this is the story of Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, who idealistically dreamed of building a ‘digital town square’ but detested Wall Street and never built a profitable business, and Musk, one of the site’s most influential users with over 70 million followers. To Musk, Twitter-once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech-had utterly lost its way. Blaming it for the proliferation of what he called the “woke mind virus”, he claimed that the survival of humanity itself depended on the future of the site.

In January 2022, Musk began secretly accumulating Twitter stock. By April, he was its largest shareholder, and, soon after, he made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company for the unimaginable sum of $44 billion. Backed into a corner, Twitter’s board accepted his offer-only for Musk to change his mind, forcing Twitter to sue him.

Drawing on unparalleled sources, this is the defining story of our time told in vivid, cinematic detail.

A momentous look at the private companies driving the revolutionary new space race, from the 3-million copy, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

In 2008, Elon Musk’s SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. Suddenly Silicon Valley, not NASA, was the epicentre of the new Space Age.

Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies – Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs and Rocket Lab – as they race to control access to outer space. While the space tourism ambitions of billionaires such as Bezos and Branson make headlines, these under-the-radar companies are striving to monetise Earth’s lower orbit; to connect, analyse and monitor everything on Earth.

With unprecedented access to private company headquarters, labs and top-secret launch locations – from the US to New Zealand, Ukraine to India – Vance presents a gripping account of private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations and multimillionaires guzzling booze as their fortunes disappear.

This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our time. Welcome to the new Wild West above the clouds.

‘Important, timely, instructive and entertaining’ – Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

World expert Bent Flyvbjerg and bestselling author Dan Gardner reveal the secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious projects on any scale.

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. Think of how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to an enormously successful product launch in eleven months. But such successes are the exception. Consider how London’s Crossrail project delivered five years late and billions over budget. More modest endeavours, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed:

• Understand your odds. If you don’t know them, you won’t win.
• Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it’s wrong.
• Think right to left. Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there.
• Find your Lego. Big is best built from small.
• Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.

Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done – on time and on budget.

‘Entertaining . . . compelling . . . there are lessons here for managers of all stripes’ – The Economist

‘Brilliant and timely’ – Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks

From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and one of the world’s top productivity experts, a groundbreaking philosophy for creating great work at a sustainable pace.

Hustle culture. Burnout. Quiet quitting. Today we’re either sacrificing ourselves on the altar of success or we’re rejecting the idea of ambition entirely. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There is a way to create meaningful work as part of a balanced life, and it’s called ‘slow productivity’.

Coined by Cal Newport, the bestselling author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, slow productivity is a revolutionary philosophy based on three simple principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.

Examining the stories and habits of ancient and modern scientists, philosophers, artists and scholars who worked in this way, Newport reveals just how transformative the slow productivity approach can be to producing a meaningful body of work.

From managing your energy according to the season, to identifying which projects to pursue and which to set aside, to building a schedule that yields maximum output with minimum stress, this timely and essential book will revolutionise how you work, helping you to accomplish great things at a more humane pace.

‘Intriguing and intelligent’ – The Times