Round-up of inspirational titles

OVER THE past decade we’ve seen many books that challenge in one way or another the conventional notions of what motivates us and how we make decisions. These are the five that inspired me most, together with the impact they’ve had on me.

2010 Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay. Impact: Never forget happy customers always precede happy investors. There are some things in life that cannot be pursued directly, like happiness. Happiness is the consequence of other things like a rewarding job, family, hobby etc. Profits are the same. Do not manage your business for shareholder value but do something you’re passionate about. Delight your customers and profits will follow.

2010 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H Pink. Impact: Inspiration to make sure BrainJuicer is a juicy place to work. Most jobs are a hangover from the Industrial Revolution where we bribe people to do dull work. In the 21st century, jobs should allow people to do something they’re passionate about, providing them with the mastery and autonomy to do it well.

2005 Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Impact: Challenges everything market research (MR) thought it knew about how people make choices. It shatters deeply held convictions about how your own mind works, and about happiness. The book has become our inspiration for translating breakthroughs in behavioural economics and psychology into MR tools that better understand and predict human behaviour.

2004 The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few by James Surowiecki. Impact: The inspiration for challenging 80 years of MR dogma. If people in a large, diverse crowd are asked their opinion, and those opinions are aggregated, they will be consistently more accurate than experts or scientifically sampled audiences. Six years and 500 head-to-head experiments later, we’ve confirmed that a crowd buying and selling shares in ‘ideas’ will be as accurate, more discriminating and better able to spot breakthrough ideas, than classic research approaches.

2003 Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings by Paul Ekman. Impact: The inspiration for exhorting brands to get emotional about advertising. There are seven universal emotions we recognise in people’s faces. Ekman’s work is used in the US in airport screening. We used it to create MR’s first universal measure of emotions and have spent the past five years proving that the degree to which an advert moves people emotionally is a better predictor of effectiveness than traditional persuasion-based metrics.