Five books about the rules nobody wrote down

A friend of mine still has my copy of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Read it until the spine gave up and never gave it back, which I've decided to take as a review.

That book is on a list I’ve just done for BookDNA, and it’s live now. Five books about the invisible rules that actually run your working life. Here it is.

Where it came from is this. I spent my first decade in business assuming the game was chess. Play well, win, everyone agrees on the rules. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that most rooms don’t run on the rules in the rulebook. They run on power, on persuasion, on who is quietly measuring themselves against who, and on the thing that makes a team come apart months before anybody says a word about it. Every one of these five named a rule I’d been losing to without knowing it was there.

And the deepest rule of the lot was the ladder itself. Do the junior work, get trained, move up. Nobody questioned it because it had always held. I build AI tools for a living, so I get to watch that one come apart in near real time, which is roughly why I wrote a book about what replaces it.

The Harari is the one that looks forward, and that’s the one I keep handing to people. I read it just before the pandemic, right as I was turning the agency into a consultancy. Timing wasn’t ideal. Sapiens looks backwards, this one looks at what’s coming, and that pulled me in a lot harder. It sits close to the future of work I’d actually want. I don’t think we get there, mind, because people will reject the things that make them feel bad long before they’ll change.

Cialdini’s Influence I’ve used almost daily since 2016. Not to manipulate anyone. To get my perspective across so it actually lands. It changed how I run advisory work more than anything else on the list: liking by being personable and honest, reciprocity by giving away real advice that sits outside the sale, and scarcity, which I now see everywhere and can’t unsee. The deflating part is watching someone’s biases hold so firm that no amount of care shifts them. I’d keep it away from anyone who persuades for manipulative ends, because in the wrong hands it’s a manual. In mine it’s a way of thinking a bit more carefully about my own thinking.

Then the 48 Laws, which I read in 2021 just after launching the advisory, when I started noticing dynamics in rooms I’d never been in before and wanted to understand what I was looking at. I read Greene as describing the world, not recommending it. Most people never consciously learn any of this. They’ve copied behaviours that seem to work, a bit like a cargo cult. Law ten, avoid the unhappy and the unlucky, still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I think it only holds if you’re a zealot about it.

Five Dysfunctions is on there because I’ve caused at least two of them myself. Early on it was inattention to results, because my ego was convinced I ran the best digital agency going. Later, and more damaging, it was fear of conflict. Not dealing with a problem until it had turned personal. Any team above four or five people, these show up, and the hard bit is that the founder usually can’t fix them, because the founder is one of them. I’ve sat in a board meeting doing 85% of the work for half the value, watching one partner chase results and another dodge accountability for the entire hour.

The Peterson I picked for one rule, really. Compete with who you were rather than the people around you. I’d been watching colleagues as comparison rather than research, which dragged me down and helped none of the businesses. It falls apart in small edge cases, and people love an edge case as a reason to bin a whole book. The one I disagree with most is the personal truth one, because those truths move as your life moves. I doubt there’s a single one you hold forever.

Anyway. The list is live, there are five covers on it and a short bit from me under each one, and it took me longer to choose them than to write about them.

The Next Rung is out 19 January 2027 with Practical Inspiration Publishing. Pre-order at thenextrung.co.