Worth following

The people worth listening to

31 people who teach business well, what each of them is actually good on, and where to start with their work. We summarise and point you at the real thing — the links go to them, not to a copy of them here.

Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland

Advertising and behavioural scienceUK

Argues that most business problems are psychological, and that the expensive logical fix is usually the wrong one.

What they teach →Seth Godin

Seth Godin

Marketing, permission and positioningUSA

Has argued for thirty years that interrupting strangers is a worse business than earning the attention of a few…

What they teach →April Dunford

April Dunford

PositioningCanada

Treats positioning as a solvable problem with a method, rather than a branding mood.

What they teach →Daniel Priestley

Daniel Priestley

Building a business around a recognised personUK / Australia

Argues that in most industries a handful of people get most of the opportunities, and that becoming one of them is a…

What they teach →Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni

Teams and how they failUSA

Writes about the meetings, silences and unspoken disagreements that quietly stop teams working.

What they teach →Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Attention, and work that requires thinkingUSA

Argues that the ability to concentrate is becoming rarer and therefore more valuable.

What they teach →Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek

Purpose and leadershipUK / USA

Made the case that people respond to why an organisation exists before they respond to what it sells.

What they teach →Chris Do

Chris Do

Pricing and selling creative workUSA

Teaches designers and agencies how to stop selling hours and start charging for the outcome.

What they teach →Steven Bartlett

Steven Bartlett

Founder interviews and building in publicUK

Built one of the most-listened-to business interview shows by asking the questions most interviewers skip.

What they teach →Alex Hormozi

Alex Hormozi

Offers, pricing and acquisitionUSA

Argues that most businesses do not have a marketing problem, they have an offer nobody particularly wants.

What they teach →Byron Sharp

Byron Sharp

What actually makes brands growAustralia

Marketing science that contradicts most of what marketers believe about loyalty and targeting.

What they teach →Michael E. Gerber

Michael E. Gerber

Why small businesses stay smallUSA

Named the trap almost every owner falls into: being brilliant at the work and terrible at owning the business that…

What they teach →Verne Harnish

Verne Harnish

Scaling a business past the founderUSA

The operating routines that stop a growing business falling apart around thirty or forty people.

What they teach →Paul Graham

Paul Graham

Startups, and thinking clearlyUK / USA

Essays that shaped how a generation of founders think about building something people want.

What they teach →Adam Grant

Adam Grant

Organisational psychologyUSA

Brings actual research to questions about work that are usually answered with anecdote.

What they teach →Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin

Search, audience research and honest startup writingUSA

Built a search-marketing company in public, wrote candidly about how hard it was, and now works on audience research.

What they teach →Emma Jones

Emma Jones

UK small business and self-employmentUK

Has spent two decades on the practical questions British small businesses actually ask.

What they teach →Marc Randolph

Marc Randolph

Testing ideas cheaplyUSA

Netflix's first chief executive, on why nobody knows whether an idea is any good until it is tested.

What they teach →Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk

Attention, social media and doing the workUSA

Grew a family wine business by getting to a new platform before anyone else, and has been shouting about attention…

What they teach →Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss

Systems, testing and long-form interviewsUSA

Made the case for designing work around the life you want, then spent a decade asking high performers how they…

What they teach →Codie Sanchez

Codie Sanchez

Buying small businessesUSA

Argues that buying an unglamorous business that already makes money beats starting a glamorous one that does not.

What they teach →Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker

Management itselfAustria / USA

Essentially invented management as a subject, and most of what came after is a footnote to him.

What they teach →W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming

Quality, systems and why blaming people failsUSA

Taught post-war Japan that quality is a property of the system, not the workforce — and was ignored at home for…

What they teach →Stephen R. Covey

Stephen R. Covey

Personal effectiveness and principlesUSA

Argued that effectiveness comes from character and principles rather than from techniques and tricks.

What they teach →Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy

Selling, goals and getting things doneCanada / USA

Made a career of turning sales and personal productivity into simple, repeatable, teachable steps.

What they teach →Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie

Dealing with peopleUSA

Wrote the book on how to get on with people in 1936, and almost nothing has improved on it since.

What they teach →Zig Ziglar

Zig Ziglar

Selling, and the attitude behind itUSA

The salesman's salesman, whose central claim was that you get what you want by helping enough other people get what…

What they teach →Tom Peters

Tom Peters

Excellence, execution and peopleUSA

Co-wrote the book that created the modern business bestseller, then spent forty years arguing that execution beats…

What they teach →Philip Kotler

Philip Kotler

Marketing as a disciplineUSA

Turned marketing from a set of sales tactics into a structured subject that could be taught.

What they teach →Eliyahu Goldratt

Eliyahu Goldratt

The Theory of ConstraintsIsrael

Every system has one bottleneck, and improving anything else achieves nothing.

What they teach →Jim Collins

Jim Collins

What separates good companies from great onesUSA

Spent years researching why some companies make a sustained leap and comparable ones do not.

What they teach →