Book Club: New Methods for Women — With Sharmadean Reid MBE

In New Methods for Women, Sharmadean candidly draws from her own experiences and challenges as a business-owner, parent and friend, and makes the case that “individual work on ourselves needs to precede collective action.”

Her toolkit of New Methods presents a blend of emotive and deeply practical experiments for doing this work daily — exploring behaviours like trust, competition, listening well, our media diet, decision making, negotiation and compassion. All are brought to life with diverse reference points, enlightening quotes and are backed by Sharmadean’s motivating calls-to-action for testing and learning — just as she's spent years doing herself.

And the data from those doing the same alongside her is very promising. Advocates for the tools have reported "better relationships, more confidence and, significantly, more salary increases. Little by little, the Methods work."

Sharmadean wants her book to be put into immediate action for individual and cultural change, "making the content redundant in my lifetime and absurd in a century”. And so we’re delighted she joined us live, virtually on the 27th June 2024, publication day, sharing insights into the methods and her own experimentation — and responding to the thoughts, questions and challenges of those along.

Enjoy the recording above.

In 2018 Sharmadean generously shared a reading list for the YCN Lending Library in London. Her selections were:

The Collected Dorothy Parker, by Dorothy Parker
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore
Competing Against Luck, by Clayton M Christensen et al.
The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell