Kathe Mazur

Making Numbers Count is a lively, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to turning cold, clinical data into a memorable story.

Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five - anything from six to infinity was known as 'lots'. While the numbers in our world have become increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. Yet the ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more. So how can we more effectively translate numbers and stats so that the data comes alive?

In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath and Karla Starr argue that understanding numbers is essential - but humans aren't built to understand them. Drawing on years of research into making ideas stick, they outline six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Using concepts such as simplicity, concreteness and familiarity, the authors reveal what's compelling about a number and show how to transform it into its most engaging form.

Whether you're interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you'd have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world.

We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we're told that failure is desirable - that we must fail fast, fail often. The trouble is, both approaches fail to distinguish the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson has spent four decades arguing that productive failure hold the key to lasting success. The world's leading expert on psychological safety, her research has shown that the most successful environments are those in which we can fail effectively - without our mistakes being held against us.

Now, Edmondson offers a revolutionary framework to get these failures right. She outlines the three archetypes of failure - simple, complex, and intelligent - before revealing how to minimise the consequences of the bad failures and maximise the potential of the good. Filled with vivid stories from business, pop culture and history, this revolutionary book is a rallying cry for us all to embrace our human fallibility and so learn to thrive. You will never look at failure the same way again.