The 7 Best Mike Clayton Books

Mike Clayton is one of those business authors who does not take his audience for fools, idiots, or dummies.

His books are intelligent but also manage to be easy to read and understand. That comes from over 25 years of training managers, leaders, and professionals from all areas of industry business, and the public sector.

Clayton has an unending intellectual curiosity, which he shares generously with his readers. His books are packed with ideas. And, coming from a background in project management and consulting, you can be sure that they are also full of practical tips that let his readers quickly make a real difference.

Mike Clayton has written 14 print books and numerous Kindle-exclusives too. But I’ve gone through all of them and found the seven best for you.

Mike’s professional expertise is as a project manager. And he has trained thousands of project managers across the UK and beyond.

This book is a fabulous introduction to project management – will quickly get you managing your first project with real confidence. Reading it, you almost get a sense of being in a training room with Mike.

Mike has spent his whole career communicating with clients, colleagues, and stakeholders. In this book, he offers indispensable practical advice for anyone who uses the most important form of communication in their work.

It is full of practical tips from everything from better listening to resolving conflict and high pressure ‘complicated’ conversations.

This one is a real favorite. It is the nearest Mike Clayton has written to a self-help book. It really does help you recover more time when you’ve tried every time management tip (and there are loads of those in my next recommendation!).

The Yes/No Book will help you make better choices about when to say yes and when to say no. And, crucially, it’s full of great advice on how to say Yes or No.

Best of all, it’s got a fabulous set of diagrams and illustrations that artist Toni Goffe has drawn to illustrate Mike’s ideas using the metaphor of the Gopher – the part of you that just wants to ‘go for this and go for that’!

This is Mike’s distillation of dozens of powerful tips, tools, and techniques to get more time and be more productive. There is so much in here.

Mike avoids a single system approach and lets you find what methods work for you. I can’t believe you won’t find two or three tips to help you squeeze some extra productivity out of your working (or non-working) day.

What Mike does for Time Management in the previous book, he does for influencing and persuading. He surveys dozens of techniques form classic rhetoric to modern psychology.

And he explains them clearly and simply. Here is everything you need to know about being influential, so you can get more of what you want.

Mike takes a simple approach to risk. He says it arises from feeling a lack of control in one or more parts of your life.

This helps you to understand the causes of stress. Then, he takes each point of control and shows us how to tackle each of them. Once again, this is a fabulous sourcebook.

This one is Mike’s most meaty book. It is for managers leading change, who need to engage stakeholders and align their support. It’s not for the casual reader, like the others in this list.

But, if you are leading change and need to fully engage stakeholders, this is pretty much the best book out therefore a clear framework and a big set of tools.

More about Dr. Mike Clayton

Mike Clayton is an author, speaker, and management educator. He founded OnlinePMCourses.com and runs two successful YouTube Channels:

• For Project managers: https://www.youtube.com/c/onlinepmcourses
• For Managers who want to learn management skills: https://www.youtube.com/c/managementcourses

Mike started his career at Deloitte Consulting, becoming a successful Senior Manager in the London Office. There he led major programs for international clients and Government Departments.

He left in 2002 to set up his own training business and is now one of the most in-demand project management and leadership skills trainers in the UK.

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