Books

Books

Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world need

Published by Do Books in 2021.

The world of business is changing. The single pursuit of ‘profit at any cost’ has been replaced by a desire to build companies that create a better future — and enjoy commercial success.

In Do Build, Alan Moore draws on his years of research into some of the most pioneering and progressive businesses on the planet. By speaking to their purpose-driven founders,
 he discovers that it is possible to lead with generosity, have a transparent supply chain, design products and services that are considered and joyful, and create a company culture where individuals flourish.

By sharing examples of best practice, Moore invites us to create a different type of business: one that will regenerate and restore our economy, our environment, and our civilisation.

Are you ready to build a new reality?

This paperback purchase includes a free ebook download.

‘This may be the most enlightened, concise, and extraordinary book on business ever written. It could be said that true beauty and business have never met. They do here. Business has long known how to steal the future. Alan Moore describes flawlessly how it can heal the future.’

Paul Hawken, author & environmentalist

‘Business can do good. Alan is passionate about the contribution that design can offer…in the journey towards kinder and more generous work. This is a beautiful book.’

Professor Peter Childs FREng, Imperial College London

‘Beauty. Elegance. Joyful. Regenerative. If these words strike you as essential to how business ought to be done today, then you simply must read Do Buildand learn how you make a difference in the world. And if these words seem odd to you, then you certainly should read Alan’s provocative and thoughtful book to shift your perspective and understand, perhaps for the first time, why you are in business.’

B. Joseph Pine II, co-author, The Experience Economy

Do Build offers hope, vision and practical ideas for creating a new model for businesses and indeed us all, post-Covid. What joy to see a philosophy that starts from beauty, and embraces regenerative principles and empathy at its very heart. Read this book, reshape your life and your business, and we all stand a chance of making a better future for everyone, including the planet.’

Dame Fiona Reynolds, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and author of The Fight for Beauty

‘Alan Moore invites us to imagine a world where both form and function are beautiful, elegant, and joyful to behold – and then shows us that this world is already here, although not yet well distributed. We can have a world where humans and the natural world thrive in harmony. And that world starts with beauty, which in turn starts with a force even deeper and more powerful. To quote Alan: “Beautiful things can only ever be made with love”.’

Roz Savage MBE

Do Design. Why beauty is key to everything

Published by Do Books in 2016 – an international bestseller.

So much passes us by, unnoticed. We multi-task, switch between screens, work faster. When was the last time you paused to consider a beautifully made object or stunning natural landscape? Yet this is when our spirits lift, our soul is restored.

Do Design invites us to rethink not only what we produce – whether it’s a website, a handmade chair, or a business – but how and why. With examples from Apple, Yeo Valley and Blitz Motorcycles, we are encouraged to ask: Is it useful and considered. Is it a thing of beauty?

‘The way you pull together craftsmanship and living is, I think, a very Ruskinian approach to the 21stC.’

Director Education
The Guild of St George

10 Good Books for Leaders for 2020

This lovely offering by designer Alan Moore tells us that we are creative beings, and urges us to create things that are better and more beautiful. Carefully illustrated and in a handy size, its part of the ‘DO’ series that I stumbled across earlier in the year (and now have many in the series). It reminded me that if you’re a leader you’re a builder. You’re building something. So build well and build beautifully. That’s the simple message of this excellent book.

Matthew Porter
The Leadership Blog

‘We met a few years ago when you gave a mind-opening talk on a Hyper Island course on “Digital strategy”. I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your book Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything. I often think about it and it’s become a source of reference and inspiration for me in my work as well as in everyday life.’

Daniel Mair
Board Member Design Sweden

‘I feel you are a collector of beautiful experiences, things, knowledge, then weave them into stories , so they are ordered, become connected, and telling. It’s a gift, a gift coming from your own way of living and navigating life’

Liu Qian

‘Dear Alan, I have been thinking about your valuable work in recent months. Beauty sustains us through adversity. Beauty, walking and stillness. And love.’

Louisa Thomsen-Brits
Author

‘Was thinking about you and your book a lot this week as we ran a collaborative workshop with our 1st year Fashion students and Ecological Architecture students facilitated by our institute of green investment. Pro Haim Dotan led the students in poetry writing on the first evening. Remarkable results – beautiful’

Patrick Gottlier
Master of Apparel and Product Design Shanghai DeTao Masters Academy

‘Your book gave me both the inspiration and courage to write about beauty within the context of architecture.’

Alison Brooks
Alison Brooks Architectss

‘Alan Moore’s book on beauty links the history of that which has been simply made, to that which has been extraordinarily made. The difference is that which is engineered, to what is crafted, to what is designed.’

John Maeda
Automattic – previously President Rhode Island School of Design, Partner at KCPB

‘I found your book so, unbelievably inspiring. The concept of beauty and truth is something that has really altered the way I am approaching creative thinking, and upon finishing the book I decided I would read it again and again at the outset of future design projects to help me to get in the right frame of mind.’

Jim Davis
Personal correspondence

‘Your book gave me real clarity and a forceful nudge to just make things and see where it takes me. What a book!’

Jono Smart
Contemporary potter

‘I read your book Do Design on why beauty is key to everything. What you described in the book is not just an approach to design, it’s a way of life.’

Karen Hodkinson
ID magazine

No Straight Lines

Published in 2011 by Bloodstone

Living at the adaptive edge of our linear economy, faced with multiple challenges that are social, political, economic and organisational. No Straight Lines asks the question – how can we design and then create a restorative economy that works in a world where it’s not business as usual, in a world that is nonlinear?

For me, as a designer, helping create a restorative economy is probably the best design challenge going.

‘In the moments between watching and re-watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony in the past 48 hours, I’ve been reading No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Non-Linear World by Alan Moore. Alan presents the current array of economic and social problems as a kind of design challenge, where what is being redesigned is the organisation of society as a whole. Insanely ambitious, but I rather like that. In sum: ‘Imagine the impossible, then create it.’ Our hero Danny Boyle would agree.’

Diane Coyle
OBE; Vice Chairman BBC Trust; Economist; author of The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters, The Soulful Science.

‘No Straight Lines is a passionate and intelligent book that explores the insanity of humankinds desire to organise itself along engineered technical, mechanistic lines when we are part of the natural world which is fluid, adaptive and asymmetrical. You find no straight lines in nature. Anyone who is interested in the future, interested in how our aspirations to work in a way that satisfies our creative intent and frankly, anyone who has an interest in the true nature of happiness – should read this important book. This is a great achievement and I commend this book to you.’

Tim Smit
Founder of The Eden Project Cornwall

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