How do we determine and pursue work that is aligned with individual talents and passions to achieve well-being and success? By finding our element - the point at which natural talent meets personal passion, says educationalist Sir Ken Robinson in The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. We need to nurture talent, and we need to develop an understanding of how talent expresses itself differently in every individual. When people arrive at their element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. Robinson looks at which conditions enable us to find ourselves in our element, and which conditions stifle that possibility.

Everywhere you turn these days, you’re bound to stumble upon Chris Anderson. If the award winning editor-in-chief of Wired isn’t being interviewed about his latest book, Free: The future of a radical price, he’s being interviewed about his job as curator of the influential annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference. How does he manage it? I asked myself.

It is natural to nurse a desire to revenge yourself on those who have mistreated you, says Robert Greene in The 48 Laws Of Power. Revenge as a response to a wounded ego probably happens more often in the business world than we realise. Revenge is inevitable, given the extent to which executives’ sense of self-worth is inextricably bound to their businesses. When Hewlett-Packard chairman Patricia C. Dunn broke an agreement with maverick board member Tom Perkins about how to handle a high profile leak probe, Perkins looked for revenge. "My No. 1 thing was to get Pattie out as chairman, and I got that," he told Newsweek. When Home Depot co-founder Kenneth G. Langone, former head of the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange's board, was named in a lawsuit by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer over his role in Richard Grasso's giant $187.5 million pay package, Langone urged friends and associates to donate money to Spitzer’s opponent in the race for the governorship.

Rudolph the dog was taking a walk in London’s Greenwich Park with his owner Sheila Robson when he got chatting to a dog belonging to Patrick Wellington, who just happened to be a senior financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. Sheila told Patrick that her 15½ - year-old son Matthew couldn’t find a work placement - which is how Matthew was offered a 2-week internship at the bank’s offices in Canary Wharf. The media and internet research team asked him to write a report about how teenagers related to media. Matthew knew that his peers talk a lot about media, but not in terms familiar to adults. So after contacting a few school friends to gauge their opinions, he wrote his analysis in a day, taking care to translate his ideas into language that bankers would understand. None of this – the dogs, the work placement, the report – would matter if Morgan Stanley hadn’t decided that How Teenagers Consume Media was so insightful that they published it. Overnight, Matthew became the talk of Tokyo, the word on Wall Street and the sage of the City. His thoughts are being eagerly analysed by CEOs, business leaders, politicians and media executives.

It takes a certain type of guts to write a book about guts. In 1998, Robert Lutz wrote Guts: The Seven Laws of Business That Made Chrysler the World's Hottest Car Company, a kind of maverick's primer on the business philosophy that revolutionised Chrysler. Like with Stephen Covey, seven wasn’t enough, so in 2003 Lutz added an 8th law (just as Covey added his 8th habit) in Guts: 8 Laws of Business from One of the Most Innovative Business Leaders of Our Time. Although he is not that well known outside the automakers’ field, Lutz is the only man in history to rise to the top of all Detroit’s Big 3 automakers – Ford, GM, and Chrysler. This former jet-attack aviator with the US Marines is a quintessential maverick. He’s in the habit of saying what he believes rather than what he believes others want to hear. This has often got him into trouble with his PR advisors, as when he declared that a particular GM car model was plain ugly. Lutz embodies the maverick’s ability to combine common sense with freewheeling creativity.