We’re delighted to share that Vikas Shah MBE has just published his first book.

Shah is well-known in the laundry industry as managing director of Swiscot Group, the Manchester based textiles firm.

Swiscot Group includes Linen Connect who supply to commercial laundry, healthcare and hospitality businesses across the UK. Linen Connect are headline sponsor of the Laundry and Drycleaning Awards – the LADAs – the key annual industry event that Shah has actively supported for many years.

Shah is also a highly regarded and respected speaker and expert on entrepreneurship, business and social issues. He’s a professor, he’s a philanthropist, and he’s also a regular columnist for British Airways Business Life magazine. Somehow, in between all of this, he’s written a book. It has been many years in the making, and we’re delighted to share that it’s finally here.

In 2007, he started a blog titled Thought Economics, as an outlet to explore topics and people that interested him. He had no strategy for it – it was just a hobby alongside the day job.

Over time it grew. A breakthrough big-name interview with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) helped him to shape his format and fine tune his approach for the interviews that were to come. Next up was Buzz Aldrin, and since then he’s been on a mission to interview the people shaping our century. Through his hugely successful website, Thought Economics, he has spoken with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, quizzing the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.

In this book, Shah presents some of his most emotive and insightful interviews to date. Featuring conversations on culture and identity to leadership and entrepreneurship, democracy and the economy to discrimination and injustice, an extraordinary array of influential people offer their thoughts and ideas, including: Noam Chomsky, Maya Angelou, Melinda Gates, Elif Shafak, Rankin, Sheryl Sandberg, Muhammad Yunas, Bertie Ahern, F. W. de Klerk, Mark Cuban, Laura Bates, Deepak Chopra, Black Thought, Tracey Emin, and many more.

As Shah says: “We often talk of war and conflict, the economy, culture, technology and revolutions as if they are something other than us. But all these things are a product of us – people like you, who have ideas that matter. We live in fast-moving and extraordinary times, and the changes we’re experiencing now, in these first decades of the twenty- first century, feel particularly poignant as decisions are made that will inform our existence for decades to come.” Shah was awarded an MBE for Services to Business and the Economy in Her Majesty the Queen’s 2018 New Year’s Honours list.

Shah is committing a minimum of £10,000 of the royalties from this book to two charitable organisations: In Place of War, an international charity he chairs, and the University of Manchester. Both are fighting for the power of knowledge to show us ways to change the world.