About Us

WHAT WE DO

CSNet Book Discussion Group is a lively and friendly group of professionals, who hold quarterly meetings to discuss interesting titles, selected from newly published business and management books from emerging authors.
Our meetings last 1½ hours, from 18.00 to 19.30 every 3 months. They are held in the round, and all attendees are encouraged to participate and ask questions of the selected author.

Subscription for members is £25 per annum, and for non-members attending a single discussion, it is £5.00.  In addition, there is a small charge of £5.00 for refreshments provided at each discussion to be paid by all attendees. 

GETTING IDEAS ACROSS

Selecting our first book proved to be relatively easy, as a colleague identified a book recently published, and the joint authors welcomed our approach. Since then, we have identified a steady stream of challenging books and willing authors.

We value the contribution made by the authors who willingly agree to attend our group discussions and to discuss their books with us. In return, books we review appear on our Website, and we make openings where possible to publicise their books in other areas.

We work with several publishers of management and business books to make contact with the authors we identify. In addition, the publishers identify and recommend suitable authors for us to discuss, as they like working with us. Publishers normally offer us a discount towards the purchase of books by their authors.

Thanks to the generosity of a committee member we have an excellent venue in Central London where we meet regularly for our very sociable and enlightening discussions.

CSNET HISTORY

The Co-Sector Network is a development from an organisation established in the 1970s to bring people from the public sector (especially civil servants) and private sector together to discuss topics of mutual interest over lunchtime sandwiches. This organisation was called the Institute of Management / Civil Service Network (CSNet) and at its peak it had monthly meetings of several different groups named after the days of the week on which they met under joint private/public sector chairmanship. There were also annual one-day conferences. After about twenty-five years of activity numbers began to diminish, and there were a number of other organisations successfully doing similar work e.g. The Whitehall and Industry Group (WIG). CSNet continued to hold lively meetings once a month until 2014, when it was wound up, and the current Book Group is an excellent spin-off from it. After such an illustrious history, it was agreed that the name should not be allowed to die, and so the idea of the Book Club, where we could discuss business and management topics was floated. With the circulation of a Proposal document, the original CSNet gave their approval for the CSNet Book Discussion Group to be launched as a non-profit making organisation. A few interested members from the old group offered to take the idea forward. In addition, we found strong support from some of our mutual working colleagues, and new members who were excited by the idea. The Group held its first book discussion in May 2014. You can find a list of all the books discussed since that date at Book Archive. Some of these titles are reviewed by members see Book Reviews.