Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Resonate: Now at the Tip of Your Fingers
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
In the 2011 paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, author Todd Sattersten included a new sidebar of the best books on using visual thinking in business because, to play off an old saying, sometimes a picture is worth more than 1000 words. The list of recommended titles included Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin, Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points, and Dona W. Wong's Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Models Behaving Badly
Book Review by Porchlight
Models Behaving Badly has nothing to do with TMZ or a Harlequin novel. The models at the heart of this book are not beautiful people that fashion designers drape their creations over, but financial models that financiers and money managers try to drape reality over in order to make predictions about the market—and, of course, gobs of money. The author, Emanuel Derman, is a former theoretical physicist and used to be the head quant (quantitative analyst) at Goldman Sachs, so this is not cheap or easy entertainment.
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The New Theseus and Novelty Minotaur
Book Review by Porchlight
Theseus was always in search of his next adventure, choosing to travel overland to meet his father in Athens so he could clear the road of its notorious monsters and villains (such as Procrustes, who business book readers may recognize from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bed of Procrustes) rather than taking the safer sea route suggested by his grandfather. And when he learned that Athens was sending seven young men and seven women in war tribute each year to be devoured by the Minotaur—the half-bull, half man pet monster of the cruel King Minos of Crete—he decided he would be one of the fourteen to go, that he would try to rid the world of yet another monster. Winifred Gallagher's recently released New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, explains the tendencies each of us has (or lacks) for novelty and new experiences—or neophilia—and what those tendencies mean for each of us and our collective future.
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Who's in the Room?
Book Review by Porchlight
There is a misconception in American business that Bob Frisch says is getting in the way of getting things done and hewants to correct it. That’s the misconception that senior management teams, or SMTs, make the decisions in business today. I may have shocked or surprised you with that statement, but if you have ever asked, or been asked, “Why wasn’t I in the room,” then you’ve had a taste of the challenge.
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A (Quiet) Room of One's Own
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
In a 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. " There has been much literary analysis (and some criticism) of this assertion, and, over time it seems her call has been taken up by proponents of nearly every minority facing systemic repression, but in the context of the time, Woolf was being quite literal and pragmatic. Women rarely had space to call their own in which to do their own work.
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Paper Promises
Book Review by Porchlight
Our economic lives could literally stop on a dime. All it would take is an agreement redefining what a dime is, or is worth, backed by or tied to. It's happened before, and The Economist's "Buttonwood" columnist Philip Coggan believes it will inevitably happen again as the great international play of creditors and debtors enters its next act.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Where Did the Jobs Go?
Book Review by Porchlight
From the authors of Where Does the Money Go? : Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis and Who Turned Out the Lights? : Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis, comes a new book about an issue of grave national importance that has touched most of our lives recently, and will be central to the political debate this election year.
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The B2B Executive Playbook
Book Review by Porchlight
Selling to consumers is different than selling to businesses. Most marketers and business strategists understand this empirically, but it doesn’t stop them from trying to use celebrity spokespeople and other tried and true consumer approaches to sell to business markets. Why is this the case?
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Taking People With You
Book Review by Porchlight
Over the course of several decades in business, David Novak has worked his way up in the Pepsi Cola North America Co. through sales and marketing, into what was then its fast food division. In the late 1990s, the restaurants were spun off into a separate company and Novak went with them.
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From Values to Action
Book Review by Porchlight
"The National Leadership Index 2010, compiled by the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, showed that American's confidence in their leaders was 'significantly below average' for a third year in a row. " From Values to Action, page 3.
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