Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert is the founder and former president of 800-CEO-READ. His Jack Covert Selects column grew out of a “new releases” column he ran in the local paper’s business pages, and blossomed into a monthly review series that ran in business journals and newspapers across the country. As the company grew, other members of the management and marketing team began writing reviews for the series, but Jack continued to contribute his own voice until his retirement in 2014. We kept the series—now weekly—alive under his name for another year, and transformed it into our current Editor’s Choice series at the beginning of 2016.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Book of Business Awesome
By Porchlight
The Book of Business Awesome/The Book of Business UnAwesome, by Scott Stratten, John Wiley & Sons, 272 pages, $24. 95, Hardcover, August 2012, ISBN 9781118315224 This new book by Scott Stratten is actually two books in one. Open the cover with the title The Book of Business Awesome: How Engaging Your Customers and Employees Can Make Your Business Thrive and you’ll read some great advice about marketing, business technology, customer service, branding, human resources, public relations, and more.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Resilience
By Porchlight
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back by Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy, Free Press, 336 pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, July 2012, ISBN 9781451683806 To some, the world seems much worse than it used to be. The economy, crime, and even weather are all indicators that the good old days were exactly that.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Attention All Passengers
By Porchlight
Attention All Passengers: The Airlines Dangerous Descent—And How to Reclaim Our Skies by William J. McGee, Harper, 368 pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, July 2012, ISBN 9780062088376 William McGee is an award-winning travel journalist who worked for seven years in the airline industry, is a FAA licensed aircraft dispatcher, served in the US Air Force Auxiliary, and was chosen in 2010 by the US secretary of transportation as the lone consumer advocate on the Future of Aviation Advisory Committee.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Pumpkin Plan
By Porchlight
The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz, Portfolio, 228 pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, July 2012, ISBN 9781591844884 Has the dream of owning your own business turned into a nightmare? That is where Mike Michalowicz was five years into his first business.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Honest Truth about Dishonesty
By Porchlight
The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely, Harper, 304 pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, June 2012, ISBN 9780062183590 If Dan Ariely’s new book is anything like his last two, it will sell like gangbusters and enlighten a lot of people on a matter of the mind we take for granted, or don’t even stop to consider. And the book, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, comes at a time when we can use some pause and reflection.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
By Porchlight
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by John Coates, The Penguin Press, 352 pages, $27. 95, Hardcover, June 2012, ISBN 9781594203381 Many of today’s top graduates, the best engineers and scientists, mathematicians and physicists of the day, have been lured to Wall Street by the overwhelming amounts of money the big firms there are offering. One would assume that with all that talent and brain power, all the sophisticated risk analysis they’ve done and all the money that flows to Wall Street every day, that the world economy would be humming along.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Wait
By Porchlight
Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy, PublicAffairs, 304 pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, June 2012, ISBN 9781610390040 Frank Partnoy won the Biographies & Narratives section of our 2009 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards for his outstanding history of Ivar Krueger in The Match King. I am a big fan of Biographies, so I was partial to it, but his was one of the best I’ve read in recent years.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Good Food Revolution
By Porchlight
The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen, Gotham Books, 272 pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, May 2012, ISBN 9781592407101 For an average-sized book, there is a lot within this one. From the title, one might expect sociological research on trends in organic food, or an analysis of a health food business and how they became successful.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Reinventors
By Porchlight
The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change by Jason Jennings, Portfolio, 256page, $26. 95, May 2012, ISBN 9781591844235 The once vital Main Streets of America are all but out of business, boarded up or filled with antique stores shopping the delights and detritus of another era. Jason Jennings visits the main street of his own abandoned hometown at the beginning of The Reinventors to use it as a metaphor for “what will happen to you, your job, and your business unless you become a reinventor completely committed to constant radical change and growth.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - How Will You Measure Your Life?
By Porchlight
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth & Karen Dillon, Harper Business, 240 pages, $25. 99, Hardcover, May 2012, ISBN 9780062102416 Clayton Christensen is a business theorist who, in 1997, wrote the renowned Innovator’s Dilemma which introduced the idea that most well-established companies are overtaken not by behemoth competitors but by “disruptive” innovations that rise up and cut down giants in part because the giants were oblivious to the threat, and/or unable to invest in new emerging technologies.
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