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 Art of the Sale
By Porchlight
The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life by Philip Delves Broughton, The Penguin Press, 304 pages, $27. 95, Hardcover, April 2012, ISBN 9781594203329 Sales is complicated. No one seems to like it, whether they’re doing the selling or being sold to, yet it is one of the most common positions in the world and many sales gurus preach, “everyone is in sales.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Advantage
By Porchlight
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni, Jossey-Bass, 220 pages, $27. 95, Hardcover, March 2012, ISBN 9780470941522 This is a book many people may have been waiting for. Although Patrick Lencioni has established himself as an elite business book writer, he writes parables, and for some, fictional stories just don’t get to the point quickly enough or clearly detail the important steps, data, and analysis of a situation in order to change and improve it.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Coming Prosperity
By Porchlight
The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy by Philip Auerswald, Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29. 95, Hardcover, April 2012, ISBN 9780199795178 With so much of the conversation in America today about the decline, decay, and descent of our power, the rise of others’, and the coming competition that that dynamic will create, Philip Auerswald’s new book, The Coming Prosperity, reminds us that life on Earth is not a zero-sum game. The first part of the book tackles the larger picture, the “macro-story line of the coming prosperity.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Power of Habit
By Porchlight
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, Random House, 400 Pages, $28. 00, Hardcover, March 2012, ISBN 9781400069286 We all have habits. Some are good, like brushing our teeth, and others are generally classified as bad, such as smoking, drinking to excess, or overeating.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - American Icon
By Porchlight
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman, Crown Business, 432 Pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, March 2012, ISBN 9780307886057 One of my favorite books of 2011 was Once Upon a Car by Bill Vlasic.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Idea Factory
By Porchlight
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner, The Penguin Press, 432 pages, $29. 95, Hardcover, March 2012, ISBN 9781594203282 One of the most important institutions of the 20th century was Bell Labs, created by AT&T and Western Electric in 1925 to design and research equipment for Bell Telephone. The Idea Factory is the story of that unique organization and its creation of some of the most important inventions of the past century—such as lasers, transistors, and telephone switching systems—patented by engineers who went on the win seven Nobel Prizes.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Uncommon Service
By Porchlight
Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business by Frances Frei & Anne Morriss, Harvard Business Review Press, 272 pages, $29. 95, Hardcover, February 2012, ISBN 9781422133316 As a service company, when we receive feedback about a negative situation, we immediately act to resolve the conflict and then try to put a process in place to avoid such a thing happening in the future. Most books on service describe ways to do this: how to react to or plan for customer service breakdowns.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Inside Apple
By Porchlight
Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky, Business Plus, 223 Pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781455512157 Apple, one of the most iconic companies of this century, has created many life-changing products (products we mostly didn’t know we needed until they made them, and now can’t live without), yet we know little about the inner workings of this organization… other than what Apple wants us to know. One thing I found particularly illuminating is Apple’s ability to say no.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Wide Lens
By Porchlight
The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation by Ron Adner, Portfolio, 231 pages, $29. 95, Hardcover, March, 2012, ISBN 9781591844600 Of all that’s been written and espoused on innovation over the past several years, it seems a key consideration has often been overlooked, one that Dartmouth College professor Ron Adner has gleaned from years of studying the subject. Adner has now detailed his findings as well as his prescription for greater success at innovation in The Wide Lens, in which cites many examples of companies that failed to check the “innovation blind spot” of their innovation ecosystem and consequently failed with innovations that should have been wild successes.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Emotional Equations
By Porchlight
Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success by Chip Conley, Free Press, 288 pages, $24. 00, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781451607253 Chip Conley bares his soul in his second book, Emotional Equations, and in doing so helps us understand our own. It is painful at times, as he recounts his own doubts and darker moments in life and business, tells us of four friends that took their own lives in one economically depressed summer, and relates the story of when his own heart literally stopped after a business presentation, landing him in the hospital.
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