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 - Running the Gauntlet
By Porchlight
Running the Gauntlet: Essential Business Lessons to Lead, Drive Change, and Grow Profits by Jeffrey Hayzlett with Jim Eber, McGraw-Hill, 256 pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9780071784092 Change often isn’t pretty and Jeffrey Hayzlett should know. In his second book, Running the Gauntlet, written in collaboration with business writer Jim Eber (as was his first, the best-selling The Mirror Test), he provides vivid detail of his adventures as a corporate change agent.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Hannibal and Me
By Porchlight
Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure by Andreas Kluth, Riverhead Books, 336 Pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781594488122 The key thing to know about this book is apparent in the title: Hannibal and Me (emphasis mine). Andreas Kluth, a writer for The Economist, presents the biography of the great Roman military leader, Hannibal, then weaves in a parallel line of stories about other types of heroes, artists, writers, inventors and revolutionists, all the while developing insight about human behavior.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Masters of Management
By Porchlight
Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—For Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge, HarperBusiness, 464 pages, $29. 99, Hardcover, November 2011, ISBN 9780061771132 Just from the title alone, you can tell that Masters of Management is a bit softer in tone than the book it revised and updated—a classic, The Witch Doctors by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, released in 1996. Micklethwait, now the editor-in-chief at The Economist, bowed out of this updated version, but Wooldridge carries the torch forward to cover the rise of the Internet, globalization, the explosion in entrepreneurship, and the ever-expanding field of management and leadership literature.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Screw Business as Usual
By Porchlight
Screw Business as Usual by Richard Branson, Portfolio, 384 pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9781591844341 By the time you get to page four of Richard Branson’s Screw Business as Usual, you will have already been treated to stories of Kate Winslett saving his mother from his burning home on Necker Island—literally carrying her soot-faced down the stairs as the fire rages behind them—and discussing the state of the world over dinner with the Queen and Barack Obama at Buckingham Palace. (And, to apologize for name-dropping, he shares a joke told to him by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Situations Matter
By Porchlight
Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers, Riverhead, 304 pages, $25. 95, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9781594488184 It is raining out, and you are in a rush. You back into the only open parallel parking space you can find on your third trip around the block.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Rare Find
By Porchlight
The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders, Portfolio, 276 pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, October 2011, ISBN 9781591844259 There are many situations in which you want to make the right choice, a choice that might change your lives in hugely positive ways. Consider standing before a roulette wheel in Las Vegas: you choose “18 Red” for a variety of reasons that have all sorts of associative data you apply to it.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Blah Blah Blah
By Porchlight
Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam, Portfolio, 350 pages, $29. 95, Hardcover, November 2011, ISBN 9781591844594 We’ve been fortunate to spend time with Dan Roam over the years, and his new book, Blah Blah Blah is as high-energy, insightful, and creative as he is. Blah Blah Blah is a book that may just be impossible to give justice to in a review.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Power of LEO
By Porchlight
The Power of LEO: The Revolutionary Process for Achieving Extraordinary Results by Subir Chowdhury, McGraw-Hill, 208 pages, $28. 00, Hardcover, September 2011, ISBN 9780071767996 Subir Chowdhury has written 13 books over the years, most recently a wonderful little parable entitled The Ice Cream Maker in which he introduced the LEO approach to sustaining quality in everything a company does. Since then, he has received repeated requests to write a more in-depth treatment of that process as it would work, or has worked, in the real world.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Once Upon a Car
By Porchlight
Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Auto Makers—GM, Ford and Chrysler by Bill Vlasic, William Morrow & Company, 400 Pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, October 2011, ISBN 9780061845628 A couple of years ago, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote Too Big to Fail, a brilliant and unparalleled “fly on the wall” narrative deep from the heart of the financial meltdown. Now, Bill Vlasic has written the equivalent about the American automotive industry meltdown from 2005 to the present.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Best Practices Are Stupid
By Porchlight
Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition by Stephen M. Shapiro, Portfolio, 224 pages, $22. 95, Hardcover, September 2011, ISBN 9781591843856 Imagine a company that has zeroed in on an opportunity to solve a problem or fulfill a need.
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