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 - Money
By Porchlight
Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin, Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $27. 95, Hardcover, March 2014, ISBN 9780307962430 Money, as we are told in classical economics, evolved from a system of barter known in the simpler societies of our ancestors.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Scaling Up Excellence
By Porchlight
Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, Crown Business, 346 pages, $26. 00, Hardcover, February 2014, ISBN 9780385347020 Sometimes a book lands on my desk like a meteorite falling from the sky, as though it is announcing its presence with fire and debris.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Moment of Clarity
By Porchlight
The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems by Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen, Harvard Business Review Press, 214 pages, $28. 00, Hardcover, February 2014, ISBN 9781422191903 Consider a time you were buying a gift for someone, and had to decide between two items.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Mindwise
By Porchlight
Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley, Alfred A. Knopf, 242 pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, February 2014, ISBN 9780307595911 For most of us, social creatures that we are, our lives are nonstop sequences of human interactions.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Smart People Should Build Things
By Porchlight
Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America by Andrew Yang, HarperBusiness, 272 pages, $26. 99, Hardcover, February 2014, ISBN 9780062292049 Andrew Yang has a very simple, yet profound idea for the American economy: smart people should build things. By “smart people,” Yang is referring to the academically gifted—the top students from the top universities in America.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Undercover Economist Strikes Back
By Porchlight
Tim Harford has a knack for making the complicated, weird, and arcane aspects of economics accessible to the layperson—and a lot of fun to read, to boot. His usual realm is the behavioral, everyday economics of individuals and organizations (his books The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life are both brilliant on that score), but in his new book, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he goes big and tackles the wider world of macroeconomics.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - On the Edge
By Porchlight
On the Edge: The Art of High-Impact Leadership by Alison Levine, Business Plus, 272 pages, $27. 00, Hardcover, January 2014, ISBN 9781455544875 Alison Levine’s requirements for accepting team members to join her on an expedition up Mount Everest are notably different from those of us who hire employees to join us on our business adventures. In addition to skill and enthusiasm, she explains, “there was the question, Would I trust this person with my life?
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Body of Work
By Porchlight
Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together by Pamela Slim, Portfolio, 240 pages, $16. 00, Paperback, January 2014, ISBN 9781591846192 I recall an old employer of mine discussing candidates for a position, complaining “They jump around too much, one year here, another there,” inferring that these nuggets of experience wouldn’t add up to what we needed. I wondered how many other hiring managers felt the same way, and felt sorry for the candidates who had the challenge of telling their story.
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
By Porchlight
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk, HarperBusiness, 195 pages, $29. 99, Hardcover, December 2013, ISBN 9780062273062 Reading a recent New York Times article about Gary Vaynerchuk, I found a great story that epitomizes who Gary is, and why he’s written Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. About once a week, Gary Vaynerchuk posts a twitter message that reads, “Is there anything I can do for you?
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Joy, Inc.
By Porchlight
Joy, Inc. : How We Built a Workplace People Love by Richard Sheridan, Portfolio, 288 pages, $27. 95, Hardcover, December 2013, ISBN 9781591845874 Depending on whom you ask, joy in the workplace may or may not be considered crucial to an organization’s bottom line.
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