Blog
-
Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Unthink
By Porchlight
Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius by Erik Wahl, Crown Business, 256 pages, $23. 00, Hardcover, June 2013, ISBN 9780770434007 Remember when you were a child, and could spend each day creating a whole new adventure for you and your friends? There were no boundaries to the stories you could dream up.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
-
Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Inside the Box
By Porchlight
Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg; Simon and Schuster, 257 pages, $28. 50, Hardcover, June 2013, ISBN 9781451659252 Inside the Box is counter-directive to the many business books published every year that strive to illuminate and teach creative thinking. Because there is a constant demand for new ideas in our fast-moving business climate, most books tend toward systematizing creativity in order to insure continued innovation within organizations.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
-
Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The End of Competitive Advantage
By Porchlight
The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast As Your Business, Harvard Business Review Press, 204 pages, $30. 00, Hardcover, June 2013, ISBN 9781422172810 Many books hail the end of major institutions or mainstream conventions. Rita Gunther McGrath’s The End of Competitive Advantage is one of these books, but it is unique among its peers.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
-
Blog / News & Opinion
The Clarity Principle
By Sally Haldorson
The Clarity Principle couldn't have landed on my desk at a better time. We've been discussing a new "mission statement" for 800-CEO-READ, one that reflects our purpose as well as the product. This book gives us plenty of guidance as The Clarity Principle aims to "illuminate how difficult it is to define your business, the costs you incur when you fail to clarify your purpose, and the tremendous gains to be won by succeeding in that effort.
Categories: news-opinion
-
Blog / News & Opinion
ChangeThis: Issue 106
By Porchlight
How to Get Employees to Manage Themselves by Cali Ressler & Jody Thompson “Employees don’t leave companies. They leave managers. [.
Categories: news-opinion
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Right or Kind? Navigating the Soft Skills Revolution
By Maxine Kamin
"Do we care about talking to each other anymore, or are we settling for mostly texts, emails, tweets, and electronic quickies? Is this like quickie sex, compared to romantic adventures with all the accoutrements of a love making session? Are we too busy to really connect? What is the draw of fast talk? We often think that quick communication saves time. This is true in some cases. Relying only on cursory communication though runs the risk of misunderstanding, and a lot of hoopla about 'what did she mean by that e-mail?' Once those questions get started, they take on a life of their own and end up as huge time wasters, not time savers, and the intent of the communication may be lost, and so badly misinterpreted that trust goes astray in the translation. Let's regroup and think about the advantages of face-to-face communication, what might get in the way, and types of skills that promote cooperation, even in difficult instances."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Jazz-Leadership
By Penelope Tobin
"Traditional leadership has long looked like the orchestral conductor. But we're living within a whirlwind of change, and the authoritarian individual, working to a fixed, detailed plan from a detached position of control, isn't equipped to deal with it. To survive these new circumstances, we must all learn how to improvise (from the Latin "improvises", meaning "not seen ahead of time"). [...] We need leadership in a new groove—jazz-leadership."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Your Time is Your Life—Invest it Well
By Porchlight
"Now is a time of revolution—or perhaps more precisely evolution—in the world of personal productivity. Time management no longer offers sufficient support for people overwhelmed with the onslaught of responsibility and opportunity in today's 24/7 world. The next step: Time Investment. Ironically, the people with the most time and autonomy can end up the most miserable because their relative freedom makes them hold onto the false notion that they can do everything. But the truth is that even if you have copious amounts of time and resources, you still need to make choices. Failing to do so will lead to an unsatisfying lack of depth and closure in your life."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
How to Get Employees to Manage Themselves
By Jody Thompson
"Employees don't leave companies. They leave managers. 70% of employees don't feel valued by their employers. 64% of Americans leave their jobs due to lack of recognition. This impacts the bottom line because customers feel the effects of employee success and either respond with loyalty, or get turned off by bad service or inferior products. There has to be a better way to improve employee and manager relationships in order to maximize business success. The answer is simple. Manage the work, not the people."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Alternative Answers: The Class Divide in Investing, and How You Can Close It
By Bob Rice
"Harvard's biggest single financial bet is on timber, not stocks. Yale has just 6% of its endowment in US equities; instead, it's long "absolute return," "private equity," and real assets. Each is up more than100% over the past decade. In the meantime, typical investors have, at best, treaded water. And that's no anomaly. In 7 of the 11 decades since 1900, the classic 60/40, stock/bond portfolio has returned an average real return of a whopping. . . 1%. Yes, those other four decades were big winners; but then those gains were walloped by the kinds of big crashes that are only becoming more frequent. Fact is, a class system has developed among investors over the past few decades. Elite money managers have used a proprietary set of tools to ride economic cycles up, but also to avoid big losses during downturns. Meanwhile, the rest of us all thought that "investing" was synonymous with simply buying stocks and bonds, with maybe a bit of real estate tossed in. [. . . ] Fortunately, times have changed—even if most people still don't know it.
Categories: changethis
