Blog
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Blog / News & Opinion
Business Book Award event: Seth Godin
By Porchlight
Each year, we host the 800ceoread Business Book Awards, where U. S. publishers and authors nominate their books for a variety of categories of business, from leadership and management, to sales, marketing, and biographies.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Inspire!
By Porchlight
Inspire! : Why Customers Come Back by Jim Champy, FT Press, 192 Pages, $22. 99 Hardcover, April 2009, ISBN 9780131361881 Some of the most successful business books use the research method to find the standouts in business, and then dig into those organizations to see what makes them so successful.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Here Comes Everybody
By Porchlight
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky, Penguin Books, 344 pages, $16. 00, Paperback, February 2009, ISBN 9780143114949 Everyone seems to have a vague idea of what sociology is. But a high school history class, or the course you took in college to cover some elective requirement, is about as far as we usually get in that understanding.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / News & Opinion
100 Best: Jack interviews David Dorsey, author of The Force
By Porchlight
Tune in today as Jack Covert interviews David Dorsey about his book The Force. Both the book and the discussion are about the dramatic experience of spending a year with the Xerox sales force, where sales, presentation, acting, relationships, and business are all in the fold. Dorsey's book is one of the books in Jack and Todd's book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Don't Bring it to Work
By Porchlight
Don't Bring it to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success by Sylvia Lafair, Jossey-Bass, 229 Pages, $24. 95, Hardcover, March 2009, ISBN 9780470404362 In my dotage, I have discovered some things—one of them being that, often times, patterns repeat themselves. In Don't Bring It to Work, Sylavia Lafair contends that negative behavior traits at work can often be traced back to one's family.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / News & Opinion
ChangeThis: Issue 57
By Porchlight
The 57th issue of ChangeThis has been published for your perusal and enjoyment. Excerpts and links below. ::::: Hit the Ground Running by Jason Jennings "Taking charge has never been easy.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
100 Best: Todd interviews David Allen, author of Getting Things Done
By Porchlight
David Allen discusses how to prioritize one's most important tasks to create a stronger sense of purpose. Allen believes that productivity is directly proportional to one's ability to relax, and that true creativity comes from clear, organized thought and a clear mind. David Allen's book, Getting Things Done is one of the books in Jack and Todd's book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / ChangeThis
Hit the Ground Running
By Jason Jennings
"Taking charge has never been easy. New leaders are expected to diagnose correctly, land on a brilliant strategy, pull together a powerful team, and inspire everyone to execute. Unfortunately, long lead times are gone. The months that leaders used to get for pondering, debating, or hiring outside consultants has shrunk to days. New leaders are expected stop the bleeding, decide who's in and who's out, make the strategic choices, and start racking up their wins right away. Shareholders, employees, customers, and communities believe that if you're tapped to lead you'd better be able to hit the ground running from day one. I started looking for a database of dos and don'ts for new leaders learned the hard way through years of trial and error and discovered there's virtually no reliable data available. Ninety-three percent of executives admit that their organization has never kept any records of the steps that led to their best or worst management decisions. So I started from scratch.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Calling All Corporate Couch Potatoes: Put Down the Doritos and Get Moving! Or, How Managers Can Succeed in Uncertain Times
By Jeanne Liedtka
"I am convinced that a good many of the 'survival strategies' that organizations are adopting are just wrong. Tragically wrong. For more than three years, my colleagues and I have been studying a set of managers who successfully grew their businesses in the face of uncertainty and scarcity. And they taught us an alternative path—a road less traveled—that suggests that growth needn't come with a high price tag and lots of risk. Their approach is custom made for today's climate of risk-aversion and limited capital. It may sound counterintuitive at first—and you've got to be willing to entertain a different view of reality to understand it. But once you've wrapped your head around this different worldview—this 'alternative reality'—you'll wonder why you didn't see it sooner. [. . . ] Your biggest challenge is not to find a way to trim another 10% off your work force; it is to make dealing with instability your sweet spot; to hone your ability to leverage surprise and uncertainty rather than just react.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Righteous Anger: "Mad as Hell" at "Greed is Good"
By Porchlight
"It is easy to wallow in the magnitude of the current catastrophe. But to prevent the next catastrophe, we must examine how and why the fall occurred. After all, the best solution is not to pad the ground, but to prevent the slip—more accurately, to prevent the many slips that culminate in the final slip before the fall. Corporate leaders have slipped, repeatedly. And finally—inevitably—they fell, hard. On us. After so many slips and slides, they should have seen the fall was coming, and done something about it. But they didn't, and so here we are. So, what's next. How do leaders prevent the next slip. That is, what can leaders do to defuse the current anger and lessen its likelihood in the future. The answer is to treat people fairly, and when that fails, rebuild the trust. Sounds too simple. It's not, but it is basic. This is why when the cynics and critics say that that is warmed-over recommendations from the past, we reply: Go back to basics; we know what works. In fact, what got us in this mess were leaders ignoring those tried-and-true basics.
Categories: changethis