October 15, 2024

Finding the right book at the right time can transform your life or your organization. We help you discover your next great read by showcasing four recently released titles each week.

The books are chosen by Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team: Dylan Schleicher, Gabbi Cisneros, and Jasmine Gonzalez. (Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted.)

This week, our choices are:

Dylan’s pick: Bad Artist: Creating in a Productivity-Obsessed World edited by Nellwyn Lampert, Pamela Oakley, Christian Smith, and Gillian Turnbull, Touchwood Editions

In a world that worships productivity, creating for art’s sake is seen as romantic and nearly indefensible. For anyone who has ever struggled to honour their artistic impulses, Bad Artist offers an antidote to this toxic productivity narrative. This collection of essays features 21 Canadian and international writers from a breadth of backgrounds and experiences whose lives are not always proscribed by predictable work schedules or reliable support systems. They fit creating into the cracks of their lives, and through their stories show us all how to keep creating—not producing.

As artists, many of whom have faced systemic barriers, the collection’s contributors offer pragmatic reflections on resisting the culture of productivity, reminding us that creativity can take many forms. Taken together, the essays present a comprehensive rumination on creativity in late capitalism, providing warmth, support, camaraderie, and empathy. It’s The Paris Review meets the Billfold’s “Doing Money” with a generous dash of the friend who knows you’re an artist even on the days when you’re not so sure.

Jasmine’s pick: Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Black Cat

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together.

Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.

Sally’s pick: The Employee Advantage: How Putting Workers First Helps Business Thrive by Stephan Meier, PublicAffairs

In an ever-shifting work landscape, leaders can no longer ignore their most overlooked stakeholders—their employees.

In The Employee Advantage, behavioral economist Stephan Meier explains why organizations must value their employees as much as—if not more than—their customers: those that pivot toward an employee-centric model will be more profitable, innovative, and appealing to top talent.

The good news? You don’t need to start from scratch. The customer-centric tools that give you a competitive advantage can be repurposed to focus on employees.

Through case studies of Fortune 500 companies like Costco, DHL, and Best Buy as well as smaller organizations, you will learn: 

• Why employees care about more than just money when it comes to their jobs—the same way customers care about more than just price 

• What two mindset shifts are essential to becoming an employee-centric workplace 

• How improving your employee experience will benefit your business and your bottom line 

The future of work is human-centric. The companies that win in the marketplace will be those with the best employees. To get and stay ahead, businesses must embrace the employee advantage.

Gabbi’s pick: The Leaders You Need: How to Create Diverse Leadership Teams for a More Dynamic, Resilient Future by Karen Brown, MIT Press

We need the strength that comes from diversity more now than we ever have in our collective memory. Without leadership teams that reflect the full range of humanity, for-profit and nonprofit organizations alike will find it more difficult to confront today’s challenges and are unlikely to thrive in the long term. But no two organizations have the same need for greater diversity in leadership nor the same path to achieving it. In The Leaders You Need, Karen Brown offers an innovative, field-tested ABCD Framework that will help readers to discover the hidden leadership and management talent in their organizations—and how to harness it.

Karen Brown shares the approach she has used to guide organizations from small nonprofits to the Global 500 on their journey to greater diversity in leadership and management. Her framework consists of four pillars: 

• How to align diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts with business priorities 

• How to build strong partnerships with stakeholders 

• How to cultivate a culture of role models 

• How to define objectives and outcomes with data

Readers will learn how to use the framework to identify and dismantle the barriers to greater leadership and management diversity in their organizations. What’s more, they will get practical advice on how to become inclusive leaders who create opportunities for everyone on their teams to learn, grow, and fulfill their potential.