February 4, 2025

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.)

Here are our choices:

Jasmine’s pick: Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team by Paula Davis, Wharton School Press

In the wake of the pandemic and on the cusp of the generative AI revolution, the world of work has undergone a seismic shift. Chronic stress, burnout, and employee disengagement have reached crisis levels, and leaders are struggling to keep their teams motivated and inspired amid relentless change and uncertainty. Conventional management approaches are no longer sufficient, demanding a new leadership framework to address the root causes of these challenges.

To meet this moment, Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team provides a timely and practical blueprint for a new era of leadership. Drawing on extensive research and workshops with thousands of leaders, Paula Davis, CEO and founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute and author of Beating Burnout at Work, offers a transformative approach to building high-performing teams that can adapt and grow, even in the face of relentless change.

Lead Well offers actionable tools and insights to help you and your team today: 

• Discover the 5 Lead Well mindsets that can transform your team’s well-being at work; 

• Explore research-backed strategies to foster a greater sense of purpose, meaning, and values alignment at work; 

• Gain techniques to improve workload management, work-life integration, and sustainable productivity; 

• Develop skills to build team cohesion and a culture of trust and support; 

• Cultivate practices that boost systemic resilience and help teams adapt to disruption; and 

• Implement Tiny Noticeable Things (TNTs) that can be quickly adopted by teams. 

Davis’s first book, Beating Burnout at Work, addressed individuals and teams experiencing significant stress. This new book offers a method for addressing the factors that can lead to counterproductive stress and disengagement.

Whether you’re a seasoned leader or an emerging manager, Lead Well provides a holistic, research-backed framework to future-proof your leadership and unlock the full potential of your team. Navigating today’s turbulent work landscape has never been more critical—or more achievable.

Dylan’s pick: No One Is Self-Made: Build Your Village to Flourish in Business and Life by Lakeysha Hallmon, Dey Street Books 

Support is a verb. 

Dr. Lakeysha Hallmon keeps this mantra pinned to her wall as a reminder of the undeniable impact of community. When she was pursuing her entrepreneurial dreams, she quickly saw the racial disparities and systemic issues affecting Black small businesses. She began meeting many brilliant entrepreneurs and small business owners, recognizing their potential to soar if backed by invested supporters. 

In response, Dr. Hallmon founded the Village Market and challenged people to put the “Support is a Verb” mantra to action by rallying around businesses within their own communities. As a result, The Village Market funneled millions of dollars into local businesses, attacking the wealth gap and spiriting economic prosperity. This replicable model has inspired others nationwide to adopt a similar approach and economic strategy. She found that her beliefs were true: that by rooting our lives, businesses, and work in community–we find resources to create and support economic mobility from within.

No One Is Self-Made is an inspirational narrative weaving together themes of community, purposeful businesses, and collective economics. This book debunks the myth of being self-made and empowers readers to abandon the notion and lean into community on their pathway to success. Entrepreneurs at any stage of growth will appreciate Dr. Hallmon’s story—with all the ups and downs of founding the Village Market—and the road-tested advice she dispenses for those trying to find success in business, career, and life. She explains economic and social factors, missteps that can derail goals, and the tools necessary to create their own thriving village. Along the way, it becomes clear why working within a collective is a more effective path to success than going it alone. 

Sally’s pick: Perfect Is Boring (And It Tastes Like Kale): Finding Belonging and Purpose Without Changing Who You Are by Jess Johnston, Convergent Books 

Jess Johnston used to feel alone in her mess. In a random burst of courage, she started sharing about those insecurities and struggles out loud, and what she found shocked her. Again and again, people replied, “Me too! I thought I was the only one!” 

Over the last decade she’s reached hundreds of thousands of women with her message of authenticity and refreshing realness, and this is what she’s found: Women are really, really hard on themselves, and we should stop it. 

We often believe that if we just “did better”, “worked harder”, “were less messy/flawed/human”, our life would be infinitely better and everyone would like us more, therefore giving us the belonging we want. In her research, Jess has discovered that the exact opposite is true. It isn’t our lack of perfection that isolates us—it’s our authenticity about our imperfections that bring us together.

In Perfect is Boring (and It Tastes Like Kale), Jess reminds readers that no one’s living a perfect life, and there’s a powerful interpersonal connection that happens when we’re real about it. With honesty, heart, and humor, Johnston takes on lies she’s believed and the lessons she’s learning (and relearning) about cultivating an authentic life, including: 

• If I’m rejected, I will die. (We won’t.) 

• I’m a junior varsity adult, and the best spot for me is usually the bench. (Nope, we’ve got to get in there and play). 

• My job is to keep people happy and make sure they like me. (Excuse me while I go hide in my closet and have an anxiety attack.) 

Jess reminds us that the answers are in us already. They’re in wearing shoes that fit, in letting ourselves be ourselves, and in accepting that we’re a lot—a lotta mess, and a lotta great too.

Gabbi’s pick: Pure Innocent Fun: Essays by Ira Madison, III, Random House 

Most of us can recall the first TV show, movie, book, or song that made us feel understood—that shaped how we live, what we love, and who we would become. It gave us an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject—and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.

Here, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black, gay man in Milwaukee.  In this hilarious, full throttle trip through the '90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his mom's Lil' Kim CDs; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush's 2004 re-election, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); observing how Jerry Springer accidentally shaped queer representation; and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “A virgin who can’t drive.”

Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.