The 2022 Porchlight Business Book Awards Longlist
November 17, 2022
“This terrific collection of books balances the innovative with the iterative, and champions doing the right things the right way to make our work and our future tangibly better, no matter the industry or the endeavor.”
The past few years have laid bare just how deeply embedded many of the systemic challenges we face truly are. The books we have read and recommended the most over that time reflect that reality, often taking a 30,000-foot view to give us a better picture of the terrain we all go to work in every day. This year, we’ve found ourselves inundated with and immersed in books focused on what things look like on the ground, and how to go about our work with the knowledge we’ve gained during the pandemic and the years that proceeded it. There are, for instance, four books on our longlist this year focusing (at least in part) on restaurants—perhaps the hardest hit industry in the last three years—that provide lessons in resilience, service, and community building.
Our Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, had this to say in our final deliberations on this year's books:
This year’s longlist bears a more practical problem-solving mien than years past. The demands of the pandemic and other ongoing cultural tensions have made us more pragmatic, more hesitant to deal in declarative sentences and idealistic renderings now that we’ve been jarred by several years of intense change to how we work and how we live. This terrific collection of books balances the innovative with the iterative, and champions doing the right things the right way to make our work and our future tangibly better, no matter the industry or the endeavor. We do this, they collectively declare, by valuing progress over perfection, community over collateral, and the well-being of all over the enrichment of the few.
If recent years have reminded us how important it is to pause, to reflect on and reconsider our assumptions and direction, this year is about the need to roll up our sleeves and get engaged in the work. Here are the books we believe can help us do that.
LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
- Anti-Racist Leadership: How to Transform Corporate Culture in a Race-Conscious World by James D. White with Krista White, Harvard Business Review Press
- Dare to Un-Lead: The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World by Céline Schillinger, Figure 1
- Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than They Expect by Will Guidara, Optimism Press
- The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale by John A. List, Currency
- When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, How We Can Learn from Them by Julia Boorstin, Avid Reader Press
MANAGEMENT & WORKPLACE CULTURE
- Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work by Jess Rimington & Joanna Levitt Cea, Page Two
- How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives by Brian Elliot, Sheela Subramanian, and Helen Kupp, Wiley
- Satisfaction Guaranteed: How Zingerman's Built a Corner Deli into a Global Food Community by Micheline Maynard, Scribner
- Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work by Tina Opie & Beth A. Livingston, Harvard Business Review Press
- Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman, PublicAffairs
MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS/SALES & INFLUENCE
- Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike by Greg Hoffman, Twelve
- How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney, Portfolio
- How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth by Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness, and Kate Tellers, Crown
- Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath & Karla Starr, Avid Reader Press
- The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas, Alfred A. Knopf
INNOVATION & CREATIVITY
- Build the Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business If You're Not a Rich White Guy by Kathryn Finney, Portfolio
- How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back by Ariel Ezrachi & Maurice E. Stucke, Harper Business
- Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul by Matt Richtel, Mariner Books
- She Builds: The Anti-Hustle Guide to Grow Your Business and Nourish Your Life by Jadah Sellner, Harper Business
- Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Riverhead Books
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT & HUMAN BEHAVIOR
- Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain, Crown
- Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari, Crown
- Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself by Lynne Twist, Berrett-Koehler
- Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better by Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Flatiron Books
- Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University Press
CURRENT EVENTS & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
- Delinquent: Inside America's Debt Machine by Elena Botella, University of California Press
- Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source by Kathryn Judge, Harper Business
- Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America by Dahlia Lithwick, Penguin Press
- Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane, One Signal Publishers
- Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay, Penguin Press
NARRATIVE & BIOGRAPHY
- Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange, Bloomsbury Publishing
- Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers by Ruth Conniff, The New Press
- A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community by Natalia Molina, University of California Press
- Saving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19 by Gary Rivlin, Harper Business
- Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith, Roc Lit 101
BIG IDEAS & NEW PERSPECTIVES
- Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them by Paul LeBlanc, Matt Holt
- The College Devaluation Crisis: Market Disruption, Diminishing ROI, and an Alternative Future of Learning by Jason Wingard, Stanford Business Books
- Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports—And Why it Matters by Linda Flanagan, Portfolio
- Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World by Eliza Reid, Sourcebooks
- You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon, Basic Books
Thanks, as always, to all the authors who put their hearts, souls, and time into producing these books, and to everyone else working in the industry who helped bring them to life (and to the many other books we loved but had to leave off this list). We appreciate all of you, and the monumental efforts you put into bringing more books and ideas into the world.
We will announce our shortlist on December 15th, and the overall winner on January 12th, 2023.
About Dylan Schleicher
