Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Extreme Productivity
Book Review by Porchlight
There are few things worse than the feeling that you're getting very little done with the seemingly ample time you have. There are a handful of potential contributors to this feeling (including derangement), but most often we feel unproductive because we are in fact unproductive. In this case, what would help is a guide to increasing productivity, which is exactly what Robert Pozen has created with Extreme Productivity.
Categories: staff-picks
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Blog / Staff Picks
Infographics
Book Review by Porchlight
My 3-year-old daughter will only tolerate a certain ratio of words to pictures. Generally the pictures win the war for her attention. Looking at the popularity and apparent effectiveness of infographics, adults actually like pictures too (I certainly do).
Categories: staff-picks
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Blog / Staff Picks
500 Days, Eleven Years Later
Book Review by Porchlight
It's the morning after 9/11, eleven years later. As I sat down to write this post yesterday, I began typing up a description of four commercial airplanes hijacked by religious zealots and flown into the heart of the American establishment: two hitting a set of twin towers in the middle of the country's financial district, which when built were the tallest on Earth; another crashing into a five-sided office building—still the largest on Earth by sheer floor area—that housed the nerve center of the mightiest military the world has ever known; and one that was brought down in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania before it could reach it's final target, believed to be either the White House or the U. S.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Innovation Economics
Book Review by Porchlight
Politicians and the punditry across the country are making a good living discussing America's decline, but no one seems to be doing very much about it other than asking people to "vote for me" or "listen to me. " It seems like every time we turn to the news, it's the same story with a different punchline, usually dictated by what side of the political divide the speaker is coming from. Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell's new book, Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage, is a welcome, wonkish 440 page respite.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Phantoms on the Bookshelves
Book Review by Porchlight
People collect all manner of material goodness—cars, antiques, orchards, and art. . .
Categories: staff-picks, publishing-industry
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Best Business Writing 2012
Book Review by Porchlight
There is nothing that excites me quite as much as the English language when beautifully crafted, burdened with a purpose, and bearing the truth. I find it in my favorite poetry and great works of fiction that expose our human core, in artfully crafted works of nonfiction that explore the human story in all its facets and fascination, and yes, even in the best that business books have to offer. But, I find it most often when I sit down with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel every day over lunch, or when I follow the thread of a story contained in the a link in an email from ProPublica, when I relax with The New Yorker, Fast Company, and Foreign Affairs at home, or when I listen to a well-crafted story on This American Life or a great interview with Charlie Rose.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Tubes
Book Review by Porchlight
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck.
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Blog / Staff Picks
KnowledgeBlocks
Book Review by Porchlight
We're very pleased to announce the official opening of KnowledgeBlocks, a subscription-based service and online resource that gives readers access to quality content and business resources, a way to save, organize, and customize the information that is important to them, and engages business authors and thought leaders to help solve business problems and build new knowledge. Among the key features of the site, subscribers have access to the following: Explorations: Every month we publish three business book explorations that examine a narrow subject within a broader business topic. Each begins with a featured book and then branches out in unexpected directions, introducing you to author insights via podcast or interview, other related must-reads, curated links, and brief analyses that will help you build your business knowledge.
Categories: staff-picks, narrative-biography, publishing-industry, the-company
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Blog / Staff Picks
Resonate: Now at the Tip of Your Fingers
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
In the 2011 paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, author Todd Sattersten included a new sidebar of the best books on using visual thinking in business because, to play off an old saying, sometimes a picture is worth more than 1000 words. The list of recommended titles included Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin, Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points, and Dona W. Wong's Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Models Behaving Badly
Book Review by Porchlight
Models Behaving Badly has nothing to do with TMZ or a Harlequin novel. The models at the heart of this book are not beautiful people that fashion designers drape their creations over, but financial models that financiers and money managers try to drape reality over in order to make predictions about the market—and, of course, gobs of money. The author, Emanuel Derman, is a former theoretical physicist and used to be the head quant (quantitative analyst) at Goldman Sachs, so this is not cheap or easy entertainment.
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