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
Liespotting
Book Review by Porchlight
Oftentimes, when someone lies to us, we think, "I knew that wasn't true. " Yet, for a moment, we trusted them, and we believed they were being honest. We then wonder how we could have been more certain up front, and not have been fooled.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Doing the Right Thing
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
In 2007, we chose a book called Responsibility at Work as the winner of the Personal Development category for that year's Business Book of the Year Awards. It was the first time I'd been exposed to Howard Gardner's work--he is prolific*, so the book we featured was only a small part of his overall catalog--, and I became quite interested in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I don't recall if I've ever taken an official IQ test but I can tell you I wouldn't have done well on it.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Practical Genius
Book Review by Porchlight
Geniuses are people on a higher level. We imagine them as gurus and experts whose every word seems like the perfect articulation of whatever it is they speak of. And certainly, those people do exist.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Coming Jobs War
Book Review by Porchlight
Right now, some of us are sitting in positions we've held for years, and looking forward to staying that way. Others are scrambling to prove their worth in a highly competitive market. Yet others still may have given up, after years of trying to find work, with no hope in site.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Talk Normal
Book Review by Porchlight
Jack reviewed a great book a few years ago called The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong. It is a serious book critiquing what the author calls "the pseudoscience of management theory," a call for us to look at management theory not as a science, but as a philosophy. A question at the heart of that book is the efficacy of business jargon—that is, does the language we invent around business topics really produce a better understanding of those topics, or simply make the speaker of that language sound more clever, studied and imbued with expertise.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Future of Value
Book Review by Porchlight
According to Eric Lowitt, author of the new book, The Future of Value, sustainability and outperforming your competition at the same time, is a choice, not an impossibility. The first part of the book describes how sustainability creates value. And in this case, sustainability refers to "a continuous, unwavering commitment that companies make to balance their financial returns with environmental impact and social equity investments.
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Blog / Staff Picks
A Giving Business is a Good Business
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
Teachers in the Milwaukee Public School system were surprised on their first day back in the classroom this fall with a gift from a local company, Penzey's Spices. The gift included a jar of their newest salt-free seasoning, Forward! (which not-incidentally is Wisconsin's state motto), and a jar of their all-purpose cinnamon.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Retirement Heist
Book Review by Porchlight
Pabst Blue Ribbon has become a trendy beverage across the country. It has developed a blue collar, sub-culture friendly image. But while Pabst has been a huge part of Milwaukee's history, its connections to the city today are limited to its branding, and there are still plenty of working class folks here who won't touch it.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Culture and The Innovator's Cookbook
Book Review by Porchlight
When you booted up Windows 95, a man named Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno made that experience more remarkable and memorable. He made the little league game at the end of the movie Traffic seem profound and timeless—a gentle, reassuring reminder that the universe is stitched together of individual, seemingly mundane moments.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Invest Like a Girl
Book Review by Porchlight
634 points. That is quite a dramatic drop. How should we react?
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