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
Andrea Learned Recommends
Book Review by Porchlight
Stand Back, the Karma Queens, Geek Gods and Innerpreneurs are A'Comin' By Andrea Learned If you enjoy tapping your inner sociologist and anthropologist, the new book by Ron Rentel, Karma Queens, Geek Gods and Innerpreneurs, will be right up your alley. Within its pages, you will likely find bits and pieces of yourself, making it all the more fun (or scary) to read. Perhaps even more intriguing still, you'll also see many of your friends and colleagues in the nine "C-Types" Rentel explores.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Excerpt from Be the Elephant
Book Review by Porchlight
The new selection on our Excerpts blog is from the Preface of Be the Elephant: Build a Bigger, Better Business by Steve Kaplan. He helps readers understand the exact nature of their business by showing how to define objectives, identify risks, and get the operation on solid footing. Be the Elephant is the second book in a series aimed at helping solve the real issues faced by business owners, professionals, sales professionals, managers--anyone charged with growing any part of a business.
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Blog / Staff Picks
An excerpt from The Black Swan
Book Review by Porchlight
Visit our Excerpts Blog to read an excerpt from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Here are a few of the media hits Taleb has received: Wired Magazine The Wall Street Journal Financial Times And here's what we've written about it on our site: My Review of Portfolio's Book Reviews The Black Swan - Few and Far Between From the book: What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
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Blog / Staff Picks
New Excerpt!
Book Review by Porchlight
There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts Blog. It's taken from the introduction to Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken. This movement, however, doesn't fit the standard model.
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Blog / Staff Picks
See Jane Lead
Book Review by Porchlight
I've had this advanced copy on my desk for a while, and finally had the chance to page through it this morning. I'm always interested in business books directed specifically toward women in business. Sometimes these "girl power" books only reinforce unhealthy attitudes among female professionals who grumble about their minority status in male-dominated fields, yet fail to take action that promotes change.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Read an excerpt from The New Language of Business
Book Review by Porchlight
The new excerpt on our Excerpts blog is from Chapter 11 of The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2. 0 by Sandy Carter. Carter shows how, by levering SOA (service-oriented architecture), Web 2.
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Blog / Staff Picks
No "Jack Welch" on the horizon
Book Review by Porchlight
It's interesting how many inquiries we receive regarding "CEO" books. Not from customers, but from the media. There seems to be a fascination with the stories of heroic or villainous business gurus.
Categories: staff-picks, publishing-industry
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Blog / Staff Picks
Hot Spots spark innovation
Book Review by Porchlight
A few days ago we posted an excerpt from the book Ignited. Here's an excerpt from a February Financial Times article that reviewed Lynda Gratton's new book, Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, And Organizations Buzz With Energy - And Others Don't, another "hot" title this spring: But, if you are lucky, you may also spot the occasional flash of orange or red. These are "hot spots" - "a moment when people are working together in exceptionally creative and collaborative ways .
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Blog / Staff Picks
New Feature: Book Reviews on Del.icio.us
Book Review by Porchlight
We pay attention to what many people are writing about business books. Sometimes those articles and blog posts become the basis for a blog post here. Often, those reviews pass into the night—a missed opportunity to inform you of what we are seeing.
Categories: staff-picks
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Blog / Staff Picks
Excerpt from Flower Confidential
Book Review by Porchlight
There's a new entry up on our Excerpts blog. It's a chapter taken from Flower Confidential: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers by Amy Stewart. Flower Confidential takes us inside the flower trade and reveals what has been gained (and lost) by the new varieties and unusual breeds created in labs, and, of course, the worldwide market for flowers.
Categories: staff-picks