Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All
July 12, 2024
The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change
June 27, 2024
An Excerpt from When We Are Seen
June 05, 2024
'Getting Things Done with Others': An Interview with David Allen and Edward Lamont
May 28, 2024
Upcoming Author Interview: Tessa West — July 24, 2024
March 27, 2024
The 2023 Porchlight Business Book Awards
November 30, 2023
Promo Video: Our Author Interview Series
July 31, 2023
Blog
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Who's in the Room?
Book Review by Porchlight
There is a misconception in American business that Bob Frisch says is getting in the way of getting things done and hewants to correct it. That’s the misconception that senior management teams, or SMTs, make the decisions in business today. I may have shocked or surprised you with that statement, but if you have ever asked, or been asked, “Why wasn’t I in the room,” then you’ve had a taste of the challenge.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / ChangeThis
How to Change Medicine
By Porchlight
"The practice of medicine today is obsolete, extremely wasteful, driven by patient crisis and perverse incentives. New tools in medicine can reboot the future of health care, making it more precise, consumer-driven, and truly preventive. While not intended to be a comprehensive overhaul of all of the maladies of medicine, the 9 steps outlined here address exceptional opportunities for getting us on the right path for the future."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Changing the Way We Change
By Porchlight
"As a senior executive in fields as diverse as Aerospace, Entertainment and Intelligence, I've learned a hard lesson about people and organizations everywhere: they seldom learn from previous failures. To make matters worse, most people not only repeat past mistakes, but fail to learn that they've failed to learn from the past so they go on making the same mistakes over and over again."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Strategy for Personal Success: Discovering Your Purpose
By Rich Horwath
"Just as we need strategy for business success, we need to plan for successful lives. Without one, we allow all kinds of forces to push, pull, twist, and turn us into mental and emotional pretzels. Our inability to say 'no' pushes us into time-wasting activities; a lack of strategic direction allows us to be pulled down a career path we never wanted; good intentions to volunteer in the community are twisted into negative comments when we're not able to meet the time commitments; and we're emotionally turned around when the relationship we let wither finally ends."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
The Substitution Economy: How Small Changes in Our Day-To-Day Spending Can Shake the World.
By James Marshall Reilly
"We are, to some degree, what we buy. Or at least we can become a bit closer to who we want to be based on the products we use, consume, and wear. As consumers our brand alignment can function not only as a means for public self-identification, but also as an important source of self-affirmation. The brands we purchase can become, in a sense, our personal position statement. Each of us can define ourselves publicly, and we can simultaneously feel good about who we are privately, as a direct result of our consumption patterns."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
From Dropouts to Fully Functioning Adults: What's Missing in Our Efforts to Fix America's Public Educational System
By Steve Rothschild
"Young people pay a high price for not graduating high school. Drop-outs earn substantially less than their friends who have diplomas—when they're employed. The recession is tougher on them: their unemployment rates are higher than the rest of the population. Their risk of going to jail is higher, too. The rest of America also pays a high price for this awful situation: in lost talent, in lost taxes, the costs of social services we provide, and the costs of dealing with crime. And we can't even say that the whole world is in the same boat. We rank 8th from the bottom in a comparison of high school graduation rates among the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But we don't have to accept this travesty. We can teach young people the attitudes and skills they need to succeed in school and in life. And we can make it worthwhile for schools make the effort."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Generating Repeat Business
By Porchlight
"For any enterprise to thrive, you cannot underestimate the importance of repeat business. The vast majority of senior executives believe that providing good customer service is sufficient to obtain return customers. However, focusing on the service interaction alone is not always enough to generate repeat business; it's building an emotional connection that becomes the loyalty glue."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / News & Opinion
What Kind of Listener Are You?
By Sally Haldorson
Every morning when I drop my 6-year-old son off for school, I remind him to put on his listening ears. It is quite adorable when he reaches a hand up to each ear and "clicks" them into place. Of course this ritual of ours is more about reminding him to follow directions given by his teacher than teaching him social attentiveness.
Categories: news-opinion
-
Blog / Staff Picks
A (Quiet) Room of One's Own
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
In a 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. " There has been much literary analysis (and some criticism) of this assertion, and, over time it seems her call has been taken up by proponents of nearly every minority facing systemic repression, but in the context of the time, Woolf was being quite literal and pragmatic. Women rarely had space to call their own in which to do their own work.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / News & Opinion
Big-Hearted Business Books
By Sally Haldorson
In Gary Hamel's new book, What Matters Now (which we are giving away this week on inBubbleWrap! ), he encourages leaders to define a mission that "embodies the values of trust, generosity, and forebearance" no matter how "radical and weird" it seems. But he even goes further and suggests you bring love into the equation.
Categories: news-opinion