New Book Releases for the Week of July 29, 2025
Featuring new releases from Tre Johnson, Martin Dubin, Kate Morgan, and Laura Huang.
What forces hold us back, and how do we overcome them to achieve our greatest successes? Each of these four books explores stories that illustrate how we can evolve and expand personally and professionally.
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabbi Cisneros, Jasmine Gonzalez, and Dylan Schleicher. As expert booksellers, we browse publisher catalogs and explore new titles from across the book industry to discover what captures our interest, and we're excited to share our findings with readers like you.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are provided by their respective publishers.
Our Recommended Books This Week
Dylan's pick: Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy by Tre Johnson, published by Dutton
Black genius sits at the heart of the American story. In his probing essay collection, Black Genius, cultural critic Tre Johnson examines how Black American culture has, against all odds, been the lifeblood of American ingenuity. At times using his own personal and professional stories, Johnson surveys Black cities, communities, and schools with an ever-watchful eye of what transpires around Black mobility.
With a passion for complex storytelling and pulling from both pop culture and American history, Johnson weaves past and present making his case for the genius of innovation. As he examined all he collected, Johnson couldn’t help but wonder about the brilliance of the every day. Specifically, the creativity of the 90’s graffiti-style airbrush tee, his aunties packed weekend bus trips to Atlantic city, and the razor-tongued, socially-sharp, profanity-laced monologues of comedian Dick Gregory.
Again and again, he asks us to ponder—are these not obvious examples of genius?
Chatty yet profound, Black Genius subverts expectations from the very first page with a blend of reportage, historical data, and pop culture as Johnson dives into his own family history seeking big answers to complex questions. Johnson’s signature wit and curiosity turns history into an amusing sequence of events.
Jasmine's pick: Blindspotting: How To See What's Holding You Back as a Leader by Martin Dubin, published by Harvard Business Review Press
As leaders, we all hit a point when things stop going well. A problem emerges that we think we can handle but discover we can't. The tools that got us this far somehow stop working. We don't understand; what are we missing?
What we don't see is what we can't see: we have blindspots.
It's a known fact that we're often not great judges of ourselves, even when we think we are. Sometimes we're simply unaware of a behavior or trait that's causing problems. Other times, where we see normal, effective behavior, others see tremendous deficits. Bottom line: until we uncover these blindspots, we can’t move forward or deliver on our goals as leaders.
The good news is that you can learn to do your own blindspotting. Clinical-psychologist-turned-entrepreneur-turned-business-coach Martin Dubin has spent years learning when and how leaders get in their own way, and he has turned that experience into a deeply practical blueprint to help you identify your professional blindspots and work to overcome them.
Blindspotting provides a framework for understanding six types of blindspots, then takes you inside coaching sessions with profoundly relatable leaders going through the process of learning to recognize their own blindspots. Along the way, you get the practical guidance you need to identify and manage those same blindspots in yourself, unlocking high performance and great leadership.
Gabbi's pick: Custom-Fit: A Straight-Talking Guide to Hiring Top Talent for Entrepreneurs & Small Business Owners by Kate Morgan, published by Forbes Books
Packed with real-world stories and insights from Kate Morgan’s extensive experience, Custom-Fit offers a roadmap that balances emotional intelligence with a data-driven approach. Founders will learn how to identify high-potential candidates, avoid costly hiring mistakes, and create a cohesive team that shares their vision. With her straightforward, no-fluff advice, Morgan helps entrepreneurs get past the people pitfalls and build a strong, productive team that drives business success.
For small business owners, hiring the right people can make or break their company. Custom-Fit: A Straight-Talking Guide to Hiring Top Talent for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners by Kate Morgan is the essential resource for founders seeking practical, no-nonsense advice on building a team that fuels growth without the complications of big business HR.
Kate Morgan, a seasoned talent acquisition expert and founder of Boston Human Capital Partners, brings over 25 years of experience in guiding small businesses to make smart, strategic hires. Morgan knows that, for companies with fewer than 25 employees, traditional HR models simply don’t apply. Instead, Custom-Fit provides straightforward guidance that emphasizes aligning hires with core values, conducting insightful interviews, and developing a hiring plan that fits a smaller organization’s needs and resources.
Inside, readers will find techniques for:
- Defining core values and using them as a hiring compass
- Structuring interviews to identify high-potential candidates without resorting to typical corporate jargon
- Building a hiring plan that avoids premature or mismatched hires
- Balancing emotional intelligence with data-driven decision-making
Morgan shares stories of both successes and hard lessons learned from the hiring trenches, showing founders how to avoid costly hiring missteps and build teams that truly support their vision. Entrepreneurs will discover how to tackle the challenges of “peopleing” with confidence, creating a cohesive, motivated team that drives business success.
Packed with actionable advice, Custom-Fit is the guide for small business leaders who know that great teams are built, not bought, and that every hire matters. Whether you’re hiring your first employee or preparing to expand, this book equips you to make hiring decisions that propel your company forward.
Sally's pick: You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition by Laura Huang, published by Portfolio
What sets the most successful people apart? You may think that the correct answer is hard work (and it’s certainly part of it), but in her interviews of the most accomplished individuals—from entrepreneurs and investors to Olympic athletes and Pulitzer Prize winners—Distinguished Professor of Management Laura Huang discovered that what they called their gut feel, the product of their intuition, played the most important role.
We all have intuition, our brain's intelligent synthesis of external data and the entirety of our personal experiences. As such, it draws from what we already know and what we didn’t even realize we knew. This culminates in a gut feel that manifests as a eureka moment, a Spidey sense, or a jolt that changes how we see things and compels us to act. Most people experience these flashes of clarity passively, as random occurrences that come out of the blue.
In You Already Know, Laura Huang scientifically breaks down what happens during the intuiting process and details the personified, physical, emotional, and cognitive components of the gut feel that results. Along the way, she provides valuable exercises to help you recognize, understand, and strengthen your intuition. Purposeful practice enables you to:
- take it from passive and accidental to active and intentional
- develop it to deliver increasingly reliable signals
- heighten your own sensitivity to the signals it sends
Drawing on Huang’s pioneering research on individual judgments and decision-making, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics, as well as hundreds of interviews, You Already Know offers a highly practical model that equips you to leverage your most powerful and underutilized resource to make better decisions, take swift action, and accomplish your most ambitious goals.
As the external world gets ever noisier, often, the smartest thing you can do is turn your focus inward and trust your gut to guide you in the right direction.
