New Book Releases for the Week of September 2
Featuring new releases on creativity, leadership, and business biography.
We believe in books, and we believe that a great book can shape the way we work, think, and live. Take a look at our picks below and see what speaks to you!
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabriella Cisneros 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
Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas by Andrew Robertson, published by Basic Venture
How can organizations prioritize innovation and execute new ideas, while also continuing to do what they do best? We want Mercedes to be careful, methodical, and risk-averse when testing their vehicles. But we also want them to be able to remove their blinders when envisioning next-generation car technology. How can a company strike a balance between operation and exploration?
Andrew Robertson, the CEO of BBDO, an advertising firm considered to be the gold standard of creativity, knows that it is critical to conduct business as usual while pursuing business unusual. Most companies focus on the former, while giving lip service to the latter. In The Creative Shift, Robertson offers the tools to help individuals, teams, and companies switch into creative mode, seamlessly and effectively, including:
- Developing a common language to convey when a creative shift is needed;
- Generating an array of possibilities and applying them onto your problem until something clicks;
- Managing unhelpful personality traits;
- Properly incentivizing and protecting creative contributions;
- Getting out into the world to "forage" for ideas.
This book is for every manager, leader, and entrepreneur who needs to rally a team, an organization, or themselves to think big and keep the flame of invention burning brightly while under suffocating pressure--which happens to be when you need creative problem-solving the most.
Lead Every Day: Three Essential Disciplines to Unleash the Passion and Performance of Everyone Around You by Mark Miller and Randy Gravitt, published by Matt Holt Books
From seasoned executive leaders Mark Miller and Randy Gravitt, Lead Every Day provides a concrete, comprehensive framework for improved performance. Veteran and aspiring leaders alike can utilize the Lead Every Day Operating System to maximize their impact in the short-run and their long-term success. With insights from extensive global research and decades of practical experience, Lead Every Day is a powerful, application-focused guide to transform your approach and your outcomes.
Far too many leaders have never been taught the principles and practices of leadership. If they've been taught anything at all, it's often a hodge podge of random, disassociated content. The Lead Every Day Operating System addresses this problem directly by including the essential disciplines you'll need in three domains:
- Become a Better Leader
- Improve Team Performance
- Strengthen Your Organization
Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time by Natalie Nixon, published by Balance
Natalie Nixon, known as the creativity whisperer, helps corporate leaders catalyze creativity's ROI for more inspired business results. In Move. Think. Rest. she reveals how the best organizations allow the personal and the professional to converge at strategic moments, which often come when we step away from our desks and phones. According to Nixon, it is this MTR framework (pronounced "motor")--which allows us to make time for strategic thinking, prevent burnout, build leadership resilience and redefine performance for the Imagination Era.
Nixon's MTR framework (Movement, Thought, and Rest) will change the way you work. And it will do so without demanding that you adhere to a rigid protocol or life-hack the liveliness out of your working hours. When you allow yourself to pause, unabashedly pay attention to your emotions, and allow your intuition to guide you, then you achieve fluency, ease, and even greater productivity. Move. Think. Rest. will help you shift the ways you work and live.
They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World's Greatest Store by Gene Pressman, published by Viking
In They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman tells his story for the first time, capturing the unprecedented rise and unimaginable fall of his family's multimillion-dollar fashion retail empire as only he can: from the inside
From its humble beginnings as a discount shop on Seventh Avenue, Barneys grew into an international phenomenon, setting the tone for fashion not only in New York, but across the country and worldwide. Told with razor-sharp wit and inimitable style, They All Came to Barneys takes us on an insider's journey as rakish, would-be rocker Gene Pressman and the global fashion industry grew up and came into their own, side by side.
Through back-room handshake deals with designers, days at the haberdasheries on Savile Row and nights out at New York clubs and Paris bistros, three generations of Pressmans--grandfather Barney, son Fred, and grandson Gene--built Barney's little shop into an empire and a byword for cool around the world. They All Came to Barneys is a front-row seat to the rise of some of the biggest names in fashion (Armani, Alaïa, Wintour, Meisel) and the store that came to dress an entire generation of celebrities, models, artists, and magnates. Set against the biggest movements in fashion and in culture, from the birth of ready-to-wear in the '60s and disco delirium in the '70s to the devastation of AIDS in the '80s and the explosion of globalization in the '90s, Gene Pressman had a backstage pass to history--until hubris, ambition, and risky business threatened to tear it all apart.
