Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari was named the 2022 Porchlight Business Book of the Year (formerly the 800-CEO-READ award), which was presented virtually from the company's headquarters in Milwaukee, Wis.
“In one insightful instance after another, Hari demonstrates the ways in which our attention is deliberately hijacked, and the ways in which companies and their software could easily do just the opposite.” said Porchlight’s owner and CEO, Rebecca Schwartz. “In a conversational style, he thoughtfully and convincingly shows us the incentives around which the internet and the sites that depend on it are designed--and how they could be organized around very different principles, those that not only enhance our focus but feed our emotional health and cooperative spirits as well. Even as he discloses his own vulnerability to wasting hours online or fishing for ‘likes,' he makes a hopeful, fearless case for how we must combat the loss of human attention. In doing so, he makes clear, we can renew our imaginations and inspire our collective energies to fight for the common good.”
Barbara Cave Henricks is the recipient of the 2022 Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry. Porchlight managing director Sally Haldorson observed: "We need publicists. Really talented publicists who know how to build a wind behind the back of a good book and push it into the public eye where it belongs. And one of the very best publicists in our industry... is Barbara Cave Henricks....
"In 2007, Barbara opened her own firm, Cave Henricks Communications, which represents about 25 nonfiction titles and authors a year. She now guides a team who are every bit as caring and deliberate and motivated to drive a book’s success as she has always been. Just months before Jack passed away in 2021, he wrote an e-mail to me noting that 'BTW Barbara should be the next.' So we are proud, in Jack’s stead, to give the Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry to Barbara Cave Henricks!"