Winner
The Authenticity Key: Claim Your Words. Set Your Compass. Blaze Your Trail.
Hilary Dawn Rose Bilbrey
The Authenticity Key helps people break free from leading and living out of trauma, toxicity, and self-doubt. Too often, we move through the world believing we are “not enough” — and that belief quietly shapes our relationships, our work, and our impact. This book invites readers to stop faking it until they make it and instead practice it until they become it — aligning daily with integrity, clarity, and purpose.
The benefit is both personal and collective: readers learn simple strategies to self-reflect, connect meaningfully with others, and take purposeful action that ripples outward. When we decide how we want to show up — at home, in friendships, in community, and at work — we not only reclaim our own compass, we also elevate those around us. The Authenticity Key is a call to live as the magic the world needs, now more than ever.
Finalist
AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide
Mike Baxter
Organisations and individuals are having to make high-stakes decisions in an increasingly unpredictable and complex world. In today’s fast-moving environment, the time available for decision-making is shrinking as the cost of poor decisions increases.
This book helps in the following ways:
1. It gives you a process for making faster, smarter, better decisions. This robust five-phase decision-making process has been designed around key principles established from decades of design thinking, complexity theory and decision science.
2. It offers five free super-prompts to enable your decisions to be augmented by the AI of your choice.
No prior AI experience is needed - from choosing and setting up your AI platform to crafting effective prompts, this guide takes you through every stage. This isn't about letting AI make decisions for you—it's about transforming any AI platform into your researcher, thinking partner and executive assistant so you can make the big decisions that matter you.
Finalist
Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk
Suzy Burke, PhD
Ryan Berman, Rhett Power
Headamentals is an actionable guide that helps leaders silence negative self-talk before it spirals into toxic team-talk. Doubt and mental spirals don’t just affect the individual; they ripple into miscommunication, stalled progress, and reduced confidence across the team. By tackling the root of the problem—the destructive internal “Monster”—leaders create space for clarity, focus, and more productive conversations.
Grounded in decades of research and coaching, Headamentals delivers practical tools through the 3-C Maverick Method: Catch, Confront, and Change negative dialogue. This concise framework empowers leaders to strengthen resilience, make decisions faster, and lead with confidence.
Filled with real-life stories, insights, and exercises, the book is designed for busy professionals who need immediate impact. The result is stronger leaders who model courage and create healthier, more effective teams capable of thriving.
Finalist
Harnessing Purpose: A Marketer's Guide to Inspiring Connection
Melissa Fors Shackelford
Harnessing Purpose is a guide for marketers and leaders who want their work to matter. It helps readers clarify both personal and professional purpose, then shows how to align the two. Rather than treating marketing as just a tool for growth, the book reframes it as a way to connect, build trust, and drive meaningful change. It offers practical strategies to uncover brand purpose, lead with integrity, and create campaigns that resonate beyond the bottom line. Readers also get tools to build resilient, values-driven teams and navigate challenges like burnout and misalignment. With a focus on inclusive, ethical marketing, the book challenges professionals to do better—for their organizations and their audiences. Rooted in real-world experience, Harnessing Purpose is for those ready to lead with intention, make a lasting impact, and grow their business with purpose at the core. It’s equal parts inspiration, strategy, and call to action.
Finalist
Be Well to Lead Well: A Self-Coaching Guide to Support Personal Development and Well-Being at Work
Waajida Small
This book provides strategies, guidance and “coach yourself questions'' (CYQs) as prompts to help readers develop goals around specific areas that support their overall well-being in the workplace. Readers explore their thought habits, create a personal mission statement, and reflect on their levels of self-efficacy among other activities that allow them to do a deep dive into what they really need to be well at work, be fully present for themselves and their teams, and make an impact.