Results
Winner
True Titans: Leading Inside to Win Outside
Christian Anschuetz
Luis Serpa
Leadership is stuck in a "Groundhog Loop." Organizations restructure, reset strategies and chase efficiency, yet the same problems keep coming back. Underneath, something deeper has been lost: the promise of leadership itself. True Titans helps leaders restore it. It shows how fear, short-term thinking and inward-looking metrics cost organizations trust, customers and results, then introduces five Powers: Strategic Courage, Customer Heart, People Activation, Market Ingenuity and Torchbearer Leadership. Through business, military and historical examples, readers learn to make hard decisions early, see their business through customers' eyes, build cultures where people do extraordinary work, adapt before the market forces them to, and leave a legacy that outlasts them. Practical rituals turn each Power into lasting team habits. The result: organizations that win outside because they are led well inside.
Winner
Red Brick Thinking: Make Space. Find Focus. Move Forward.
Donna McGeorge
Red Brick Thinking helps others by shifting the default mindset from adding more to letting go of what no longer serves. We’re overloaded, overstretched, and over it and much of that pressure comes from outdated systems, unnecessary obligations, and sneaky habits that slow us down. Through Red Brick Thinking, individuals, leaders, and teams learn to identify and remove these “red bricks,” creating clarity, focus, and momentum. This practice of strategic subtraction reduces overwhelm and burnout, improves decision-making, and frees up time and energy for meaningful work. By challenging “we’ve always done it this way,” Red Brick Thinking supports healthier cultures, smarter ways of working, and progress with less friction so people can move forward lighter, clearer, and more intentionally.
Winner
The Tao of Leadership: Harmonizing Technological Innovation with Human Creativity
Jack Myers
Readers of The Tao of Leadership gain a navigational compass for becoming effective leaders built on 3,000-year-old Taoist principles. With accelerating technology overwhelming traditional structures, the book offers a practical Blueprint for Leadership in the AI Era, focused on embracing AI without becoming subservient to it and pursuing innovation without losing empathy, ethics, or purpose. The Tao of Leadership is grounded in the Taoist principles of harmony, flexibility, balance, simplicity, and integrity, translating them into the FusionFlow Process, a tutorial for breaking down organizational silos, accelerating ideas into action, and building cultures of continuous learning. Readers who are navigating the role and influence of AI in their own lives, their organizations, and in civilization will learn that leadership in the AI age is not about mastering machines. It is about understanding how to embrace change and remain grounded in human judgment, empathy, purpose, and integrity
Finalist
Raising Social Capital: Corporate Advocacy and Impact in a Time of Social Change
Gregg Feistman
Heather LaMarre
Raising Social Capital: Corporate Advocacy and Impact in a Time of Social Change combines expert interviews from industry insiders with data-driven insights from cutting-edge research, offering the keys to driving social impact and balancing risk with influence amidst uncertainty and rapidly changing conditions. Part strategy, part pragmatism and full of insights, the book provides a roadmap complete with a set of management tools for leaders, executives, and communications professionals navigating the perfect storm of political controversy, partisan media and social change facing today’s organizations and leaders. Raising Social Capital addresses topics including driving public engagement and building public trust; navigating controversy, political pushback and the partisan press; managing employee activism and workplace incivility; and balancing risk with influence while keeping an eye on the bottom line.
Finalist
The System Gambit: Find Leverage to Unlock Compounding Value
Ritavan Ritavan
The System Gambit is a rigorous guide to the one strategic move that most investors and operators never make. They say companies get disrupted because they miss the signals. This is technically true, but it is besides the point. You are not missing the signals. You are reading them correctly and responding rationally, and the rational response is the trap. Every benchmark you hit is proof that you are excellent at a game whose rules have already changed. Nobody is going to tell you this. Your metrics cannot see it and your board is scoring the old game. Finding it is your job, and it is worth doing properly.
The move is a system crossing rather than a reallocation of resources, because the logic that wins in your current system is the same logic that blocks the position that compounds in the next one, and you cannot run both at once. This book maps the eight system crossings, the sacrifice each one demands, and how to defend that sacrifice to people still keeping score the old way.
Finalist
The Standard Model for Business: Know business better. Do better business.
Edward Rowe
The Standard Model for Business helps leaders, founders and aspiring executives understand how organisations work as complete systems rather than collections of individual departments. Built around five stages of organisational development—Start, Stabilise, Grow, Govern and Assure—the book maps twenty core business functions and explains how they interact as an organisation evolves. This helps readers move beyond their own area of expertise and develop the broader perspective needed for effective leadership and decision-making.
Drawing on more than two decades of global experience, Edward Rowe uses practical examples to show how organisations are built, scaled and governed. The book helps readers identify capability gaps, understand changing priorities, and make better cross-functional decisions. By providing a clear view of the enterprise as an interconnected system, it equips leaders with the knowledge needed to build resilient, scalable and well-governed organisations.