Results
Winner
Mastering Digital Identity: From Risk to Revenue
Eve Maler
Digital identity decides who gets into a company's systems, who gets defrauded, and who becomes a loyal customer, yet most enterprises treat it as plumbing with no clear owner. Mastering Digital Identity: From Risk to Revenue gives CEOs, senior leaders, and board members the business language to take charge of it. Readers learn the Four Ps of Identity (Protection, Personalization, Payment, People, and the hidden fifth, Productivity) to see where identity creates risk and where it creates revenue. They get a filter for separating lasting trends from hype, and a clear-eyed view of how AI agents and deepfake fraud are breaking yesterday's defenses. The Make Your Vision Actionable℠ method and a 90-day transformation plan turn insight into action. The result: leaders who can protect their organizations and customers from AI-era identity fraud while building the trusted relationships that grow the business.
Winner
GenNexus: The Future of Being
Jack Myers
Readers of GenNexus: The Future of Being, will gain a deep understanding of the first generation born post-AI who will never remember life before machine intelligence. This hopeful and positive story introduces GenNexus as the architects of a more inclusive, imaginative, and deeply human future. It is written for both the GenNexus cohort to read as they mature and for the parents, grandparents, educators, and leaders preparing them for an unprecedented future. Through text and images, the book defines this new generation and shares how machine intelligence has the potential to positively reshape learning, work, relationships, identity, belonging, and the wonderful qualities of being human. With a view of the opportunities and ethical challenges ahead, GenNexus seeks to replace fear with informed dialogue and purposeful action, explaining why empathy, creativity, courage, judgment, and human connection must guide this generation’s development.
Winner
The Business of Sports Technology: How to Make Smart Decisions That Drive Your Organization Forward
David Nugent
The Business of Sports Technology helps leaders make smarter, more strategic technology decisions in an increasingly complex and fast-moving environment. Drawing on decades of experience advising leagues, teams, and sports organizations, David Nugent shows that most technology failures are not caused by the tools themselves, but by misaligned strategy, unclear goals, and weak decision-making frameworks.
This book equips executives with a practical approach to evaluating technology investments, aligning them with business outcomes, and avoiding costly missteps—especially as AI and data-driven systems reshape the industry. By shifting the focus from chasing innovation to building clarity and accountability, Nugent empowers leaders to invest with confidence, reduce risk, and drive long-term organizational performance.
Winner
Human Edge in the AI Age - Eight Timeless Mantras for Success
Nitin Seth
Human Edge in the AI Age by Nitin Seth is making a tangible, positive impact by reframing how leaders and professionals engage with AI – not as a replacement for humans, but as a force that amplifies human strengths. The book is helping business leaders move beyond fear and hype to adopt a balanced, values-driven approach to AI. Readers consistently highlight how it sharpens their focus on uniquely human capabilities such as judgment, empathy, creativity, and ethical decision-making – skills that technology cannot replicate. By grounding AI adoption in purpose and responsibility, the book enables leaders to make smarter, more humane choices in strategy, talent development, and culture building.
Practitioners across industries are using its frameworks to redesign leadership models, reskill teams, and create workplaces where people and intelligent systems collaborate effectively. For young professionals, the book offers clarity and confidence on how to stay relevant in the AI age.
Finalist
Digital Sustainability: Designing Resilient Digital Systems
Catherine Mulligan
Shivam Kishore
Digital Sustainability is a strategic guide for senior leaders, policymakers, and consultants who need to align advanced technologies with long-term resilience, responsible governance, and enduring performance. The book positions digital transformation as a lever for sustainability, not just efficiency or growth. In a world shaped by climate shocks, geopolitical instability, and accelerating technological change, leaders must balance profitability, stakeholder expectations, and urgent environmental and social responsibilities.
While AI, IoT, and blockchain are reshaping industries, many organizations remain unprepared to govern these technologies in ways that create durable value and avoid unintended harm. Digital Sustainability addresses this gap with practical, scalable frameworks that help leaders operationalize transformation across strategy, culture, operations, and policy, ensuring technology remains in service of people, the planet, and long-term organizational value.
Finalist
AI Economics: How Technology Transforms Jobs, Markets, Life, and Our Future
Benjamin Shiller
This book helps people make clearer, more informed decisions about their careers and economic choices in a world increasingly shaped by AI. Instead of treating AI as a mysterious or purely technical force, it explains how AI actually changes incentives, productivity, prices, and jobs. For professionals, leaders, and policymakers, the book offers practical mental models built on economic frameworks to assess how AI affects their industry, role, or organization, helping them adapt without overreacting or chasing hype. For general readers, it builds economic literacy around AI, making complex debates about automation, labor, inequality, and growth accessible and grounded in real-world dynamics. Ultimately, the book helps readers think more strategically about AI—so they can respond with judgment rather than panic to an unfolding economic transformation.
Finalist
Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change
Mark van Rijmenam
It Solves the "Paralysis of Analysis" - We are all drowning in noise about AI, quantum computing, and the "tsunami of change". Most books just add to the anxiety. Now What? stands out because it respects the reader’s need for agency. It doesn't just list threats; it hands over a compass in the form of the WAVE framework (Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower). This isn't theoretical fluff; it is a practical mental model that leaders can actually use on Monday morning to convert uncertainty into strategy.
It Elevates the Conversation Finally, this book understands that technology is nothing without context. While others stay in the lane of Silicon Valley hype, Now What? integrates Eastern philosophy, Indigenous wisdom, and Spiral Dynamics to argue that we must upgrade our consciousness to match our computing power. It bridges the gap between "Smart Thinking" and ethical responsibility, arguing that the future isn't something that happens to us, it's something we build.