Results
Winner
It's All About Relationships: Mastering the Art of Relational Leadership
Eddy Arriola
This book makes a simple but profound argument - leadership is all about relationships. Teams and companies are only as strong as their leaders' connections to their teams. In a time where isolation is an epidemic, this book argues for a better path.
Winner
The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation
Phil Le-Brun
Jana Werner
The book helps leaders, teams, and organizations break free from the dysfunction that keeps them stuck—saving them time, money, and the frustration of failed transformation efforts. Most organizations waste billions on top-down change initiatives that deliver little. This book offers a radically different path: instead of expensive, slow overhauls, readers get thirty-six practical "levers" that create meaningful improvement in months, not years. By applying the distributed intelligence model of the octopus—where the whole moves with purpose while each part thinks for itself—leaders learn to unlock the talent already inside their organizations. The result is teams that innovate faster, adapt to disruption more confidently, and build resilience that lasts.
Drawing on real-world experience at Amazon, McDonald's, and hundreds of global companies, this book gives every reader—from frontline manager to C-suite executive—an actionable blueprint to create organizations that truly thrive
Winner
Becoming a Better Boss: Be the leader people want to follow, not just tolerate
Burl Stamp
Everyone wants to be a leader. But what employees really need is a great boss. Seventy percent of what determines whether an employee is engaged at work comes down to one thing: the person they report to.
"Becoming a Better Boss" helps managers become that boss. Most of us became managers by being great at the technical or tactical parts of our job, only to realize the skills that made us star individual performers can make us a terrible boss. Former hospital CEO Burl Stamp offers a candid playbook for mastering the human side of management that nobody trained you for.
The T.E.A.M. Model (Teach, Empower, Align, and Mentor) addresses the root causes of burnout and disengagement with tools managers can use immediately. Readers learn to earn trust in hundreds of small moments, build a culture where people feel they have a voice, and become the leader people want to work for.
Finalist
Invisible Leadership: How to design systems that create high‑performance habits
Carlos Donato Da Silva
Invisible Leadership helps professionals eliminate the hidden, daily friction that causes workplace burnout and costly operational rework.Instead of relying on exhausting motivational speeches, this book shows leaders how to embed a healthy, high-performance culture directly into their ERP systems (like SAP or Dynamics). It helps companies save money and time by replacing frustrating "Shadow IT"—like parallel Excel sheets—with logical, frictionless workflows.
By teaching managers to act as "Choice Architects," the book dramatically reduces employee stress. Using new metrics introduced in the book (ICE and CRR), leaders can design smart defaults and system rules that make doing the right thing the path of least resistance. Ultimately, it helps organizations build a coherent, stress-free environment where people can succeed and high performance becomes a natural habit, rather than a daily struggle.
Finalist
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
The Four Competitive Business Drivers: Theory + Model + Strategy + Tactics
Jorge Sá
Magda Pereira
Avoiding the trap of increasing efforts for decreasing returns. Why? There are four distinct/necessary drivers for performance:
- The theory of business: why the company makes sense. The reality assumptions it is grounded upon;
- The business model: what are the basic pillars of a firm’s organization. How it transforms client satisfaction into value for itself;
- Strategy: where the organization competes: geographical areas, industries and segments; and
- Tactics: the how of the nine functional areas - how to organize operations, how to market the product, how to finance, how…
The above constitute the four drivers for organization optimization: the why; what; where; and how. Previous literature has failed in two ways:
- by making the distinction between strategy and tactics fuzzy; and
- by identifying the business model with the theory of business.
But only a clear-cut distinction enables to:
1 – Target them;
2 – Review them; and
3 – Obtain a coherent whole.