Results
Winner
Co-Created: The Cultural Strategy That Redefined Pacsun
Brieane Olson
Co-Created helps business leaders, marketers, entrepreneurs, and professionals become more successful by providing a practical framework for building brands and organizations that stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. Drawing from Pacsun's transformation, CEO Brieane Olson demonstrates how co-creation with customers, creators, and communities can drive innovation, strengthen brand loyalty, and fuel sustainable growth. Readers learn how to embrace collaboration, align business strategy with purpose, and make decisions based on real-time cultural insights. The book also offers actionable strategies for leading organizational change, fostering authentic partnerships, and creating meaningful community impact while achieving measurable business results. Whether reinventing an established company or launching a new venture, readers gain practical tools to transform cultural connection into long-term business success.
Winner
Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native
Melissa M. Reeve
Hyperadaptive helps the people inside organizations who are living through AI change and feeling the fatigue of it. Most AI rollouts fail. Licenses get bought, tools get announced, and nothing really changes, which burns out teams and erodes trust. This book gives leaders a clear, humane path to make AI adoption stick without grinding their people down. It translates enterprise AI from hype into a step-by-step operating model, with checklists, decision aids, and real examples of what works and what breaks. The result is less chaos, less change fatigue, and more durable capability. As the fastest-growing enterprise roles, AI Transformation Lead and Chief AI Officer, take shape with no established playbook, Hyperadaptive gives these leaders and their teams a shared language and a way forward. The book lands with the promise of using AI to further the triple bottom line - not only running business for profit, but for the benefit of people and the planet.
Winner
Rising from Ground Zero: 9/11 and the FDNY's Path through Crisis to Transformation
Gregory P. Shea
Paul Brown, André Kotzé
Rising from Ground Zero presents the story of the FDNY, a proud, long standing, and widely respected organization that suffered intense systemic shock on September 11, 2001. Using over 90 hours of never-before-published author-conducted responder interviews, mainly FDNY firefighters, this book relates the story of the organization's transformation, how it battled through the crisis, managed the aftermath, and constructed the future. The interviews provide provide the basis for lessons (often starkly concrete) offered by the authors to all those, especially leaders, facing crisis or seeking fundamental organizational change. The book helps readers to see, learn, and apply lessons in crisis management, leading in prolonged hard times, and succeeding in organizational change.
Finalist
Working in Slippers: Virtual Companies and the New Normal
Ken Taylor
Working in Slippers helps business leaders build companies that are more profitable and productive while improving employees' quality of life and reducing turnover. Ken Taylor helped scale a startup from three people to a multi-million dollar operation, all without ever renting office space. The book is a practical guide to making remote work actually work for companies, teams, and the people in them. Readers learn how to hire and manage top remote talent, create a high-performance remote culture, and put essential systems in place. Companies can cut office costs, hire the best people from anywhere, and reach talented candidates who can't commute, including caregivers and people with disabilities. It's a roadmap for rethinking how and where work gets done, so leaders can build a more competitive company that works for everyone, everywhere.
Finalist
Leading the Living Organization: Transform How You Lead to Deliver Extraordinary Results
Norman Wolfe
Jane Wolfe
Leading the Living Organization helps leaders navigate today's increasingly complex business environment by replacing outdated, command-and-control leadership models with a more human-centered approach. Through an engaging business parable, the book demonstrates how organizational performance is shaped not only by strategy and processes, but by culture, relationships, and the shared context that drives behavior. Readers follow a CEO's journey as she learns practical skills for fostering collaboration, navigating uncertainty, resolving conflict, and building resilient teams. Each chapter concludes with key learning points and reflection questions, enabling readers to immediately apply the concepts within their own organizations. By viewing organizations as living systems rather than machines, leaders gain a new framework for creating workplaces where people are empowered to grow, innovate, and contribute to lasting success. The result is a practical guide that helps leaders strengthen c