The 2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist: General Business

Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. Then on Monday, December 17th, we'll announce the category winners, and, on Wednesday, December 19th, we'll celebrate the overall winner of the 2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards! Stay tuned.

The selections for the General Business category are:

• Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Businessby Harley Manning & Kerry Bodine, New Harvest
• The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalismby Rodolphe Durand & Jean-Philippe Vergne, Harvard Business Review Press
• Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy Worldby Michael Hyatt, Thomas Nelson
• Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Elseby Chrystia Freeland, The Penguin Press
• Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power by Steve Coll, The Penguin Press

Owing to an increasingly service-oriented economy, the customer has been restored to the throne, and Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine's Outside In provides an excellent argument for why customer experience is so important, and how we can put our customers at the center of our business. The global economy has a whole lot of dissatisfied customers—a group frequently referred to as 'the 99 percent'. Chrystia Freeland's Plutocrats gives us a timely look at the increasing disparity between incomes of the super-rich and everyone else, and in doing so gives a voice to that financially-frustrated majority. Also feeling frustrated are the thousands of businesses struggling to gain or maintain a presence within their respective markets amid a growing cacophony of attention-seeking sound. That group will find solutions--fifty recommendations in short and easy-to-understand chapters--in Michael Hyatt's Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne's The Pirate Organization explains why following the surprisingly predictable actions of pirate organizations operating in our global economy offers a map to how ideas and innovations move from the fringe to the center. And finally, Private Empire by Steve Coll details the extraordinary operation of oil giant ExxonMobil, the most consistently profitable--and controversial--corporation in the US.