The 2013 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist: Management

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 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners! In early January, the overall winner of the 2013 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards will be awarded, so stay tuned to The Daily Blog for all the good news.

The selections for the Management category are:

• American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and the Way We Do Business in the USA by Ed Whitacre with Leslie Cauley, Business Plus
• Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEOs Quest for Meaning and Authenticity by August Turak, Columbia Business School
• Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love by Richard Sheridan, Portfolio
• Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding + Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport & Jinho Kim, Harvard Business School Press
• No Excuses: How You Can Turn Any Workplace Into a Great One by Jennifer Robin & Michael Burchell, Jossey-Bass

What is the difference between leadership and management? For the purposes of these book awards, we let the publishers decide when they submit their nominations, so the boundary between the two categories is not hard and fast. But in general, we regard leadership books as oriented toward the personal and interpersonal, while management is more internal nuts and bolts. You'll get a full range of both options with these management finalists. The most 'nuts and bolts' of the bunch is Keeping Up with the Quants because it instructs, on a more primary level, the basics of analytics. You might think Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks would be the least instructive, but the book's message is clear and as business-centric as they come: you don't need to be focused on money to make money, but instead be clear about your purpose. Purpose is what Joy Inc is all about; and Menlo Innovations is a model example of how determining a mission--in this case, joy--can serve to redirect and reinvigorate any company and any industry. It follows, then, that No Excuses is the perfect follow-up, offering readers a more prescriptive approach to changing a workplace into a place where it is great to work. An example of whole-scale and lasting change when it really comes down to brass tacks can be found in American Turnaround, which shows it is simply never too late and you are never too big to get better.