The 2016 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist

The choices for this year’s shortlist reflect the general attitude and outlook of the staff here at 800-CEO-READ, and represent a continuing trend in business books toward a more humanistic and inclusive view of the business world. You will see a broadening in the definition of what constitutes ‘business,’ in who business is meant to serve, and in who should be allowed—even welcomed—to sit at the table.

The books on the shortlist for this year's 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award are: 

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, Grand Central Publishing (Personal Development & Human Behavior)
• Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes, Harper (Narrative & Biography)
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, with Matthew L. Miller, Andy Fleming, and Deborah Helsing, Harvard Business Review Press (Management & Workplace Culture)
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, Crown (Current Events & Public Affairs)
• Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways by William C. Taylor, Portfolio (Leadership & Strategy)
• Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom, St. Martin's Press (Marketing & Sales)
• What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet, Belknap Press (Big Ideas & New Perspectives)
• Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books (Innovation & Creativity)

The previous winners of this award have been:

• 2015: How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton
• 2014: The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael S. Malone
• 2013: Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for SUCCESS by G. Richard Shell
• 2012: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni
• 2011: Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen
• 2010: Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• 2009: Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—And Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• 2008: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
• 2007: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

We will announce this year's overall winner of the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year at our annual awards ceremony and business book industry celebration in New York City on Thursday, January 12th. Follow along here or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Keen Thinker, for updates.