Harriet Rubin, founder of the prestigious Doubleday business imprint Currency 

There are many kinds of business books, with many kinds of stories to tell and lessons to teach. But there are two big threads: how to make it and lead in the corporate world, and how to leave that world behind (or avoid it altogether) and build something of your own. The 2020 Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry exemplifies both paths. Harriet Rubin rose to great heights in publishing, founding the Currency imprint at Doubleday in 1989. She published the likes of Peter Senge, Andy Grove, Arie de Geus, Faith Popcorn, and Don Peppers. In the process, she raised the quality of business writing and made it accessible to a popular audience. And then, at the height of her career, as the publisher of her own imprint, she walked away. She wrote a book, Soloing, about the experience, and followed it up with three others: The Mona Lisa Strategem, Dante In Love, and The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, which would become an international bestseller. The one constant throughout it all has been her focus on the quality of writing.  

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin | Harvard Business Review Press 

America’s system of democratic capitalism survived its initial flaws and sins, a Civil War and two World Wars. Indeed, it emerged more resilient than ever after two of our greatest tests, the Great Depression and World War II, with most Americans believing in our combination of democracy and capitalism and sharing in the great growth and prosperity of those times. But for the last forty-plus years, that faith has waned as the economic outcomes the system generates have become increasingly unequal and most Americans’ incomes have become stagnant even as their productivity has climbed and the overall economy has grown. Roger Martin believes that the root of this problem lies in our model of the economy as a perfectable machine and our obsession with efficiency above all else, suggesting "We should instead understand the economy in more natural terms, as a complex adaptive system—one that is too complex to be perfectable."

Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One by Emily Heyward | Portfolio

With her quick wit, honest exploration, and years of experience in the field, Emily Heyward shows us how to bring both emotion and rationality into building your brand. This book is not just for the business owner looking to begin their startup with a sturdy and genuine brand foundation, but also for the consumer and the everyday individual who cares about the companies they support and what they stand for. In this day and age, we want to know that the products we buy are made ethically and that the companies behind them stand by their mission down to their very core. In our own companies, we want to create the most genuine brand and product by embodying our mission and allowing our supporters to peak behind the curtain and get to know our story and see our passion. Emily Heyward offers instruction on all of this and a refreshing, more human insight into the world of marketing and sales.

The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work by Natalie Nixon | Berrett-Koehler Publishers 

Natalie Nixon's blended background in anthropology and fashion has widened her view of creativity in business. The leap she advocates for is not a specific action or endeavor but rather an ability we can all hone and practice—the ability to push our thinking across the chasm between a complex problem and into a place of improvement and innovation. In order to see the world more fully, we must be able to comprehend complexity and the creative process. Scientifically, complex systems "are not predictive, are hard to manage, and require perspective and regular experimentation." Nixon teaches us to be and think adaptively, honing our "CQ" (Creative Quotient) through inquiry, improvisation, and intuition. This is not as swift as a physical leap, but more like slow, steady, and sometimes rigorous processes. Using 56 interviewees of diverse work backgrounds and including exercises at the end of each chapter for you and for your organization, The Creativity Leap presents creativity from so many perspectives that it's impossible to deny that creativity and innovation are inherently human and accessible to us all. 

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May | Riverhead Books 

Wintering is the loving guide we need to gently redirect our thoughts, create new habits of kindness, and walk with a grounded determination through this most difficult time. We don’t need to be fervently productive right now, or reconfigure our time management tools. What we do need is to be kinder to ourselves and others. We need to learn how to keep going in the face of it all. And, most importantly, we need to be able to spot our own personal times of wintering coming across the horizon and discover how to move through them without paralysis. May’s book provides a season’s worth of survival strategies to shed new light on old habits. Her tenderly observed stories and beautiful use of the language will surely reframe the season for her readers. Even though we have all walked different paths in 2020, they have all been paths strewn with rocks and fallen trees. We have seen the world we know fall apart in bad and good ways, and from that wreckage we will build something new together. Or as May says: “We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let our voices fill the air.” 

Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy by Margaret Sullivan | Columbia Global Reports 

“Disruption” was the rallying cry of Silicon Valley for over a decade. “Move fast and break things” they invariably did. One of the “things” they broke as they siphoned off the advertising dollars that supported local new outlets across the country was our already fracturing civic life and discourse. Mainstream, traditional news outlets were never perfect, but a shared reality is essential to our shared democtratic values. A free press is foundational to a free society. We have gone too far in trading ours for the Silicon Valley notion that information wants to be free in a monetary sense, even as Silicon Valley has built some of the world’s largest, most monopolistic corporations monetizing that supposedly “free” information. Margaret Sullivan explores this dire situation and some notable experiments and reinvigorate quality local coverage and investigative reporting in Ghosting the News.