We Are Market Basket is the story with a little bit of everything. It’s a great company history and narrative, a good management primer, the story of a family power struggle, and a battle between two visions of American Capitalism. It is a story so idealistic that it’s hard to believe it is realistic—that it really happened. It is the story of Market Basket employees striking and Market Basket customers boycotting the store until a popular CEO and the business model he represented and fought for were reinstated. Tell me, how many stories have you heard of people protesting in favor of a CEO? the very foundations and philosophy of free enterprise.

I use Post-it tabs when I’m reading to flag ideas I want to revisit later. In the case of Everybody Matters, I loaded up the entire book with them. Its management advice seemed tailor-fit for our small company, despite the fact that the book was written by the CEO of an enormous manufacturing company—an affirmation of author Bob Chapman’s humanistic approach to leadership. “The machinery we build is just the economic engine that enables us to touch lives,” Chapman says. “The flourishing of those lives is our paramount concern.” We believe this focus can and should be applied to every company of every size, a task made easier with Chapman’s book at hand.

Is the bottom line really the bottom line? Not always. Companies in the “responsible economy” measure more than just cash flow to determine their success and more than number of purchases to determine their customer loyalty. Patagonia is one of those companies, and Craig Wilson spearheaded their multi-channel marketing efforts for nearly a decade. If you are looking for long-lasting love and not just a one-off purchase from your customer base, you can find Wilson’s brand loyalty secrets in his first book, The Compass and The Nail.

As a very busy sales person, I really appreciated the simple applicability that Alex Goldfayn brings to the world of often complex sales literature. This book is laid out in very short chapters, with digestible, immediately actionable tips for how we can be better at everything we do. Alex isn't preaching anything we didn't already know, but he reminds us of these simple tasks and lays out how to best experiment with and test them, find the ones that work and have tangible results for us, while eliminating the ones that don’t and our excuses for not doing the ones that do.

Paul Downs' book is refreshing (to say the least), in that Downs doesn't pretend he has a blueprint for small business success. Rather, he painstakingly walks readers through actual experiences running his custom furniture business, revealing what too many business books gloss over: running and growing a small business is really, really hard, full of gut-wrenching decisions, and littered with frustrating mistakes. Aspiring and acting entrepreneurs will glean lessons from these stories—both the failures and successes—but the real power of Boss Life is that it mirrors not only IPO chasing, start-up entrepreneurs, but the experience of millions of everyday business owners looking for and working hard to build a solid life for themselves and their employees.

Reclaiming Conversation wasn’t a book we expected to see in the personal development category, but this very sophisticated look at conversation in the digital age quickly rose to the top of this year’s awards. Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle finds that electronic devices have come to dictate how humans interact and that it has compromised our ability to truly relate to and empathize with one another. Ironically, it seems being constantly connected online is degrading our ability to connect in real life. This compelling book urges the reader to embrace the intimacy of face-to-face communication and reclaim it as a real means of connection.

It can be refreshing to take a break from the books in celebration of the rogue genius. The outstanding narratives like that of Jobs tend to mislead us into thinking of creation as a practice reserved for an elite few. How to Fly A Horse is the smelling salt to your fantasies of genius creativity. Kevin Ashton cites examples spanning centuries and demonstrating the intense collaborative nature of creation. In an age of increasing inequality of all stripes, it is refreshing to have this well-researched reminder that our world is pushed forward not by a few geniuses but by millions of hard-working people.

America’s Bank is the genesis story of the Federal Reserve. And the fact that about half the people reading this will scoff at the mention of our national bank shows exactly why Roger Lowenstein’s history of the bank’s creation is so informative and important to the conversation today. Lowenstein’s tale weaves through the rise and fall of our first two national banks, the monetary dysfunction and uneven financial prospects of America as a young nation without a central bank, even as it rose as an industrial power, and leads us into the high drama and fascinating characters involved in creating the bank we know today. It is, as I wrote in an earlier review of the book, drama worthy of an original HBO series and yet demonstrates practical politics at its best.