2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist: Innovation/Creativity

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 Innovation & Creativity category are:

• Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books
• The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? by Seth Godin, Portfolio
• Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back by Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy, Free Press
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't by Nate Silver, The Penguin Press
• Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers, Riverhead Books

The Creativity/Innovation shortlist looks not only at specific practices, but also how to approach the topic itself. Throughout the list, books outside the usual "how to" practice appear, analyzing instead issues of prediction (The Signal and the Noise), circumstance (Situations Matter), technology (Future Perfect), and science (Resilience). These shortlist winners are deeper thinking books, hopefully allowing each reader the chance to digest the information on their own terms in order to come up with something unique. As they say, "think outside the box," "be different," or even, "fly higher" (The Icarus Deception). These books take us outside of our usual worlds by showing innovations in other areas, which end up being surprisingly familiar to our own.own.