2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist: Leadership

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 Leadership category are:

• The Commitment Engine: Making Work Worth It by John Jantsch, Portfolio
• The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward by Kevin Cashman, Berret-Koehler
• Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations by Boris Groysberg & Michael Slind, Harvard Business Review Press
• Turn the Ship Around: How to Create Leadership at Every Level by L. David Marquet, Greenleaf Book Group
• Vital Voices: The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World by Alyse Nelson, Jossey-Bass

Small business guru John Jantsch knows that if you can set a clear purpose and build a business around it that generates commitment in others, then you can let go of the controls and watch as your business seemingly runs itself. Learn how in his Commitment Engine. Throughout The Pause Principle, best-selling author of Leadership From the Inside Out Kevin Cashman offers a good balance of research, case studies and personal anecdotes to effectively advocate for the power of pause—the act of slowing down to give ourselves space and time to think and reflect. As a result, we can be more potent leaders, not lesser people. Make your company conversation-powered with Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind's Talk, Inc. Why? Gone are the days of leaders who issue directives from on-high; needed are leaders who promote organizational excellence through the input from and debate with the company's employees. L. David Marquet, a retired captain in the US Navy who successfully reinvigorated a poorly performing nuclear-powered submarine, reveals his atypical strategy for empowering his crew rather than clinging to more conventional military command methods in Turn the Ship Around. And CEO of Vital Voices, Alyse Nelson, fills her aptly-named Vital Voices book with the stories of women who have succeeded on the global stage as agents of change in a rapidly shifting world that desperately needs this new population of leaders.