The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Longlist

The books you'll find below, however, there is absolutely no distress in actually choosing. They are, we believe, the best of the year 2014.

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

• Flex: The New Playbook for Managing Across Difference by Jane Hyun and Audrey S. Lee, HarperBusiness
• Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't by Simon Sinek, Portfolio
• On the Edge: The Art of High-Impact Leadership by Alison Levine, Business Plus
• The Road to Reinvention: How to Drive Disruption and Accelerate Transformation by Josh Linkner, Jossey-Bass
• Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, Crown Business

• The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules & Making Change in Modern Africa by Dayo Olopade, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Crazy is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags by Linda Rottenberg, Portfolio
• The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators by Chris Brogan, Wiley
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, HarperBusiness
• The Responsible Entrepreneur: Four Game-Changing Archetypes for Founders, Leaders, and Impact Investors by Carol Sanford, Jossey-Bass

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis, W.W. Norton & Company
• How the Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class by John Hope Bryant, Berrett-Koehler
• Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin, Alfred A. Knopf
• Open Secret: The Global Banking Conspiracy That Swindled Investors Out of Billions by Erin Arvedlund, Portfolio

• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, Portfolio
• The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, Simon & Schuster
• The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman and Tyler Grey, Houghtin Mifflin Harcourt
• Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pngneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith, Wiley
• What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest by Denise Lee Yohn, Jossey-Bass

• Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling by Frank V. Cespedes, Harvard Business Review Press
• Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less by Joseph McCormack, Wiley
• Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer-Sell Like a Superstar by John Jantsch, Portfolio
• UnSelling: The New Customer Experience by Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer, Wiley
• When Buyers Say No: Essential Strategies for Keeping a Sale Moving Forward by Tom Hopkins and Ben Katt, Business Plus

• The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris, Current
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, Crown Business
• #girlboss by Sophia Amoruso, Portfolio
• Mind Gym: Achieve More by Thinking Differently by Sebastian Bailey, Ph.D. and Octavius Black, HarperOne
• Things a LIttle Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind by Biz Stone, Grand Central Publishing

• How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg, The Penguin Press
• How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster
• Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs by Joshua Wolf Shenk, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjofsson and Andrew McAfee, W. W. Norton & Company

• The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton & Company
• Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, McSweeney's
• The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael S. Malone, HarperBusiness
• Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners by Michael Mazzeo, Paul Oyer, & Scott Schaefer, Business Plus
• The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success by Rich Karlgaard, Jossey-Bass