Blog Archives
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Seeing Clearly: Turning Clarity into Culture, Scale, and Legacy
Shawn Gaffney’s Seeing Clearly is a personal business book about how leaders learn to notice what’s happening around them and build organizations that reflect that understanding. Drawing on decades in manufacturing and his experience founding Infinium, an architectural wall systems company, Gaffney connects clear thinking with the everyday work of setting expectations, designing processes, and earning trust. The book moves through four sections, The Lens, The Build, The Culture, and The Light, giving its ideas an orderly progression from perception to lasting influence. What makes the premise appealing is its attention to familiar workplace frustrations: unclear ownership, repeated misunderstandings, and the exhausting feeling of working hard while progress stays stubbornly out of reach.
The writing becomes most engaging when Gaffney gets close to the physical details of building a business. A small product sample, a folding dolly, a factory floor, and conversations with family and colleagues give his ideas texture. You can feel the engineer’s interest in how things fit together, whether he’s discussing a wall system or the movement of information between teams. His emphasis on staying close to customers is particularly persuasive because he explains how that proximity shapes accountability and improvement. He also gives space to the emotional demands of entrepreneurship and the support that makes sustained effort possible. Those passages bring warmth to a book with exacting standards. His acknowledgment that he found the language for his approach through years of experience adds credibility to the advice.
Gaffney writes in short, emphatic lines, with frequent lists, chapter takeaways, and field guides that invite readers to stop and examine their own habits. That format makes the book easy to pick up between meetings, and several ideas lend themselves to immediate use: defining what finished work looks like, clarifying decision authority, and choosing three meaningful priorities. The repetition is noticeable, though. Clarity, alignment, identity, and standards return so often that some chapters feel like another pass over familiar ground. I sometimes wanted more detailed examination of the choices and tensions beneath the principles. His confidence also makes lessons drawn from one company sound more universal than the examples establish. The advice has energy and conviction, and readers will get more from it by considering how each principle fits their circumstances.
I’d recommend Seeing Clearly most strongly to founders, business owners, and operations leaders who are trying to grow a company while preserving the quality of its work. Managers in manufacturing, construction, design, and other businesses where several teams must coordinate a finished result will recognize plenty here. People working in family businesses may also appreciate the attention to shared responsibility and the changing relationship between a founder and the people carrying the work forward. It’s especially useful if you’ve become the person every decision waits for, or if your team’s effort keeps getting tangled in unclear expectations. Gaffney offers a thoughtful prompt to examine the environment you’re creating. The book’s most valuable invitation is to make good work easier for others to understand, deliver, and sustain.
Pages: 326 | ASIN : B0HJX6B1KX
My Heritage, My Pride
My Heritage, My Pride by Manmohan Sadana is a thoughtful and personal collection of spiritual poetry, cultural essays, historical reflections, and short fiction celebrating India’s extraordinary religious and literary heritage. Drawing from Hindu mythology, Sikh history, Sufi mysticism, and centuries of philosophical thought, Sadana explores the beliefs and traditions that have shaped generations. The book moves comfortably between ancient scriptures and contemporary life, examining how timeless teachings can still guide our understanding of leadership, relationships, compassion, and personal responsibility. Its combination of Indian spiritual literature, mythology, and cultural heritage makes for an engaging exploration of faith and identity. Throughout the collection, Sadana’s admiration for his cultural roots is unmistakable, and his enthusiasm encourages readers to consider how inherited wisdom continues to influence everyday decisions. There’s a genuine sense of affection running through these pages, giving the book the warmth of someone sharing stories and ideas that have held special meaning throughout his life.
Essays about Guru Nanak’s companion Bhai Mardana, the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah, and the spiritual traditions of Kashmir offer fascinating perspectives on devotion, equality, and religious harmony. His discussion of Christian carols, Sikh Shabad Kirtan, and Sufi ghazals is particularly interesting, showing how music creates emotional connections across different faiths. Hindu mythology also occupies a central place, with explorations of Lord Rama, Lord Jagannath, Goddess Siddhidatri, and the philosophical significance of Shiva’s Tandav. Sadana often connects these traditions to modern concerns, including ethical leadership, environmental responsibility, and social justice. His reflections on lessons from the Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita in corporate settings are an especially distinctive touch. These connections give the book a practical dimension, inviting readers to recognize the continuing relevance of ancient Indian philosophy in today’s world.
Sadana’s spiritual poetry frequently uses vivid natural imagery, rhythmic language, and an almost prayerful sense of wonder. Pieces such as “Baba Buddha,” “The 13th Spiral,” and “When the Preserver Walked Through Time” revisit familiar spiritual and mythological figures through questions of courage, duty, mortality, and moral choice. His portrayals of characters from the Mahabharata, including Duryodhan, Yuyutsu, Urvi, and Hidimbi, encourage readers to consider different emotional and ethical perspectives within these enduring narratives. The collection also includes intimate writing about family, love, and belonging. “Welcome Rachel Bani” is especially tender, celebrating a newborn child while reflecting on the inheritance of traditions across generations and continents. Meanwhile, the story “Sargi” brings cultural customs into the intimate world of marriage and companionship. Sadana’s style is expressive and earnest, sometimes richly embellished, with recurring images of light, rivers, flowers, and sacred music creating a recognizable poetic voice.
What makes My Heritage, My Pride memorable is its consistent belief that cultural heritage becomes meaningful through the values people carry into their lives. Across its spiritual essays, historical discussions, mythology-inspired poetry, and contemporary storytelling, Sadana returns to compassion, humility, integrity, and the importance of respecting different religious traditions. His treatment of Sikhism, Hindu philosophy, and Sufi spirituality reveals a sincere interest in the common human desire for understanding and connection. Readers interested in Indian mythology books, South Asian cultural history, spiritual poetry collections, and religious philosophy will find plenty to appreciate here. The book’s wide-ranging structure also makes it suitable for reading a chapter at a time, allowing individual subjects and reflections to settle before moving to the next. Above all, Sadana’s collection feels like an invitation to celebrate where we come from, reflect on what our traditions teach us, and discover how the wisdom of earlier generations can remain a living part of the present.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0HJJL9YKT
The Disciplined Executive: The Athlete’s Approach to Leadership — How to Lead with Clarity, Courage, and Competitive Edge
Jani Hirvonen’s The Disciplined Executive presents leadership as a craft developed through deliberate practice, honest reflection, and consistent responsibility. Drawing on his experience in elite Taekwondo, endurance sports, corporate leadership, and nonprofit service, Hirvonen gives athletic preparation a clear application to professional life. Meetings, decisions, and difficult conversations become opportunities to train judgment and strengthen relationships. His central principle is concise: “Leadership is a muscle. It grows with practice.” The comparison gives the book a coherent identity, connecting individual habits with the conditions that help teams perform. It’s a useful perspective for readers who want to approach their development with greater intention and a realistic sense of the work involved.
The book’s strongest contribution is its connection between demanding standards and attentive, supportive leadership. Hirvonen treats listening, emotional intelligence, recognition, and trust as essential parts of effective execution. His statement, “The leader exists to serve the team,” captures the responsibility that runs through these discussions. Delegation becomes an investment in someone’s judgment; feedback becomes a continuing exchange that requires visible follow-through. These ideas give the book a humane understanding of performance, grounded in the daily experience of working with others. The attention to volunteer leadership is especially valuable, since it brings motivation, shared purpose, and earned commitment into sharper focus. Across these settings, Hirvonen makes a persuasive case that a leader’s influence grows through the capability and confidence of other people.
Its twenty-five chapters follow a dependable pattern of personal reflection, examples, frameworks, and actions organized around weekly, monthly, and ongoing practice. That structure makes the material easy to revisit when a particular responsibility needs attention. Exercises involving commitments, meeting participation, priorities, and career conversations provide concrete starting points, while the frameworks give readers language for discussing their habits with colleagues. Hirvonen also draws on established leadership and behavioral literature, bringing familiar concepts into his approach to training. The repeated emphasis on consistency, humility, and accountability creates some overlap between chapters, and the prose occasionally explains a principle several times before moving forward. That repetition suits the book’s emphasis on rehearsal, though readers may find it most productive to work through selected exercises gradually and return to the relevant chapters as their responsibilities change.
Hirvonen’s personal voice gives the guidance much of its credibility. He writes openly about the effort required to listen well, manage ego, and maintain composure, presenting development as a continuing obligation throughout a career. His treatment of recovery and pacing also adds substance to the athletic comparison: sustainable performance depends on protecting attention and energy alongside building strength. The Disciplined Executive will be especially useful to emerging managers, experienced leaders reviewing their routines, and people responsible for developing future leaders. Its value lies in the connection it builds between principles and observable behavior. Readers willing to apply its exercises will find a structured basis for evaluating how they lead, how their teams experience that leadership, and which daily practices deserve more care.
Pages: 397 | ASIN: B0HJFMV12B
Talk Human to Me
Steven Asifo’s Talk Human to Me takes on a familiar workplace frustration: you’ve spotted a real problem, explained it carefully, and watched everyone carry on with their day. Asifo, a cybersecurity leader and stand-up comic, treats that gap between a good recommendation and actual follow-through as a central part of security work. His argument is that influence grows when you understand someone’s pressures and make the next step clear. The book brings together personal experience, communication advice, and short exercises, all delivered in a voice that sounds like a colleague talking through what he’s learned. It’s direct, energetic, and easy to settle into.
The strongest part of the book is how consistently it connects communication to the practical conditions of someone else’s working day. Deadlines, limited resources, uncertainty, and competing priorities all shape whether a security request gets anywhere. Asifo encourages readers to listen for those conditions, build messages around them, and invite people to help shape the solution. He also gives readers concrete ways to check their work: trim a message to its essential meaning, see whether someone can explain it back, and make the requested decision obvious. These exercises give the book a useful rhythm. You can read a chapter, open an email or presentation you’re working on, and try something immediately. That makes the advice feel manageable, especially for readers who’ve been told to improve their communication without much guidance about how.
Asifo’s comedy background gives the book a unique personality. He pays close attention to timing, audience, and the difference between getting a reaction and earning someone’s engagement. His discussion of humor is especially thoughtful about trust, including the importance of reading the moment and choosing jokes that bring people into the conversation. He’s also willing to examine his own missteps, which gives the advice credibility and keeps the tone approachable. The book does lean heavily on recurring phrases and familiar lessons, so its pace can feel repetitive once you’ve grasped the central idea. Its evidence comes mainly from Asifo’s experience, and some broad claims about fear, training, and behavior would benefit from more support. Still, the workplace detail makes his observations easy to recognize and gives readers plenty to think through against their own experience.
I recommend Talk Human to Me to cybersecurity professionals whose success depends on cooperation across teams: analysts, security program managers, people working in governance, risk, and compliance, and technical specialists who regularly present to business leaders. It should also appeal to managers helping those professionals develop, particularly when technically sound work keeps stalling at the point of adoption. Readers who enjoy an informal voice, personal stories, and exercises tied to real tasks will probably get the most from it. There’s useful material here for quieter readers, too, since Asifo treats communication as a skill you can practice through everyday choices. The book’s lasting value is the attention it asks you to give the person receiving your message. It leaves you with practical ways to make that person’s next decision easier.
Pages: 108 | ASIN: B0HM5NHP3H
Saying the Hard Parts Out Loud: Backbones, Boardrooms, and Graceful Exits
Maranda Dziekonski’s Saying the Hard Parts Out Loud is a business memoir about how the experiences we carry into work shape the people we become there. Her story begins in rural Michigan, where childhood poverty, an unstable home, and responsibility for her younger brother taught her to read people and respond quickly to trouble. The opening scene, with two hungry children eating frozen strawberries while watching cartoons, gives her later discussions of leadership a very concrete starting point. From factory work and single motherhood to executive roles in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dziekonski follows the connection between survival, ambition, and belonging. Readers who enjoy leadership memoirs and personal development nonfiction will find plenty to connect with in her candid, conversational voice.
I think the book’s strongest quality is Dziekonski’s willingness to examine how her own behavior affected other people. She describes the discipline that helped her build teams and improve operations, then looks closely at the emotional cost of leading with so much force. Her account of firing an employee after receiving an insulting message is especially revealing. Years later, she’s still thinking about the dignity she could’ve preserved during his departure. That kind of reflection gives the leadership development material credibility. Another memorable episode involves a costly ordering mistake at a manufacturing company, where management trusted her to help repair the process. Because she was a single mother who’d recently gained financial stability, you understand exactly what that trust meant. Accountability becomes something you can see happening between people, with livelihoods and relationships attached.
The family chapters deepen the book’s treatment of boundaries, forgiveness, and emotional resilience. Dziekonski writes about her mother’s limitations, her stepfather’s cruelty, and the lasting influence of her grandmother with a frankness that can be uncomfortable to sit with. Her relationship with her son, Lucas, adds another perspective, especially when he tells her he wishes she’d spent more time playing with him as a child. She gives that admission room to matter alongside the work she did to support them. The white teddy bear he gives her, replacing one she lost in a childhood fire, is a particularly tender detail. These scenes make the book’s interest in compassionate leadership feel personal and earned. The practical suggestions that follow, including listening carefully in one-on-ones, sharing credit, and helping colleagues grow, connect naturally to those experiences.
Dziekonski organizes the book around belonging, becoming, and leading forward, returning often to the image of a room and the question of how people feel inside it. That recurring image holds the personal and professional stories together, although repeated explanations of belonging, self-doubt, and values occasionally slow the pace. A little tightening would give the later chapters more momentum. Still, her humor, affection for the people who’ve helped her, and openness about unfinished emotional work keep the voice engaging. The closing encounter with her stepfather gives the discussion of healing a small, believable moment of movement. For readers interested in women in leadership, career growth, and the human side of management, Saying the Hard Parts Out Loud offers an intimate look at learning to lead with clarity, care, and enough self-trust to make difficult choices.
Pages: 220 | ASIN : B0H5T7FV1H
Make Civility a Public Practice
Lead with Civility presents civility not as politeness or conflict avoidance, but as a leadership discipline grounded in dignity, truthfulness, justice, self-mastery, and the common good. What changes have you observed in civic institutions and public discourse that made this book feel especially urgent?
Over three decades in civic leadership, I have watched incivility become increasingly normalized in public life—in council chambers, school boards, workplaces, social media, and the wider political culture. But what made this book feel especially urgent was not simply the rise in incivility; it was the recognition that leaders have a disproportionate influence on the culture around them.
Those who hold public authority help establish what becomes acceptable. Their language, conduct, decisions, silences, and responses to misconduct send powerful signals about the norms of an institution and, over time, the political culture of a community. When leaders model contempt, manipulation, humiliation, or indifference to truth, those behaviours spread. When they demonstrate courage, restraint, dignity, fairness, and concern for the common good, those qualities can spread as well.
That is why the word lead matters so much in Lead with Civility. Civic leaders are not simply participants in the culture; they are among its principal stewards. They tend the garden of community, the civic environment. And tending a garden is active work: noticing what is growing, pulling what is choking out healthy life, protecting what is fragile, and deliberately cultivating the conditions in which people and institutions can flourish.
In a period of declining trust, polarization, and increasingly corrosive public discourse, leaders have to fully inhabit that responsibility. We cannot control every force shaping civic life, but within our spheres of influence we can decide what we will model, what we will tolerate, what we will interrupt, and what we will cultivate.
That is the central leadership challenge of this moment: not merely surviving an uncivil culture, but helping to shape a better one.
How did you develop the Civic Braid Leadership Model?
The Civic Braid Leadership Model grew out of a problem I kept seeing in leadership: we often rush to action before we understand what is really happening, or we become very good at analysis without ever turning insight into change.
I wanted a learning model that would resist both tendencies.
The model has three interconnected strands: Perceive, Prepare, and Practice. It echoes an ancient Greek rhythm of learning: theoria, phronesis, and praxis.
- Perceive is our version of theoria: stepping back, looking honestly at what is happening, and seeing beneath symptoms to patterns and causes.
- Prepare corresponds to phronesis, or practical wisdom. This is where we develop the judgment, language, knowledge, and self-mastery necessary to discern what wise action requires in a particular situation.
- Practice is praxis: putting what we have learned into action through conversations, decisions, policies, civic education, interventions, and the everyday habits that shape institutional culture.
I chose the image of a braid very deliberately. Each strand is distinct, but the strength comes from their being woven together. When Perceive is missing, leaders rush in without really seeing. When Prepare is missing, they may recognize the problem but misjudge what to do. When Practice is missing, wisdom remains an abstraction.
The Civic Braid is therefore less a three-step technique than a discipline of leadership: see clearly, develop practical wisdom, and act well. Then keep doing all three.
How can leaders begin repairing trust once an institution or community has developed a deeply unhealthy culture?
The first task is honest diagnosis.
Leaders often want to move immediately to a new code of conduct, training program, values statement, or communications campaign. Those things may have a place, but you cannot repair a culture you are unwilling to see truthfully.
Start by asking what has become normalized. What behaviour is being tolerated? Where is dignity being violated? What are people afraid to say? Where have stated values and lived experience separated? And perhaps most importantly: how has leadership itself contributed to the culture?
Next, stop the ongoing harm. This may require what I call a civic intervention: a deliberate, principled action—or sustained series of actions—that disrupts a destructive pattern, sets healthier boundaries, and allows trust to begin rebuilding.
But trust itself cannot be commanded. It is earned through repeated experiences of trustworthiness.
People watch what leaders do when it is inconvenient: whether they tell the truth, apply standards fairly, admit mistakes, keep commitments, protect dignity, listen to criticism, and act consistently with the values they profess.
That is why culture renewal takes time. You are not merely repairing relationships; you are changing patterns, norms, habits, and sometimes systems.
My shorthand would be: tell the truth about the culture, stop reinforcing what is harming it, and begin giving people repeated reasons to trust again.
If every civic leader adopted one practice from Lead with Civility tomorrow, which practice do you believe could make the greatest difference?
I would ask leaders to stop letting incivility pass without a thoughtful response.
One of the most damaging habits in civic life is normalization. Someone humiliates a colleague, dehumanizes an opponent, spreads misinformation, bullies staff, or repeatedly violates the dignity of others, and everyone in the room quietly adjusts. Eventually the abnormal becomes normal.
That is why I place so much emphasis on the civic intervention.
A civic intervention does not mean escalating every disagreement or policing every imperfect word. It means developing the judgment and courage to recognize when a destructive pattern is taking hold and stepping in—early, proportionately, and without becoming uncivil yourself.
Sometimes that intervention is as simple as saying, “We can disagree strongly, but we are not going to speak to one another that way.” Sometimes it means changing a meeting process, enforcing a boundary, challenging misinformation, protecting a staff member, or confronting behaviour that everyone else has learned to tolerate.
Civility must be more than a private virtue; it must become a public practice.
If more leaders learned to interrupt toxicity without reproducing it—to combine courage with restraint, truth with dignity, and conviction without contempt—I believe we would change the culture of many institutions surprisingly quickly.
Culture is built in moments, and so is its renewal.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
In an age of performative outrage, misinformation, and rising authoritarianism, Diane Kalen Sukra challenges the myth that might makes right. She shows how doing right by each other builds the shared strength our communities and institutions depend on.
Kalen-Sukra reclaims civility as a culture-shaping leadership discipline—a powerful antidote to toxicity. It equips leaders to hold the line, protect people and process, and make tough decisions that restore order and advance the common good.
She introduces the art of the civic intervention: using your role, procedures, and presence to interrupt harmful patterns and reset the norms of the rooms and places you lead.
Drawing on ancient wisdom, modern research, and her experience as a city manager and global civility advocate, Kalen Sukra offers a proven roadmap and practical tools for leaders determined to turn the cultural tide. Vivid portraits and guest essays from civic leaders show how incivility and dysfunction can become catalysts for renewal.
A handbook for leaders who want to change the culture—not just survive it.
Win or Win: Your Playbook for the Starting Five to Align, Lead, and Scale Your Business
Tamika Tyson’s Win or Win is a practical guide to building leadership teams that can evolve with a growing company. Using basketball as its governing metaphor, Tyson identifies five essential roles: Founder, CEO, Operator, Marketer, and Finance Person. She divides each role into three archetypes, producing a vocabulary that helps readers distinguish job titles from the ways people actually create value. Her central insight is expressed with admirable economy: “Your role is where you sit. Your number is how you think.” This distinction gives the book a sharper purpose than a conventional discussion of executive responsibilities.
The framework becomes more useful as Tyson connects the fifteen archetypes to three orientations: Meaning, Systems, and Speed. She then applies them to common organizational constraints, five stages of growth, and the “Triangle” a balanced team needs. This layered structure enables readers to diagnose whether a business requires greater clarity, capacity, or capability before making another hire. The later chapters are especially strong because they address changing requirements as a company moves from validation through building, scaling, optimization, and institutional endurance. Tyson treats leadership composition as dynamic, showing how a person who was indispensable at one stage can become poorly matched to the next.
Tyson writes in a direct, conversational style and develops her concepts through brisk case studies drawn from companies such as Danaher, Fastenal, Nike, Patagonia, Quibi, and Zillow. These examples function as managerial parables, making an elaborate taxonomy easy to remember. Repeated diagnostics, hypothetical responses, and “exhaustion tests” turn the book into a workbook as much as a narrative. This repetition occasionally slows the middle chapters, and the compressed business histories sometimes support broader conclusions than their documentation can fully establish. Still, the consistent format reinforces the framework and gives leadership teams a common language for discussing strengths, blind spots, and role fit without reducing those conversations to personality or loyalty.
I think the book’s most valuable contribution is its treatment of succession as an achievement. Tyson asks readers to judge leadership by the durability of what they build, including systems, brands, capital structures, and teams that can function without their creators. Her statement that “Win or Win isn’t optimism. It’s architecture” captures both the method and the ambition of the book. Win or Win is a disciplined, accessible playbook for founders and executives who want to align complementary talents, recognize when their organization’s game has changed, and create a company whose success can outlast any individual leader.
Pages: 266 | ASIN: B0HCRCR7XM
