The 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards Longlist

by Dylan Schleicher

These 40 books offer a kind of panoramic view of the world we’re building and reinforce a simple and hopeful truth: the future is something we help create.

The 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards logo

Marshall McLuhan argued that “the medium is the message,” that the form a message takes is more important than the content it delivers. As booksellers, we are not going to discount the importance of content—indeed, we do much to spread and celebrate the content we find in books—nor will we denigrate other forms of media. Still, we believe that books remain the best medium we have for making sense of the world and our place in it. Even in an era of artificial intelligence, books authored by humans are still the best technology for conveying detailed information and complex ideas across time and space, for developing cognitive skills critical to our individual and collective flourishing, and for preserving, transmitting, and retaining knowledge in our increasingly distracted, screen-dominated world. We firmly believe that we would make more progress as a society in addressing the collective challenges we face if more people—especially those in leadership positions—put down their phones more often and picked up more books, and we have some recommendations.  

Each of the 40 books featured in the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards cuts through the cacophony of other media, focuses our attention on an important issue or story, and offers a more thoughtful path to creating a free, fair, and prosperous future for all. 

As our Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, recently said:  

Taken together, these 40 books offer a kind of panoramic view of the world we’re building. You see the pressures, the possibilities, and the ideas that will meaningfully shape the years ahead. And running through all of them is a shared belief: the future is not something hurtling toward us, but something we actively influence. They offer practical ways to make better ethical, strategic, and humane decisions—and to take the kind of purposeful action that supports stronger organizations, healthier communities, and a more hopeful future. 

After months of close reading and much consideration, we are excited to announce the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards Longlist.

Current Events & Public Affairs  

Innovation & Creativity  

Leadership & Management  

Personal Development & Human Behavior  

Our deepest gratitude goes out to all the authors who put their hearts, minds, souls, sweat, tears, and time into producing this year's books, and to everyone working in the publishing industry who helped bring them to life. We appreciate you, and all the work you put into bringing great books and ideas into the world this past year. There were so many other wonderful books published in 2025, and over 700 of them were submitted for our awards this year. In addition to this list, we hope you'll go back and check out the books we covered over the course of the year and check out other lists from the likes of NPR, FT Press, The New York Times, the Non-Obvious Book Awards, and so many others. 

You will see excerpts from all the books on our list appear in this space over the course of the next month, and we will announce the winners in each of our four categories at an industry event in New York City on January 28th. 

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Porchlight Book Company

Born out of a local independent bookshop founded in 1927 and perfecting an expertise in moving books in bulk since 1984, the team at Porchlight Book Company has a deep knowledge of industry history and publishing trends.

We are not governed by any algorithm, but by our collective experience and wisdom attained over four decades as a bulk book service company. We sell what serves our customers, and we promote what engages our staff. Our humanity is what keeps us Porchlight.

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