The culling process we undertake during the awards process is always painful. As great as it is to dive into the stacks and discover some books for the first time, and rediscover and revisit some past favorites from the year, there are always ones left behind, books that get laid back down softly on our desks with care instead of thrown back in a box on the floor. There is a list of books just as long as the list of books that made it here that caused us real distress to leave off—that we want to stand behind and will in other ways.

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

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

• 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

FINANCE & ECONOMICS

• 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

MARKETING

• 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

SALES

• 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

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

• 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

INNOVATION & CREATIVITY

• 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

GENERAL BUSINESS

• 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