Books on Donald Trump’s finances and Bill Gates’ influence go head to head with titles about the challenges of artificial intelligence, the impact of demographic change and how business can do the right thing, in the race to be named Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year.
Other titles vying to be judged the “most compelling and enjoyable” business book of 2024 range from the memoir of an investment bank trader to an in-depth exploration of the changing concept of the corporation, from an assessment of Amazon’s dominance to a powerful account of the tension between sustainability and resource demand.
More than 600 entries were filtered and reviewed by FT journalists. A longlist of 16 titles now remain in the running to become the 20th winner of the £30,000 award, which was first presented in 2005. Here they are:
AI AND TECHNOLOGY
Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that will Change the World, published next month, recounts the battle between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis to develop the world-changing technology of generative AI, while also grappling with the ethical and commercial imperatives set by their respective backers at Microsoft and Google.
The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future, by Hilke Schellmann, drills down into the impact of AI in the workplace, as an aid to recruitment and performance management. Schellmann warns how algorithms can amplify bias and cause more harm than good.
In The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power, Dana Mattioli takes a critical look at the influence of the dominant ecommerce and cloud computing company. Her book — echoing the title of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store (which won the award in 2013) — asks whether the group has become too big for regulators to stop.
Entrepreneur Raj Shah and technology strategist Christopher Kirchhoff tell the story of how they and others have shaken up US defence procurement in Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. Shah and Kirchhoff turned to start-ups to revolutionise the way the US military is supplied and how war is fought.
The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder, goes to the heart of the dilemmas facing those who want to accelerate the shift to a more sustainable economy. Scheyder examines how the quest to mine critical minerals is setting policymakers, manufacturers, ecologists and scientists against each other.
ECONOMICS
In Growth: A Reckoning, Daniel Susskind, whose timely book A World Without Work made the 2020 shortlist, turns his attention to the question of how to resolve the tension between the quest for growth at all costs — creating inequality and environmental damage — and the need to preserve what we value.
Andrew Scott returns to the question of how to cope with, and benefit from, improved life expectancy in The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives. Scott — co-author with Lynda Gratton of 2016 finalist The 100-Year Life — proposes ways to pursue an “evergreen agenda” that should help us to live sustainably and healthily for longer.
In The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People, Paul Seabright offers a novel economic analysis of religions. He describes them as the original platform organisations, rallying groups of users in mutually beneficial relationships just as Instagram or X do today, and points out how religious and secular groups can work together.
ORGANISATIONS
Economist John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong is a profound analysis of how the world of digital products and services is challenging the traditional view of the company. The book, out in late August, examines the future of what was once the pre-eminent organisational unit of capitalism, and how it and the wider economy are managed.
Alison Taylor picks up some of those challenges in Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, her guide for leaders struggling to balance clashing stakeholder demands, ESG investment requirements, and ethical questions that go far beyond the confines of their day-to-day business.
In Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, to be published in October, psychologist Michael Morris takes a deep and well-timed look at how leaders in business and politics can harness innate tribal instincts to positive effect, rather than allowing them to divide.
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How The World Lost its Mind, by Dan Davies introduces readers to ubiquitous “accountability sinks” that allow responsible parties to avoid blame and therefore erode the foundations of society. Davies points to the ways in which mainstream economics supplanted the management theory of “cybernetics” that could have created a more positive outcome.
Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao outline a familiar picture of bureaucratic dysfunction in The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder and offer plenty of practical ways that heroic “friction-fixers” can remove the grit of unnecessary meetings, overlong emails and poor management. But they also point to the importance of “good” friction in preventing hasty decision-making.
BIOGRAPHY
The Trading Game: A Confession is Gary Stevenson’s vivid account of his time as a Citigroup swaps trader and the consequence. He made huge sums for his employer — and for himself — but also set himself on a path to burnout and the opposite of the freedom he had expected financial success to provide.
Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King: The Hidden Truth About Bill Gates and His Power to Shape Our World, by Anupreeta Das, published this month, takes a close and unflinching look at one of the world’s richest men in an attempt to disentangle Gates’ multiple complex interests and relationships, while at the same time exploring our obsession with billionaires.
Finally, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, investigates the former president’s finances. The book, due out in September, draws on tax information, business records and interviews with insiders to explore the truth behind Trump’s claims of having built a thriving multi-billion-dollar business empire.
Entrepreneur and angel investor Sherry Coutu joins the judging panel for 2024. The jury is again chaired by FT editor Roula Khalaf and the other members are: Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, managing director for global business, Nikkei; Mitchell Baker, executive chair, Mozilla Corporation; Mohamed El-Erian, president, Queens’ College, Cambridge, and adviser, Allianz and Gramercy; Peter Harrison, chief executive, Schroders; James Kondo, chair, International House of Japan; Randall Kroszner, economics professor at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; and Shriti Vadera, chair, Prudential and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be the book that offers the “most compelling and enjoyable insight” into business issues. The shortlisted titles will each receive £10,000. The 10 judges reserve the right to add further books to the longlist ahead of the announcement of the shortlist on September 17. The winner of the award will be announced on December 9. Read more about the award at www.ft.com/bookaward. Consult a complete interactive list of all the books longlisted since the award began in 2005 at ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/
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