The Financial Times and Schroders today announced the shortlist for the 2024 Business Book of the Year Award. Now in its twentieth year, the award is an essential calendar fixture for authors, publishers and the global business community. Each year it recognises a book which provides the ‘most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues’.
This year’s shortlisted books, selected by the eight distinguished judges (see below) are:
The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong by John Kay, Profile Books (UK), Yale University Press (US)
Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together by Michael Morris, Thesis (UK and US)
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson, Macmillan Business (UK), St. Martin’s Press (US)
The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives by Andrew J. Scott, Basic Books (UK and US)
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, Scribner (UK and US)
Growth: A Reckoning by Daniel Susskind, published by Allen Lane (UK), Belknap Press (US)
FT Editor Roula Khalaf said: “Our six finalists, picked from a very strong longlist, focus on some of the most interesting and controversial issues on leaders’ minds, including the quest to achieve better economic growth, the purpose of technology, the evolution of the corporation, and the impact of tribal instincts and improving longevity. It will be a hard task to select a winner from this range of exceptionally interesting and relevant titles.”
Schroders Group Chief Executive Peter Harrison said: “In the second year of our partnership with the FT, we have arrived at a shortlist of exceptional books. These are insightful and compelling, written with great skill underpinned by strong research and writing. They raise challenging contemporary issues about the ways in which businesses impact our economies and societies. In doing so, these books highlight the difficult choices business leaders and policymakers face in an era of disruption.”
The judging panel, chaired by Roula Khalaf, comprises:
- Mimi Alemayehou, Founder and Managing Partner, Semai Ventures LLC
- Daisuke Arakawa, Managing Director, Nikkei Inc.
- Mitchell Baker, Executive Chair of the Board, Member of the Nominating and Governance Committee, Mozilla Corporation
- Sherry Coutu, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor
- Mohamed El-Erian, President, Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Adviser, Allianz and Gramercy
- Peter Harrison, Group Chief Executive, Schroders
- James Kondo, Chairman, International House of Japan
- Randall Kroszner, Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business
- Shriti Vadera, Chair, Prudential Plc and Royal Shakespeare Company
The winner of the 2024 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on Monday 9th December at an event in London hosted by FT Editor Roula Khalaf, Schroders Group Chief Executive Peter Harrison and Nikkei Inc. Managing Director for Global Business Daisuke Arakawa. The winner will receive £30,000 and the author(s) of each of the remaining shortlisted books will be awarded £10,000.
Previous Business Book of the Year winners include: Amy Edmondson for Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive (2023); Chris Miller for Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022); Nicole Perlroth for This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021); Sarah Frier for No Filter: The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture (2020); Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019); John Carreyrou for Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018); Amy Goldstein for Janesville: An American Story (2017); Sebastian Mallaby for The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (2016); Martin Ford for Rise of the Robots (2015); Thomas Piketty for Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014); Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013); Steve Coll for Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012); Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo for Poor Economics (2011); Raghuram Rajan for Fault Lines (2010); Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009); Mohamed El-Erian for When Markets Collide (2008); William D. Cohan for The Last Tycoons (2007); James Kynge for China Shakes the World (2006); and Thomas Friedman, the inaugural award winner in 2005, for The World is Flat.