Business Book of the Year 2023 — the longlist

Books tackling the challenges of artificial intelligence, the race for natural resources, and the rise (and fall) of billionaires make the longlist for this year’s Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. 

The 2023 award is the first to be run under a new three-year deal with the global asset manager, in partnership this year with Nikkei, the FT’s parent.

Fifteen books were filtered by FT journalists from more than 500 entries for the award. The longlist also includes books about cryptocurrencies and the future of money, the growing influence of China on global business, how to fight climate change, the quest for better jobs, and how to avoid or face failure.

Technology and jobs

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, is one of a quartet of books that examine tensions caused by the rapid advance of technology. Johnson and Acemoglu (co-author of 2012 finalist Why Nations Fail) examine the history of technology breakthroughs and their socio-economic consequences, concluding that if the benefits are going to be shared, such advances have to be carefully managed.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman, published next month, picks up a similar theme, but presents an insider’s take on generative AI, synthetic biology and quantum computing. Working with Michael Bhaskar, Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, warns of the dangers of sleepwalking into catastrophe. The coming wave of change must be contained, the authors argue, and they lay out the tools necessary to navigate “the tortuous route forward”.

Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy provides an early indication of some of the ways in which humanity could take the wrong path. New York Times reporter Hill followed a tip-off about Clearview AI, an app that claimed to identify anyone based on a picture of their face. Her account, also published in September, points out some of the privacy pitfalls ahead as data-mining companies exploit new technology.

Both Power and Progress and The Coming Wave refer to the Luddites. Brian Merchant devotes the whole of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (due out next month) to the machine-breakers of the Industrial Revolution, drawing parallels with ordinary workers of today, from Uber to Amazon, affected by wrenching tech-fuelled change. The Luddites’ uprising against exploitative entrepreneurs sowed “the seeds of a conflict that continues to shape our relationship to work and technology today”, argues Merchant, who made the shortlist of the FT award in 2017 with his book about the iPhone, The One Device.

Zeynep Ton, an MIT professor, offers some evidence-based suggestions about how to reverse the vicious cycle that makes bad jobs worse in her book The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work. Ton and her Good Jobs Institute have tested a system that moves away from punishingly short-term contracts and low wages in a successful effort to reduce staff turnover, raise productivity, delight customers and make workers happier.

Future of money

Two longlisted titles look at the future of money in a world of apps, influencers and digital technology. In Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, to be published in October, Rachel O’Dwyer examines new “money-like instruments”, such as phone credit, game tokens, even customer data itself. The Dublin-based academic points out that such instruments have always shadowed the real economy, but the spread of platforms poses new threats now that digitisation has made their use ubiquitous.

O’Dwyer examines cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin as part of her analysis, but Ben McKenzie, the US actor turned crypto-sceptic, pairs up with journalist Jacob Silverman to dive even deeper into the subject in Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. McKenzie became interested in crypto during pandemic lockdowns and turned his obsession into a campaign to unearth fraud and question the foundations of digital currency hype, including interviewing former crypto star Sam Bankman-Fried before the failure of his company FTX.

Climate, resources and geopolitics

The dangers posed to the environment are at the forefront of Simon Sharpe’s Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change. Sharpe is a former UK civil servant working on climate policy, whose title refers to the need to decarbonise the world economy about five times faster this decade than what was managed in the past two decades to meet global warming targets. He lays out pragmatic ways in which scientists, economists and diplomats could help.

Two longlisted titles take different perspectives on the pressure on natural resources. In Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, Siddharth Kara investigates the human rights abuses that taint the mining of cobalt, an essential raw material for the rechargeable batteries in our laptops, phones and electric cars. His inquiry takes him deep into the cobalt-mining communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ed Conway explores the origins and uses of other minerals in Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future, which underlines the world’s reliance on six key materials: sand (used for concrete), salt (for fertiliser), iron (and steel), copper (for electrical wires), oil and lithium. Sky News’s economics editor travels the globe and describes in vivid detail how the materials he studies have come to make up “the bedrock of our lives today”.

The expanding geoeconomic reach of China is tackled in Beijing Rules: China’s Quest for Global Influence, by Bethany Allen, who chronicles the many ways in which she says the ruling Communist party seeks to exert its power abroad. Allen warns that the rest of the world needs to act now to curb China’s “authoritarian economic statecraft”, expressed through trade policy, indirect influence over western brands, investment in technology, and more.

Billionaires

Two books take the reader deep inside the ambition, paranoia and eccentricities of the billionaire class. Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Hollywood Media Empire, by James Stewart and Rachel Abrams is the no-holds-barred tale of the brutal succession battle that broke out over media mogul Sumner Redstone’s empire. Stewart (a finalist in the inaugural FT book award in 2005 for DisneyWar) and Abrams tell a tale of sex, power and late-life obsession.

Katherine Clarke’s Billionaires’ Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World’s Most Exclusive Skyscrapers focuses on the New York real estate entrepreneurs who fought to build the “supertall” residential skyscrapers that now dominate midtown Manhattan, in the process underlining the widening gulf between the super-rich and the person in the street. Clarke, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, describes it as “a story about hubris, sophisticated financial engineering, architectural daring, shady money, and one-upmanship”.

How to fail better

Finally, the longlist features two titles looking at different aspects of failure.

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner draw on the former’s comprehensive studies of the fate of megaprojects — most of which run over time and over budget — in How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration. Their book draws some of the lessons of failures, from the Sydney Opera House to many Olympic Games, and applies the lessons to more humdrum project management challenges.

Amy Edmondson also looks at the importance of turning failure to good account in the Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive, to be published next month. The Harvard professor and advocate of the need for “psychological safety” and speak-up work cultures draws on her and others’ research to lay out how to learn to fail better and take smarter risks. “Most of us go out of our way to avoid experiencing failure,” she writes, “robbing ourselves of adventure, accomplishment, and even love.” 

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 judges reserve the right to add further books to the longlist ahead of the announcement of the shortlist on September 21. The winner of the award will be announced on December 4. 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/

Additional research by Harvey Nriapia