FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024 — the shortlist

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The pursuit of better growth, the purpose of technology, the economy of tribal instincts and improving longevity are among the topics tackled by the six finalists for the 20th Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.

FT editor and chair of the judging panel Roula Khalaf said the judges would have “a hard task to select a winner from this range of exceptionally interesting and relevant titles”.

She announced the shortlist at a ceremony on Tuesday at Schroders’ US office in New York. The finalists are:

The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong, by John Kay, traces the impact on the corporation of the shareholder value movement, the knowledge economy and the digital and services revolution, which is changing the way companies are run.

Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, by Michael Morris, set to be published next month, is a vivid examination of the power of tribalism, often used to ill effect, but latent with potential for positive change if leaders in business and politics can harness basic human instincts.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World, by Parmy Olson, tracks the rivalry between Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Sam Altman of OpenAI, as they sought to apply artificial intelligence to change the world for the better, while Google, Microsoft and others vied for commercial advantage.

The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives, by Andrew Scott, proposes ways in which people, policymakers and businesses can establish an “evergreen agenda” to help us make the most of our longer lives.

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, by Raj Shah, left, and Christopher Kirchhoff, takes the reader inside the technology revolution that is shaking up the way the US military is supplied and how modern warfare is waged.

Growth: A Reckoning, by Daniel Susskind, examines the tension between our breakneck quest for growth, which can widen inequality and destroy the environment, and the need to preserve what we value.

The titles in contention for the £30,000 award were selected from a longlist of 16 books. The prize, which is also supported by FT owner Nikkei, will be presented in London on December 9. Authors of each of the shortlisted books will receive £10,000.

Last year’s prize was won, for the first time, by a management book, Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong, about how to learn from failure and take better risks. Previous winners include Chip War, Chris Miller’s analysis of the battle for global supremacy in semiconductor production, which triumphed in 2022, Nicole Perlroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, about the cyber arms race, in 2021, and Sarah Frier’s No Filter, on the rise of Instagram, in 2020.

The other judges of this year’s award are: Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, managing director for global business, Nikkei; Mitchell Baker, executive chair, Mozilla Corporation; entrepreneur and angel investor Sherry Coutu; Mohamed El-Erian, president, Queens’ College, Cambridge, and adviser, Allianz and Gramercy; Peter Harrison, chief executive of 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.

For more about the book award, visit www.ft.com/bookaward