The Best Business Books of 2024: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

What’s 2024 been like as a year for business books? What kind of trends have we seen?

We’ve had another year where artificial intelligence has been in the news and perhaps surprisingly given the long lead time of many business books, we have already had a flurry of business books on AI. A couple of them did make our longlist, and one of them is on the shortlist, as we’ll discuss. Obviously, there will be more. The big question that I and those of us who filter the entries have posed is, ‘To what degree does an AI book stand the test of time (one of our sub-criteria for the prize) given that it’s moving so fast?’ So that’s one obvious trend, as well as technology in general.

I also noticed books from the diversity and inclusion wave a couple of years ago. We’re now hitting a moment where there’s been a slowing down and possibly even a backlash against DEI policy, so there were quite a number of books that felt, to me at least, a bit out of sync with the news in that area.

This has not been a year with huge books that we knew were coming. Last year, there was a Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman-Fried and everything that happened at FTX; there was the big Walter Isaacson book that got onto our shortlist about Elon Musk. This year, I’d say the longlist was a bit more even in terms of the types of books and the authors that we were looking at. For me, as the organizer of the prize, that’s a good thing, because it means we’re showcasing books that might not already be getting a lot of publicity. Also, it makes for a more exciting contest.

So that’s the year as I’ve seen it.

Let’s get straight into the books. First up is The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong by British economist John Kay. Tell me more.

John Kay is well known to FT readers, because for a long time he wrote a column and still is an occasional FT contributor. This book is supposedly the first in a trilogy that he’s producing. It’s looking at what has happened to the archetypal vehicle for modern capitalism: the company or corporation. What happens to it when we move, as we have moved, from a world of making mainly things, into a world where lots of products are essentially digital, immaterial or services?

The book looks mainly at the history of corporate capitalism since the late 19th century, and in much more detail in the 20th century. He writes that it’s a book that you would want to read if you were learning about business. It’s not aimed at people who already know a lot about business and the corporate economy.

He writes in a very witty, sometimes acerbic style about some of the scandals and setbacks of the corporate model over the years and looks at the way the change in the economic landscape is changing the way companies are run. I think possibly for later in the trilogy, we’ll want to know more from him about the future of the company. This book is sold as being about what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t touch very much on the weird models that are beginning to emerge for decentralizing management and so on. It’s more about what’s happened in the recent past.

What does the subtitle—‘almost everything we are told about business is wrong’—refer to? What have we been told that’s wrong?

That’s a bit of publishing hyperbole. The book seems to be a straightforward analysis of how the corporate model has evolved and challenges some of the ways in which one might think about shareholder value. That’s classic John Kay but it’s also something that we know to be a challengeable fact in economics. There are plenty of books out there, and have been for some time, that take issue with shareholder value as the only way of running companies. As I say, it’s wonderfully written, quite tart in places, and very accessible—notwithstanding the fact that John Kay is a very distinguished and intellectually high-level economist.

Let’s go on to the next book. This is Tribal by Michael Morris, who is a psychologist at Columbia Business School. Is he arguing that tribalism isn’t all bad?

That’s right. The timing of this book is clever—it came out in October. That was aimed at putting it in front of people in the month before the US election where we’ve got two tribes—Trumpians and Democrats—taking each other on. We’ve seen many years of the political landscape, not only in the US but also elsewhere, dividing into bad tribalism.

Morris’s point, first of all, is that tribalism is innate. Going back to the Neanderthals, he spends quite a lot of time explaining how Homo sapiens has developed these tribal instincts and how they have not only protected but also advanced humankind. There is no getting round tribal instincts.

What he’s arguing for is that there are real opportunities for positive change, if leaders—and he takes leaders across the whole gamut: from politicians like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore through to modern corporate leaders—can harness this tribal instinct. He makes a little nod at the beginning of the book to working from home, and why it’s not as good as getting together in the office. One of the reasons is that our tribal instinct looks for cues from other people in our team, and that’s harder to get when you’re on a Zoom call.

I must admit, when I first saw the book, I thought, ‘This will be another of these behavioral science books that’s going to recycle some old thinking and research that we’re all familiar with’—but it has a strong spark of originality in the way he is recasting tribalism as a potential positive. At least one of the judges, when we were talking about it, said this was a book they wish they’d had when they were a CEO or leading a team, as a way of helping to interpret what you’re looking at when you’re confronted with a team management situation.

It’s a genuine business book, but with a very wide brief as well, to look at things beyond business.

Let’s go on to Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson, who is, I think, a journalist?

Yes, she’s a Bloomberg columnist. In her columns, she has written about the subject of this book, which is the battle between Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, and Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, which is strongly allied with Microsoft. It’s about their rivalry to find a way to apply generative AI—and AI more generally—in a world-changing way.

Her line is that Altman and Hassabis had a vision of a world-altering technology, and the ability to bring it into being, but that they have been corralled by corporate interests so that it’s become a commercial product. And of course, this has been borne out with OpenAI. Last month, we had further evidence that Sam Altman and OpenAI are pushing fast down the for-profit commercial route, and that’s been the cause, certainly at OpenAI, of quite a lot of the rifts that Parmy Olson chronicles in Supremacy.

So it’s a book in the moment, a journalistic investigation with a broader warning about the risk of putting AI in the service of commercial interests. In terms of lack of safeguards, it means greater risks and, overall, the loss of an idealistic vision of AI as something that can make the world a better place.

If these companies weren’t commercial, what would they be?

Her starting point is that both Hassabis and Altman made a leap. Obviously, they had the ability to develop AI with their teams and, for a long time, they thought that it would be something that should be serving wider humanity—improving productivity, making life better, sparking creativity and so on, all those good things. But once the Googles and Microsofts of this world got their eyes on the wider commercial prize, it became harder for them to stick to that line.

Now I don’t follow this closely but some of the things that have been happening in the last few months suggest that certainly Sam Altman has his eye on a commercial prize as well, and that’s been the cause of these rifts and disputes that have emerged at OpenAI.

Somebody did point out to me that although Google and Microsoft are the commercial protagonists in this book, there are competitors out there. There are other gen AI models and the very speed with which AI startups are developing does offset the risk of it becoming an oligopoly.

Let’s move on to the fourth book. This is The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives by Andrew Scott.

Andrew Scott is the economist who was the co-author (with Lynda Gratton) a few years ago of The 100-Year Life. This is the idea that people being born now, and indeed in the last 10 or 15 years, have a greater chance of living to 100. It’s about how that affects how they as individuals behave, as well as how companies, policymakers and society handle that. In this book, Scott takes it a step further, laying out what he calls an evergreen agenda, which is the way various institutions and individuals can improve their ability to live well into long life.

One of the things that he takes on here, which was raised in the earlier book as well, is the danger that if you simply allow this demographic change to happen without taking any action, then we risk having a longer life that is actually no better, indeed worse, than the shorter, healthier life that might have gone before. What you want is to live a better life both medically, but also in the way the economics is set up so that you can continue to make a difference well into healthy old age. In that sense, it’s a policy book.

I find this topic fascinating. I was always surprised that The 100-Year Life didn’t spawn lots more books about this challenge. There are some, and there’s a lot of work to which he refers—of people trying to live forever: this whole obsession with immortality is still out there, and he cites some of the more eccentric examples. But he points out that there’s a risk that you simply live forever as an invalid, unable to do anything, which is not a great outcome. He’s pointing to a more realistic option, which policymakers might be able to help shape.

Is it about making sure we don’t retire too young and practical recommendations like that?

There’s lots of practical stuff in there, including suggestions about how you deal with this overhang. We’ve already got situations like Japan, a top-heavy society with older people whose retirement is not going to be funded by a relatively dwindling number of younger people. Those are issues that he addresses in the book. It’s ultimately optimistic, because he’s saying this is within reach, but we have to start acting now.

Let’s go on to Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War.

Unit X is a book by people who were doing the things that they describe. So Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, the authors, ran Unit X, which was a specially set up unit of the Pentagon that was going to take ideas from Silicon Valley that could be useful for defence purposes. They were brought in to revive it, after the original team started to struggle.

For me, as the former management editor of the FT, it’s a fascinating book about ‘How do you bring together a gigantic, powerful, but bureaucratic organism like the Pentagon with fast-moving startups impatient to get their inventions out into the world?’ Quite a lot of the book is about the navigation, literally, of the corridors of the Pentagon in order to make this happen. That, in itself, is interesting.

It also ticks the box of being a technology book: it’s about what’s happening at the cutting edge of technology.

Then the third part of the book is about the military-industrial complex in the 21st century. It puts us in the heart of this question of, ‘What is the moral value of defence in a world where there are actual hot wars out there, into which the Pentagon and other allies of the US are feeding their materiel?’ It’s right up to date. It only touches on Israel-Iran obliquely, but it covers Ukraine and the Gaza conflict.

For me, it’s a fascinating book because it makes you think about the value of these companies and what the crossover is between money making and war making, which is one of the things that they have to broker. How do we make sure that we are harnessing the innate desire of startups to make money to a wider strategic effort?

I was reading the first pages. He’s flying a jet over Iraq, but he can’t figure out where he is despite all the high tech in his fighter jet, so he has to use another gadget to find his location.

That’s right. He ends up repurposing his $300 hand-held device to give him a more accurate readout. That comes full circle at the end of the book, where they go to Ukraine. We know the Ukrainians have been ingeniously repurposing ordinary kit in order to make more effective defences against the Russians and vice versa. The point the authors make is that the very cheap drones repurposed by the Ukrainians turn out to be far more effective than the very expensive, high spec drones supplied by the Pentagon. It’s that contradiction—we’re not getting the technology that is useful on the battlefield, except by workarounds.

It’s a very topical look at this particular kind of crossover.

Let’s turn to the final book on this year’s shortlist Growth: A Reckoning by Daniel Susskind. Tell me about this book.

Daniel Susskind has been on the prize’s longlist before—with a book on the future of work a few years ago. He’s part of the Susskind clan that has looked at everything from artificial intelligence in the professions through to the impact of tech on democracy. Growth is a big thinking book. It’s an economics book. It’s his look at how you resolve the dilemma that has emerged in the last 200 years of economic growth being both the most potent way of increasing prosperity and reducing poverty, while at the same time a catalyst for widening inequality and environmental depredation. So the good and the bad of growth: what is the solution to the tension between the two?

He takes on some of the solutions. A traditional one is, ‘We just go for more growth. If we make that the objective, eventually these other problems fall away.’ He says that’s just going to lead to greater inequality and more environmental destruction. But he also takes on the counter view, that says we have to stop growing. He dismantles the degrowth argument quite effectively.

What he lights on is the idea of human ingenuity. There’s a bit of a read across here, actually, to Tribal. Both these books talk about the pre-history of Homo sapiens and how hunter gatherers developed ways of using tools and so on. Susskind puts a lot of emphasis on the optimism inherent in human ingenuity. He is also keen—and this is where he argues against the degrowthers—that we shouldn’t be pulling in our horns on this, that it does involve taking risk. The one thing that we shouldn’t be doing is hampering our yearning for more prosperity and better lives by putting an artificial cap on it, as the degrowthers might argue.

Degrowth is being taken quite seriously, I’ve noticed. I dropped in on a politics lecture at the University of Bristol a few months ago and I was surprised to hear a German political scientist talking about degrowth.

There’s certainly a lot of discussion of it in the bien pensant circles of academia. He doesn’t destroy degrowth—one of the things I like about the book is that it does examine arguments. Quite a lot of the first half of the book is about how growth emerged to be the one objective. GDP growth is the thing that most economies are measuring themselves by. How did that happen? He writes about the wars between various schools of economics in developing that. For a non-economist like me, there’s a lot of useful history of economics. I would certainly turn back to this book if I heard mention of a particular school of economics. There are some nice thumbnail sketches of where they went wrong, what happened when the next set of schools of economics took over and corrected the errors of the previous one. So he’s not positive about degrowth as a solution to this difficult dilemma that everyone wrestles with, but he is positive about economics, provided the key moral questions of how to tackle the trade-offs of growth are part of a political discussion between citizens.

The other interesting thing, again, from a non-economist point of view, was his reminder that for most of human history, there was no growth. Often, depending on where you were born, you just stayed the same. Only in 1800 do all the charts—and he has many of them—suddenly show this hockey stick take-off in growth, with the Industrial Revolution fueling that.

The winner of the 2024 Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on December 9th.