The Best Business Books of 2025: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Before we get to this year’s shortlist, are there any trends you’ve seen in business books over the past year?

I think it’s been a repeat of the last couple of years in that technology has dominated the business book output and prize entries this year. Last year Parmy Olson won the prize with Supremacy, which was about the battle between OpenAI and DeepMind.

I didn’t do a breakdown of themes, but of the 16 books on this year’s longlist, I would say about half were in some respects linked to technology, with AI in particular still a dominant theme.

The challenge for those of us who filtered the 500+ books entered for the prize was to ensure that we didn’t have a longlist that was entirely technology based. It’s also a difficult subject for the industry to publish books on, because it’s a target that’s moving very fast, in the case of AI. Books risk being out of date quite quickly. The question of whether the book will stand the test of time—one of the criteria for winning—is coming up in the judging process more frequently in relation to AI-related books than it has done in the past on almost any other topic.

It reminds me a little bit of the 2000s when we were looking at lots of books about the financial crisis and whether the definitive book on it had been produced. Later in the cycle, you got books that might have been well worth consideration earlier, but books had already received the prize—or been long- or shortlisted—on the same topic. It makes it quite hard.

You mention the prize’s criteria. For anyone who hasn’t followed it before, could you say what classifies as a business book, because it’s pretty broadly defined?

Yes, we are not confined by what you might find on the business bookshelf in a bookstore or at the airport. We go as widely as history and biography. This year, for the first time in 15 years, we had a novel on the longlist, Drayton and Mackenzie by Alex Starritt.

We also define quite broadly what we mean by business itself. It goes from economics through management–more the mainstream of the business bookshelf in most stores and libraries—through to finance and beyond into entrepreneurship and CEO-type investigations.

So I’m pleased to say that over the two decades of the prize—it’s now in its 21st year—we’ve broadened the category and made people think a bit more laterally about what constitutes a business book.

Let’s go through the six books that made the shortlist in 2025. First up, we’ve got House of Huawei by Eva Dou. What can you tell me about this book?

As many will know, Huawei is a vast Chinese technology and telecoms company which has come to prominence in the last 20 or so years. Despite the fact that its products have traditionally competed with those of Western firms, it’s probably more of a mystery to the outsider than even the quite secretive Apple or Samsung.

There is also a crossover with the Chinese state. There have been suggestions that the founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, had links with the Chinese military, which Huawei denies. But clearly there is a story to unravel there.

Eva Dou does a great job of looking at all the available evidence of what’s to be said about Huawei. She’s done countless interviews and a lot of archival research. As our Financial Times reviewer wrote at the time, it’s probably the best version that you can get of what we know about Huawei, even if it leaves some of it still seeming rather mysterious.

And, of course, as the book points out, in the last four or five years, Huawei has become much more of a tool of China’s relations with the US and the West. There’s lots of pressure on Western countries not to use Huawei equipment because of fears of espionage and there has also been a lot of pushback from the Chinese. So it’s a fascinating story that brings together the geopolitics as well as the microeconomics and commercial success of this company.

The book is quite focused on the founder. Ren Zhengfei is very much at the center of this story, isn’t he?

Yes absolutely, and that makes it similar to another book on the shortlist that we’ll talk about in minute, The Thinking Machine. Mr. Ren is very much the front man, but also the mystery at the heart of Huawei. The book goes back and looks at how he put together this empire.

Also, from my point of view—as a writer interested in management and leadership—you get a fascinating insight into how a company that was nothing becomes something. I’ve actually visited Huawei in Shenzhen, and I remember thinking at the time—long before it became more controversial—that it had done a very good job of milking Western expertise and engineering excellence by employing Western consulting firms and so on to advise it, which then allowed it to build its own brand and power on those foundations.

Let’s go on to the next book, which is Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War by Edward Fishman. Tell me more.

I think you’re starting to get the picture that a lot of the books on this year’s shortlist are about the current global geo-economic tensions. This book goes right to the heart of economics as a weapon and sanctions in particular.

Eddie Fishman worked in the US State Department and helped to shape some of the policies that we’ve seen unfolding and being used against Russia, for example, over the Ukraine war. And although it sounds like a potentially rather dry tale, it’s enlivened by the way he takes you into the human side of it. People are trying to think creatively about ways in which they can apply the tools of economics to some pretty tense geopolitical confrontations.

Fishman has really captured the zeitgeist of the moment. I was talking recently to one of my colleagues, who said that the word ‘chokepoints’ has become part of the language in which people talk about sanctions, tariffs etc. It’s obviously front and center as a subject for the FT. He finds ways to shed light on it which I think are pretty valuable.

He starts off with the Bosphorus and the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE — so the book has a historical element as well.

Yes, absolutely. That’s common to a couple of the books on the list. We like a nice history lesson for this award.

On that note, let’s go on to How Progress Ends. This is by Carl Benedikt Frey.

Yes, he is a Swedish academic who’s written a lot not only about the history but also the future of technology, in particular AI. What Frey does in the book is challenge the idea that progress is inevitable. He looks back to civilizations over the last millennium and examines why they have stalled when it comes to progress. For example, he writes about China losing its way after the Song Dynasty. Having been a great, inventive nation, it becomes bogged down in bureaucracy.

On a giant macroeconomic and historical scale, it’s about finding the balance between the necessary structure and bureaucracy that you need in order to build and the decentralized, innovative spirit that you need to keep going. As he points out, when that gets out of kilter, you get stuck. This has huge lessons that he draws for both the US and China. Again, this is something that’s taken up by one of the other books, Breakneck, we’ll talk about shortly.

There’s a failure to adapt to technology, which inevitably dooms a civilization if it can’t find a way through it. So it’s a heavyweight book that gives you a grand historical perspective on the key question of how to guarantee growth and continued technological advance.

Is the book useful for a policymaker, say, who is trying to figure out how to keep technology and growth going?

It’s inevitably pretty sweeping. Ancient China did it wrong, so we can do it differently’ is probably not the conclusion that you draw. But I’m a great believer in the dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past (to misquote George Santayana). As a cautionary tale, the book is pretty good in saying, ‘This needs to be thought through.’

Let’s turn to Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. What’s this book arguing?

Abundance is the book that is probably the most prominent of the six on the shortlist, in the sense that Ezra Klein is a well-known commentator, and the book has already been widely reviewed and talked about. He and Derek Thompson, his co-author, have picked up an element of the danger that is posed to America if it continues to tie itself up in bureaucratic and regulatory mechanisms.

It’s essentially a message to what you might call the US opposition, the center-left, that by layering on regulation, legislation, and various bits of friction, you prevent the prosperity and growth and invention that built the American way. They point to the danger that you never remove any of the legislative and regulatory measures that you’ve put in place.

They’re quite critical of the government, which in the US in the past has been able to ignite innovation. They argue it’s no longer doing that job properly, and sound the warning that China, in particular, is doing some of these things better.

So it goes to the heart of some of the things that the Trump administration has tried to solve with a sledgehammer—through tariffs etc.

The book speaks to the fear that Americans have of being left behind, I think, and it’s attempting to address that in a quite polemical way. They don’t pull their punches.

That sounds quite Thatcherite, the idea that our problems stem from over-regulation.

Yes, but it’s coming from the left and it’s directed to the left. They aren’t preaching to the converted. They’re saying, ‘There are some things that were well intentioned but have held back American prosperity and growth and risk holding it back in future if we’re not careful.’ There’s a clear idea that there’s a path towards a progressive future that can still encourage prosperity.

So I think it’s an interesting and provocative take from people who are actually talking to their own tribe to some extent, and pointing out errors that have been made in the past.

When we reviewed it, our reviewer, who had been part of the Biden administration, pointed out that Biden himself did try and do some of these things. She also made it clear that there are darker forces, if you like, that might be working on the American economy in the meantime. So it may look a bit pie in the sky in the end, these prescriptions.

Next up is Breakneck by Dan Wang. I haven’t read this yet, but was excited to see it on the shortlist so you could tell me what it’s about. The subtitle is ‘China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.’

Yes, it’s a play on words. Dan Wang’s big conceit here is that China is an engineering economy, and America an economy dominated by lawyers. The book actually echoes some of the Abundance themes, because he, like Klein and Thompson, is arguing that America is stuck and China is building the future. So that’s the broad framing.

As I’ve described it, it sounds as though he’s saying China has won this, but it’s more interesting than that. He also points out the risk that China is going to kill off its own ambition with its social engineering. Ensuring that people are monitored and their political views are kept under control risks undermining the Chinese advantage that it might have earned through being an ambitious engineering state.

In a sense, Dan Wang’s conclusion is that China needs some of America’s respect for freedom of political expression and America needs quite a lot of China’s engineering ambition. Both countries risk killing off the best of themselves if they overdo one or other of those particular tendencies.

In the book, he points out how many of China’s top leaders are engineers, which I found interesting. When I was first in China, a friend, whose father was quite a famous dissident, said that anybody who wanted to get ahead studied engineering because it was too risky to study politics or history or subjects that you might study in the West. Engineering was a safe degree to pursue because it was neutral: there’s no ideological angle to it.

That’s fascinating and it speaks to Wang’s warning to China. Things like the dreadful, full lockdown on Covid—that they continued pursuing long after others had lifted it—and the one child policy: these are all things that can potentially hold back China. In some respects, they’re realizing that now.

In the meantime—back to the Huawei book—they’ve built a lot of very fine commercial and engineering-based enterprises.

So he frames this very nicely, I think, as a battle between two cultures, if you like, as much as anything else.

We’ve reached the final book on the 2025 shortlist, The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt, which is about Nvidia. Actually, my husband’s been reading this one and seemed to be enjoying it, but I couldn’t find it this morning, so haven’t had a chance to dip into it. Can you fill me in?

So this is a super timely book because Nvidia, the company at the center of it, is the world’s most valuable company. Stephen Witt is a former longlisted author for the prize—he wrote a book about music sharing, How Music Got Free, shortlisted in 2015. In The Thinking Machine, he has done a brilliant job of delving into the origins of Nvidia. And just as the House of Huawei book is about the founder, Mr. Ren, this book is very much built around Jensen Huang, the extraordinary, charismatic, hard-driving founder and leader of Nvidia.

Huang is in the news almost daily because Nvidia is supplying a lot of the chips that are going into AI. The book paints a picture of a company that, through sheer drive—and also a lot of luck—has managed to put itself in a position to catch this vast wave of AI development. Only a few years ago, the idea of neural networks and generative AI was considered to be a bit hopeless—both in academic and engineering circles. And the origin of Nvidia’s microchips was in gaming, another area that was somewhat neglected. The chips were put together into these vast arrays. By linking together chips that had originally been designed for video games, they could do much more.

So Huang’s vision and his drive and his eccentricities—he was a champion table tennis player, for example, at one point—come across very strongly in this book. It’s a really great read. I don’t have any judging influence, but it’s one of my favorites this year.

And these microchips Nvidia makes are absolutely crucial to AI?

They are absolutely crucial and he’s got a lock hold on the market at the moment. He’s not the only person who’s supplying chips, and everyone is racing to catch up. But Nvidia is in a pretty critical position, and that’s why it has become, latterly, part of US-China tensions. Should Nvidia be allowed to send its most advanced chips to its Chinese customers? And vice versa, are enough rare earths going to be made available by China for supplying these chip factories? These are the things on which future global economic prosperity and peace depend and this book is right at the heart of that.

The winner of the 2025 Business Book of the Year Award will be announced on December 3rd.