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

Published

2 years ago

August 19, 2024

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

Books on Donald Trump’s finances and Bill Gates’ influence go head to head with titles about the challenges of artificial intelligence, the impact of demographic change and how business can do the right thing, in the race to be named Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year.

Other titles vying to be judged the “most compelling and enjoyable” business book of 2024 range from the memoir of an investment bank trader to an in-depth exploration of the changing concept of the corporation, from an assessment of Amazon’s dominance to a powerful account of the tension between sustainability and resource demand.

More than 600 entries were filtered and reviewed by FT journalists. A longlist of 16 titles now remain in the running to become the 20th winner of the £30,000 award, which was first presented in 2005. Here they are:

AI AND TECHNOLOGY

Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that will Change the World, published next month, recounts the battle between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis to develop the world-changing technology of generative AI, while also grappling with the ethical and commercial imperatives set by their respective backers at Microsoft and Google.

The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future, by Hilke Schellmann, drills down into the impact of AI in the workplace, as an aid to recruitment and performance management. Schellmann warns how algorithms can amplify bias and cause more harm than good.

In The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power, Dana Mattioli takes a critical look at the influence of the dominant ecommerce and cloud computing company. Her book — echoing the title of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store (which won the award in 2013) — asks whether the group has become too big for regulators to stop.

Entrepreneur Raj Shah and technology strategist Christopher Kirchhoff tell the story of how they and others have shaken up US defence procurement in Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. Shah and Kirchhoff turned to start-ups to revolutionise the way the US military is supplied and how war is fought.

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder, goes to the heart of the dilemmas facing those who want to accelerate the shift to a more sustainable economy. Scheyder examines how the quest to mine critical minerals is setting policymakers, manufacturers, ecologists and scientists against each other.

ECONOMICS

In Growth: A Reckoning, Daniel Susskind, whose timely book A World Without Work made the 2020 shortlist, turns his attention to the question of how to resolve the tension between the quest for growth at all costs — creating inequality and environmental damage — and the need to preserve what we value.

Andrew Scott returns to the question of how to cope with, and benefit from, improved life expectancy in The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives. Scott — co-author with Lynda Gratton of 2016 finalist The 100-Year Life — proposes ways to pursue an “evergreen agenda” that should help us to live sustainably and healthily for longer.

In The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People, Paul Seabright offers a novel economic analysis of religions. He describes them as the original platform organisations, rallying groups of users in mutually beneficial relationships just as Instagram or X do today, and points out how religious and secular groups can work together.

ORGANISATIONS

Economist John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong is a profound analysis of how the world of digital products and services is challenging the traditional view of the company. The book, out in late August, examines the future of what was once the pre-eminent organisational unit of capitalism, and how it and the wider economy are managed.

Alison Taylor picks up some of those challenges in Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, her guide for leaders struggling to balance clashing stakeholder demands, ESG investment requirements, and ethical questions that go far beyond the confines of their day-to-day business.

In Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, to be published in October, psychologist Michael Morris takes a deep and well-timed look at how leaders in business and politics can harness innate tribal instincts to positive effect, rather than allowing them to divide.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How The World Lost its Mind, by Dan Davies introduces readers to ubiquitous “accountability sinks” that allow responsible parties to avoid blame and therefore erode the foundations of society. Davies points to the ways in which mainstream economics supplanted the management theory of “cybernetics” that could have created a more positive outcome.

Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao outline a familiar picture of bureaucratic dysfunction in The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder and offer plenty of practical ways that heroic “friction-fixers” can remove the grit of unnecessary meetings, overlong emails and poor management. But they also point to the importance of “good” friction in preventing hasty decision-making.

BIOGRAPHY

The Trading Game: A Confession is Gary Stevenson’s vivid account of his time as a Citigroup swaps trader and the consequence. He made huge sums for his employer — and for himself — but also set himself on a path to burnout and the opposite of the freedom he had expected financial success to provide.

Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King: The Hidden Truth About Bill Gates and His Power to Shape Our World, by Anupreeta Das, published this month, takes a close and unflinching look at one of the world’s richest men in an attempt to disentangle Gates’ multiple complex interests and relationships, while at the same time exploring our obsession with billionaires.

Finally, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, investigates the former president’s finances. The book, due out in September, draws on tax information, business records and interviews with insiders to explore the truth behind Trump’s claims of having built a thriving multi-billion-dollar business empire.

Entrepreneur and angel investor Sherry Coutu joins the judging panel for 2024. The jury is again chaired by FT editor Roula Khalaf and the other members are: Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, managing director for global business, Nikkei; Mitchell Baker, executive chair, Mozilla Corporation; Mohamed El-Erian, president, Queens’ College, Cambridge, and adviser, Allianz and Gramercy; Peter Harrison, chief executive, 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.

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 10 judges reserve the right to add further books to the longlist ahead of the announcement of the shortlist on September 17. The winner of the award will be announced on December 9. 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/

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America’s bid for energy supremacy is being forged in war

Published

19 minutes ago

April 25, 2026

Press Room

America’s bid for energy supremacy is being forged in war

Additional work by Jana Tauschinski

Oil and gas tanker location and destination data are from Kpler. The map shows the latest position for vessels with an active AIS signal on April 19–20, filtered by minimum capacity thresholds: crude tankers of at least 50,000 deadweight tonnage (DWT); oil product tankers of at least 55,000 DWT; oil/chemical tankers of at least 40,000 DWT; LNG carriers of at least 150,000 cubic metres; and LPG carriers of at least 50,000 cubic metres. Net fossil fuel import data by country are based on Ember analysis of the IEA World Energy Balances 2023.

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Roommate faces murder charges in deaths of 2 University of South Florida doctoral students

Published

55 minutes ago

April 25, 2026

Press Room

Roommate faces murder charges in deaths of 2 University of South Florida doctoral students

A 26-year-old man is facing two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two University of South Florida doctoral students who went missing last week, local authorities said Saturday.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said that evidence presented to the state attorney’s office resulted in the charges against Hisham Abugharbieh, the roommate of Zamil Limon, one of the doctoral students.

Abugharbieh is accused of premediated murder with a weapon. He was arrested on Friday, the same day Limon was found dead.

The family of Nahida Bristy, the other doctoral student, told CBS News that police said she is also likely dead. That is based on the volume of blood discovered at Abugharbieh’s residence, which he shared with Limon.

“Police told us she is no longer with us,” Bristy’s brother, Zahid Prato, said early Saturday.

The family was told her body may never be found and police believe she may have been dismembered, according to Prato.

CBS News has reached out to police for more information.

Authorities said in a statement Saturday they were still searching for Bristy.

Limon’s remains were found on the Howard Franklin Bridge in Tampa Friday morning, Chief Deputy Joseph Maurer with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said. His cause of death was pending autopsy results.

Deputies with the sheriff’s office took Abugharbieh into custody on Friday after responding to a domestic violence call at a home in the Lake Forest Community, a neighborhood near USF’s Tampa campus, officials said. He also faces charges of domestic violence and evidence tampering, as well as a charge of failing to report a death to law enforcement.

Limon and Bristy, both 27, had last been seen in the Tampa area on April 16.

Limon was studying the use of AI in environmental science and was set to present his doctoral thesis this week, his family said. Bristy is studying chemical engineering.

Meg Oliver

contributed to this report.

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Rubio’s Absence From Iran Talks Highlights Stay-at-Home Role

Published

10 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

Rubio’s Absence From Iran Talks Highlights Stay-at-Home Role

When President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago, his point man was Secretary of State John Kerry. Over 20 months of talks, Mr. Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart on at least 18 different days, often several times per day.

High-level nuclear diplomacy was a natural role for the top U.S. diplomat. Secretaries of state traditionally take the lead on the country’s biggest diplomatic tasks, from arms control treaties to Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

But as President Trump prepares to send a delegation to the latest round of U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan this weekend, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will remain where he often does: at home.

Mr. Rubio did not attend the last U.S. meeting with Iran earlier this month. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha. Mr. Rubio has also been absent from U.S. delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel last October.

In recent months, Mr. Rubio — consumed with his second role, as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser — has not traveled much at all.

During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made 11 foreign trips from January 2024 to late April 2024, stopping in roughly three dozen cities, according to the State Department. So far this year, Mr. Rubio has visited six foreign cities, including a stop in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Mr. Trump has outsourced much of his diplomacy to others, including his friend Steve Witkoff, a wealthy associate from the world of Manhattan real estate, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have spearheaded diplomacy with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Iran, whose delegation they will meet for the second time this month in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

Mr. Rubio’s distance from the trenches of diplomacy reflects his dual role on Mr. Trump’s national security team. For the past year, he has served as the White House national security adviser even while leading the State Department — the first person to do so since Henry A. Kissinger in the mid-1970s.

The secretary of state runs the State Department, overseeing U.S. diplomats and embassies worldwide, as well as Washington-based policymakers. Working from the White House, the national security adviser coordinates departments and agencies, including the State Department, to develop policy advice for the president.

The twin roles reflect Mr. Rubio’s influence with Mr. Trump, and offer him a way to maintain it. For Mr. Rubio, less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.

As Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Kushner and Vice President JD Vance met with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month, Mr. Rubio was at Mr. Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Emma Ashford, an analyst of U.S. diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington. “Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Ms. Ashford said.

Mr. Rubio accepted the national security adviser job on an acting basis last May after Mr. Trump reassigned the job’s previous occupant, Michael Waltz. But officials say that Mr. Rubio is expected to keep it indefinitely.

That arrangement is not inherently bad, Ms. Ashford added. And she noted that previous presidents had entrusted major diplomatic tasks to people other than the secretary of state. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delegated his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to handle diplomacy with Russia and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, for instance.

But she echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr. Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department. “I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said.

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, contested such claims. “Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. “We now have an N.S.C. and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”

Mr. Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico last June, Mr. Rubio said he visited the State Department “almost every day.”

While there, he often meets with visiting dignitaries before returning to the White House. Last week, Mr. Rubio presided over a meeting at the State Department between Lebanese and Israeli officials that set the stage for a cease-fire in Lebanon.

His twin jobs “really do overlap in many cases,” he said. “In many cases you end up being in the same meetings or in the same places; there’s just one less person in there, if you think about it,” Mr. Rubio added. “A lot of people would come to Washington, for example, for meetings, and they’d want to meet with the national security adviser and then meet with me as secretary of state. Now they can do both in one meeting.”

Asked about his travel schedule during a news conference last December, Mr. Rubio said he had less reason to travel abroad because “we have a lot of leaders constantly coming here” to visit Mr. Trump at the White House. Mr. Rubio also joins Mr. Trump’s foreign trips in his capacity as national security adviser.

Many national security veterans call the arrangement unwise, saying that both jobs are extremely demanding and incompatible with one another.

It was not easy even for Mr. Kissinger, who had firmly established himself over more than four years as national security adviser before convincing President Richard M. Nixon to let him take on an additional role as secretary of state in 1973. (In a reversal of Mr. Rubio’s approach, Mr. Kissinger was in constant motion, including a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy that kept him on the road for 33 straight days.)

“In general, it’s a mistake to combine those roles,” said Matthew Waxman, who held senior roles at the National Security Council, State Department and the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration.

“That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a dual-hatted Rubio is so offscreen right now,” Mr. Waxman added. “Especially while so much attention is focused on high-wire diplomacy with Iran, someone needs to manage foreign policy around the rest of the world.”