12 November 2018: The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company today announce that John Carreyrou is the winner of the 2018 Business Book of the Year Award for Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, published by Picador (UK) and Knopf (US), the tale of the rise and fall of Theranos, the blood-testing firm.

The award recognises the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues. It was presented this evening to John Carreyrou at a ceremony at the National Gallery in London, by Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times and chair of the panel of judges, and Kevin Sneader, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company. Keynote speaker at the ceremony was Charlotte Hogg, CEO Europe, Visa.

John Carreyrou saw off strong competition from a shortlist of titles with a focus on the future of capitalism, from the implementation of a universal basic income to the rise of India, to win the £30,000 prize. Each of the five runners-up received a cheque for £10,000.

Lionel Barber said, "Bad Blood is a brilliant piece of enterprise journalism. Carreyrou cracked the story of Theranos despite threats. He just gives us the facts and they are devastating. It’s well written and reads at times like a thriller."

“Bad Blood is a distinctive piece of work,” said Kevin Sneader. “There are lessons here about the importance of governance, and the proper trade-offs between fostering innovation and conducting due diligence. Above all, it combines deep reporting with the narrative pulse of a well-told detective story.”

The distinguished judging panel for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, chaired by Lionel Barber, comprised:

The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company also announced Andrew Leon Hanna as the winner of the 2018 Bracken Bower Prize. The prize is designed to encourage young authors to tackle emerging business themes, with a focus on the challenges and opportunities presented by growth.

Mr Hanna was awarded £15,000 for his book proposal, 25 Million Sparks, which examines the rise of refugee entrepreneurs in a global crisis. It beat entries from 22 countries on topics ranging from technology, to gender, to the ethics of business.

The judges commented, "There were a diverse, inventive range of proposals entered, with many writers seeking out fresh angles on business. The winner typifies this by uncovering the powerful entrepreneurial spirit unleashed by the toughest of global forces – the refugee diaspora. We can’t wait to read more about the stories he discovers and what they can teach us all."

The distinguished judging panel for the Bracken Bower Prize comprised:

Photographs of the presentation of the Business Book of the Year Award, the winner of the Bracken Bower Prize, shortlisted authors, the judges, and speaker Charlotte Hogg, CEO Europe, Visa, are available for download from https://www.flickr.com/photos/45442848@N05/albums/72157700145902622.

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To learn more about the awards, visit ft.com/bookaward and follow the conversation at #BBYA18 and #BrackenBower.

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Oliver Stannard, Financial Times
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E: oliver.stannard@ft.com

US: Andrew DeSio, Fortier Public Relations
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Media Relations, McKinsey & Company
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The Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2018:

WINNER 2018

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou, Picador (UK), Knopf (US)

In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of the multi-billion-dollar biotech startup Theranos, was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs. Holmes was a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup promised to revolutionise the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos raised funding that valued the company at more than $9bn, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7bn. There was just one problem: the technology didn't work. For years Holmes had been keeping this hidden from her investors and retail partners, firing employees who raised questions and fostering a secretive, febrile atmosphere in the workplace. Written by John Carreyrou, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who first broke the story, Bad Blood tells the full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, described as the biggest corporate fraud since Enron.

SHORTLIST 2018

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age, by James Crabtree, Oneworld (UK), Tim Duggan Books (US)

In The Billionaire Raj, James Crabtree asks whether one of the most divided nations on the planet can become its next superpower. This book reveals the titans of politics and industry shaping India in a period of breakneck change – from controversial prime minister Narendra Modi, victor in the largest election in history, to the leading lights of the country’s burgeoning billionaire class. Over the past two decades India has grown at an unprecedented rate, rivalled only by China. Yet while the ‘Bollygarchs’ revel in new riches, wielding huge political and economic power, millions languish in their shadows, trapped in the teeming slums of the country’s megacities. Against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class and caste, reformers fight for change, while fugitive tycoons and shadowy political power brokers struggle to maintain their grip on power. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid portrait of the divisions within the world’s largest democracy, whose future will shape the world.

Capitalism in America: A History, by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, Allen Lane (UK), Penguin Press (US)

Alan Greenspan has made a lifelong science of how the US economy works – how it stagnates and changes, surges and stalls. He has particularly studied productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, while others, including our own, see the opposite? In Capitalism in America, Greenspan partners with journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge to reckon with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. Every crucial debate is here, from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy, to the real impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, to America’s fluctuating openness to global trade. Now, as productivity growth has stalled again, the authors apply the lessons of history to the question of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its economic leadership pass to other powers.

Give People Money: The Simple Idea to Solve Inequality and Revolutionise our Lives, by Annie Lowrey, WH Allen (UK), Crown (US)  

Imagine if every month the government deposited £1,000 in your bank account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return. It sounds highly unusual, but Universal Basic Income, or UBI, has become one of the most influential policy ideas of our time, backed by thinkers on both the left and right, and seriously debated by governments from Canada to Finland. In Give People Money, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movement. She travels to Kenya to see how UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in the face of advanced artificial intelligence and the declining need for human labour. She also examines the challenges the movement faces – its contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs and most powerfully, the socially entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing.

The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy  by Mariana Mazzucato, Allen Lane (UK), PublicAffairs (US).

At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation, though the latter is integral to a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximise shareholder value to the astronomically-high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making and have lost sight of what value really means. Once a central plank of economic thought, this concept of value - what it is, why it matters  - is simply no longer discussed. In this book, prizewinning political economist Mariana Mazzucato suggests that if we are to reform capitalism, we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from - which activities create it, which extract it and which destroy it. The Value of Everything reignites a long-needed debate about who really creates wealth in our world and how we decide the value of what they do.

New Power: How It's Changing The 21st Century - And Why You Need To Know by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans, Pan Macmillan (UK), Doubleday (US)

For most of human history the rules of power were clear: it was something to be seized and jealously guarded. Under this 'Old Power' we lived in a world of rulers and subjects. Now something has changed. Collaborative, crowdsourced, and decentralised, New Power has informed everything from the #MeToo movement to #BlackLivesMatter; from the rise of Corbyn to the election of Trump. In our new hyper-connected world, ideas and movements can spread and flourish online with astonishing force and speed. In this book, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms confront the biggest story of our age and trace how New Power is the key to understanding where we are and how we will prosper in the 21st Century. Drawing on examples from business, politics and popular culture, as well as case studies of organisations like LEGO and TED, they explain the forces that are changing the course of our age.

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Notes to editors on The Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Entry forms and details of the terms and conditions are available from www.ft.com/bookaward. The annual award aims to identify the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics. The shortlist of six titles was chosen from a longlist of 15. The winner was announced at a gala event in London on 12th November 2018. Submissions are invited from publishers or bona fide imprints based in any country.

Eligibility

Books must be published for the first time in the English language, or in English translation, between 16th November 2017 and 15th November 2018. There is no limit to the number of submissions from each publisher/imprint, provided they fit the criteria, and books from all genres except anthologies are eligible. There are no restrictions of gender, age or nationality of authors. Authors who are current employees of the Financial Times or McKinsey & Company, or the close relatives of such employees, are not eligible.

The 2018 Bracken Bower Prize Winner

Andrew Leon Hanna, a first-generation Egyptian-American, is co-founder and CEO of DreamxAmerica, a startup at the Harvard Innovation Lab that joins filmmaking and impact investing to empower immigrant entrepreneurs. Andrew previously was a McKinsey fellow at Generation (an independent non-profit founded by McKinsey), and led their youth employment work in Florida and Texas. He also founded IGNITE Peer Mentoring, served in the White House, represented youth at UN High-Level Panel meetings, and served as a State Department youth advisor. Andrew is completing his JD at Harvard Law School, where he is editor of the Harvard Law Review and recipient of the Oberman Prize. He graduated from Duke University as a Robertson Scholar.

Notes to editors on the Bracken Bower Prize

The Bracken Bower Prize is named after Brendan Bracken, who was chairman of the FT from 1945 to 1958, and Marvin Bower, managing director of McKinsey from 1950 to 1967, who were instrumental in laying the foundations for the present day success of the two institutions. This prize honours their legacy but also opens a new chapter by encouraging young writers and researchers to identify and analyse the business trends of the future. The inaugural prize will be awarded to the best proposal for a book about the challenges and opportunities of growth. The main theme of the proposed work should be forward-looking. In the spirit of the Business Book of the Year, the proposed book should aim to provide a compelling and enjoyable insight into future trends in business, economics, finance or management. The winner of the inaugural Bracken Bower Prize in 2014 was Saadia Zahidi for Womenomics; Christopher Clearfield and András Tilcsik were joint winners in 2015 for Rethinking the Unthinkable; Nora Rosendahl won the 2016 prize with Mental Meltdown and Mehran Gul won the 2018 prize with The New Geography of Innovation.

The best proposals will be published on FT.com. A prize of £15,000 will be given for the best book proposal. Once the finalists’ entries appear on FT.com, authors are free to solicit or accept offers from publishers. The closing date for entries was 5pm (BST) on September 30th 2018. Entry forms and details of the terms and conditions are available from www.ft.com/bookaward.

Eligibility

Only writers who are under 35 on November 30th 2018 are eligible. They can be a published author, but the proposal itself must be original and must not have been previously submitted to a publisher. Authors who are current employees of the Financial Times or McKinsey & Company, or the close relatives of such employees, are not eligible.

About the Financial Times

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading business news organisations, recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. The FT marks 130 years in 2018 with a record paying readership of more than 940,000, three-quarters of which are digital subscriptions. It is part of Nikkei Inc., which provides a broad range of information, news and services for the global business community.  

About McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm, deeply committed to helping institutions in the private, public and social sectors achieve lasting success. For more than 90 years, our primary objective has been to serve as our clients' most trusted external advisor. With consultants in 129 cities in 65 countries, across industries and functions, we bring unparalleled expertise to clients anywhere in the world. We work closely with teams at all levels of an organisation to shape winning strategies, mobilise for change, build capabilities, and drive successful execution.