NEW YORK: 14 September 2018: The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company today publish the shortlist for the 2018 Business Book of the Year Award. Now in its fourteenth year, the Award is an essential calendar fixture for authors and the global business community alike. Each year it recognises a work which provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.

For this year’s shortlist, eight distinguished judges have chosen the six most influential business books of 2018:

Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, said: “This year’s shortlist covers the most pressing matters facing business today. It reminds us of how books make complex ideas accessible with riveting narrative, fine writing and in-depth research. From the universal basic income to new power structures in the modern economy, and scandal in Silicon Valley to India, this year’s titles raise the hard questions from the boardroom to the shop floor.”

Rik Kirkland, McKinsey & Company's Director of Publishing, added: “What’s striking is how varied both the voices and topics on this year’s shortlist are. Collectively, they probe a rich set of questions and offer some preliminary answers that should help political and corporate leaders struggling to cope with the good, the bad, and the ugly of creative destruction.”

The judging panel, chaired by Lionel Barber, includes:

The winner will be announced at a dinner ceremony in London on 12th November at the National Gallery, co-hosted by Lionel Barber and Kevin Sneader, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company. Charlotte Hogg, Chief Executive of Visa Europe, will give the keynote speech. The winner of the Business Book of the Year Award 2018 will be awarded £30,000, and £10,000 will be awarded to the author(s) of each of the remaining shortlisted books.

Previous Business Book of the Year winners include: Amy Goldstein for Janesville: An American Story (2017); Sebastian Mallaby for The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (2016); Martin Ford for Rise of the Robots (2015); Thomas Piketty for Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014); Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013); Steve Coll for Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012); Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo for Poor Economics (2011); Raghuram Rajan for Fault Lines (2010); Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009); Mohamed El-Erian for When Markets Collide (2008); William D. Cohan for The Last Tycoons (2007); James Kynge for China Shakes the World (2006); and Thomas Friedman, as the inaugural award winner in 2005, for The World is Flat.

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

For further information please contact:

UK: Katrina Power/ Steven Williams, Midas PR
T: +44 (0)207 361 7860 / +44 (0)79639 62538 (Katrina Power)
E: katrina.power@yahoo.com

Oliver Stannard, Financial Times
T: +44 (0) 20 7775 6342
E: oliver.stannard@ft.com

US: Mark Fortier, Fortier Public Relations
T: +1 212-675-6460, +1 646-246-3036
E: mark@fortierpr.com

Media Relations, McKinsey & Company
Graham Ackerman / Steffi Langner
T: +1 (212) 415-1971
E: media_relations_inbox@mckinsey.com

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 will be 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.

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. In 2016 the FT passed a significant milestone in its digital transformation as digital and services revenues overtook print revenues for the first time. The FT has a combined paid print and digital circulation of more than 910,000 and makes 60% of revenues from its journalism.

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 organization to shape winning strategies, mobilize for change, build capabilities, and drive successful execution.

www.mckinsey.com

THE SHORTLIST FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018:

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

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize 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 sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

In Bad Blood, John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley

Now to be adapted into a film, with Jennifer Lawrence to star.

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

Can one of the most divided nations on the planet become its next superpower? James Crabtree 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, 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, and one whose future will shape the world.

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

From even the start of his fabled career, Alan Greenspan was duly famous for his deep understanding of even the most arcane corners of the American economy, and his restless curiosity to know even more. To the extent possible, he has made a science of understanding how the US economy works almost as a living organism – how it grows and changes, surges and stalls. He has made a particular study of the question of productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and how does it spread through a society? And why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, see the opposite?

In Capitalism in America, Greenspan distills a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a thrilling and profound master reckoning with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with the celebrated Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale involving vast landscapes, titanic figures, triumphant breakthroughs, enlightenment ideals as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial debate is here – from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to the real impact of FDR’s New Deal to America’s violent mood swings in its openness to global trade and its impact.

At heart, the authors argue, America’s genius has been its unique tolerance for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new, driven by new people and new ideas. Often messy and painful, creative destruction has also lifted almost all Americans to standards of living unimaginable to even the wealthiest citizens of the world a few generations past. A sense of justice and human decency demands that those who bear the brunt of the pain of change be protected, but America has always accepted more pain for more gain, and its vaunted rise cannot otherwise be understood, or its challenges faced, without recognizing this legacy. For now, in our time, productivity growth has stalled again, stirring up the populist furies. There’s no better moment to apply the lessons of history to the most pressing question we face, that of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its leadership pass to other, inevitably less democratic powers.

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

Surely just giving people money couldn't work. Or could it?

Imagine if every month the government deposited £1000 in your bank account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy, but Universal Basic Income (UBI) has become one of the most influential policy ideas of our time, backed by thinkers on both the left and the right. The founder of Facebook, Obama's chief economist, governments from Canada to Finland are all seriously debating some form of UBI.

In this sparkling and provocative book, 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, and India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor. She visits 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 little need for human labour. She also examines at the challenges the movement faces: contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing.

The UBI movement is not just an economic policy -- it also calls into question our deepest intuitions about what we owe each other and what activities we should reward and value as a society.

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

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? 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: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximize shareholder value to 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 to us - is simply no longer discussed.

Yet, argues Mariana Mazzucato in this penetrating and passionate new book, if we are to reform capitalism - radically to transform an increasingly sick system rather than continue feeding it - we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from. Which activities create it, which extract it, which destroy it? Answers to these questions are key if we want to replace the current parasitic system with a type of capitalism that is more sustainable, more symbiotic - that works for us all. The Value of Everything will reignite a long-needed debate about the kind of world we really want to live in.

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: power was something to be seized, and then jealously guarded. Under this 'Old Power' we lived in a world of rulers and subjects.

Now, we all sense that something has changed. From #MeToo to Harvey Weinstein; Corbyn to Trump; from YouTube sensations to darker phenomena such as the emergence of ISIS – in our new hyper-connected world, ideas and movements can spread and flourish with astonishing force and speed.

In New Power, 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 will prosper in the 21st Century.

Drawing on examples from business, politics, popular culture and social justice, as well as case studies of organisations like LEGO and TED, they explain the forces that are changing the course of our age.

In a world increasingly shaped by New Power, this book will show you how to shape your future.NEW YORK: 14 September 2018: The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company today publish the shortlist for the 2018 Business Book of the Year Award. Now in its fourteenth year, the Award is an essential calendar fixture for authors and the global business community alike. Each year it recognises a work which provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.