FT Business Book of the Year 2023 — the shortlist

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Walter Isaacson’s newly published biography of Elon Musk is one of six finalists for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.

The book joins titles about the pressure on the world’s natural resources, how to handle failure, and how to tackle the challenges of rapidly advancing technologies.

FT editor and chair of the judging panel, Roula Khalaf, said the judges had “picked six exciting, engaging and important titles that together provide a highly readable guide to the future of business”.

The shortlisted titles for the £30,000 award are:

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future, by Ed Conway, explores the origins and uses of six key minerals that make up “the bedrock of our lives today”, underlining the environmental risks even as the world tries to pursue a more sustainable path.

Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive, by Amy Edmondson, describes how to “fail better” and take smarter risks, drawing on the Harvard professor’s groundbreaking research into “psychological safety” and speak-up cultures.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, examines the way megaprojects almost invariably run over time and over budget and shows how the lessons of such failures, and the rare successes, could be more widely applied.

Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson, describes in closely reported detail how the entrepreneur rose to become one of the most influential forces in electric vehicle manufacture, social media and space exploration. Musk’s book was released only last week and was not on the original longlist of 15. The judges exercised their rarely-used right to call in the title for consideration and add it directly to the shortlist.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara, investigates the human rights abuses that taint the mining of the essential raw material cobalt, a quest that took him deep into the mining communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar) warns about the dangers of coming technologies such as generative AI, synthetic biology and quantum computing, and explains how to contain the dangers they could pose.

The winner of the award, also supported by FT owner Nikkei, will be announced in London on December 4. Authors of each of the shortlisted books will receive £10,000.

Schroders chief executive Peter Harrison, also a judge of the award, said the finalists offered “solutions to the pressing challenges facing executives and policymakers at a time of profound disruption and uncertainty”.

Technology books have dominated the past three years of the book award.
Last year, the prize went to Chip War, Chris Miller’s analysis of the battle for global supremacy in semiconductor production. Previous winners include Nicole Perlroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, about the cyber arms race, in 2021, and Sarah Frier’s No Filter, on the rise of Instagram, in 2020.

The other judges of this year’s award are Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, Nikkei’s managing director for global business; Mitchell Baker, chief executive of Mozilla Corporation; Herminia Ibarra, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School; James Kondo, chair, International House of Japan; Randall Kroszner, professor of economics at University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and Shriti Vadera, chair of Prudential and the Royal Shakespeare Company.