The best business books to read now

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘The best business books to read now’

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Frederick Studemann
Sometimes there’s a bit of misplaced snobbery around the whole subject of business. A lot of the time it’s actually about people doing things, and it’s not about spreadsheets and it’s not about memos or whatever else people have as connotations or probably often false ideas around business. Not to say you’ve got to love every management manual, but there’s so much more to business than the many presumptions might suggest.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It with me, Isabel Berwick.

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This week, we’re talking about books. Specifically, we’re talking about the big, serious non-fiction world of business books. The business book sector is huge. Book sales on these topics were up 10 per cent in the US in the year to April 2022 and my desk heaves with new titles. So readers love them, but there are so many. How do you find a book that’s not dry, dusty or written entirely in jargon? In other words, how do you find a business book that is compelling and enjoyable? Well, you’re in luck. The Financial Times Business Book of the Year prize was set up in 2005 with the simple mission of finding and rewarding each year’s most compelling and enjoyable read. So, the judges have done the hard work and we don’t have to. In this week’s episode, we’ll share insights from the shortlisted writers and the winner, as well as FT columnists and experts. The 2022 prize has just been announced and the winner is Chris Miller for his book, Chip War. Working It was on location at the awards ceremony in London. So let’s hear from the winner himself what his book is about.

Chris Miller
It’s called Chip War: the struggle for the world’s most critical technology on the history of the computer chip and how it’s came to structure, not only the world economy and geopolitics, but also all of our lives and how we’ve become dependent on computer chips, which we use thousands of every day without ever seeing a single one of them, and the ways that they’re produced by a tiny number of irreplaceable companies. I started actually planning to write a book on missile guidance systems, and I came to realise that the interesting part of missiles was the chips inside of them, and the origins of chips actually was in missile systems. And so, it’s from Cold War missiles that we owe all of our technology today.

Isabel Berwick
I’m joined by my colleague Andrew Hill, the FT senior business writer, and Frederick Studemann, literary editor. Andrew, could you tell us about the business book prize, how it started, why it started, and what gap in the market does it fill? Is it like the Booker for business books? I feel like it is.

Andrew Hill
It is really and it’s international. It started in 2005. The gap was that there wasn’t a substantial high prestige business book award in the English language. The principal central criterion for the Business Book of the Year award is that the book should be the most compelling and enjoyable book of the year in question. It should be a book that ought to stand the test of time. Almost impossible to judge that, but it ought to have some lasting quality.

Isabel Berwick
Have you been involved since the beginning?

Andrew Hill
I have, yes. Mainly, in fact, exclusively on the side of organising the judging and the judges. And why did we do it? In part because I think we felt that that was a way of taking the editorial mission of the FT, which is to select the things that business readers want to know and extend that to business books of which, as we’ll discuss, there are plenty.

Isabel Berwick
I also spoke to Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT and chair of the judging panel at the awards ceremony. It sounds like 2022 was a tricky year for the judges.

Roula Khalaf
What was special this year is, that there were essentially two books competing for the first prize, and it was very difficult to decide between those two. Generally, you get three votes for one book and then one for each of the others. Here it was really half. The group was for one book, the other half was for the other book. Then, we go through a process where you have advocates for each side to convince the other side that this is the book that should win.

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Isabel Berwick
Fred, as the book’s editor or literary editor of the FT, I should say. Do you have a favourite on the short list?

Frederick Studemann
Oh, that’s a really unfair question, Isabel. I mean, they’re all just incredibly topical as well. So, if you really are gonna push me, Chip War I think, sort of, has piqued my interest because it’s something that I didn’t know a lot about at the start of the year. And then, Helen Thompson’s book Disorder, which is about the important role of fossil fuels in the whole global economy.

Isabel Berwick
I spoke to Helen Thompson at the awards ceremony, and she actually started writing the book before the energy crisis emerged this year. Let’s hear what she said.

Helen Thompson
Basically, my book tries to explain why the 2010s was so politically turbulent, both in western countries’ domestic politics and geopolitically. And it tries to do that by giving it a very long history, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. And it makes energy pretty central to the story that I’m telling in the book.

Isabel Berwick
And my personal favourite from the shortlist is Dead in the Water by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel. So, I spoke to them too.

Kit Chellel
Dead in the Water is a book about a crazy maritime fraud and an unsolved murder. I came across this baffling case of a ship that was burned off the coast of Africa, and a British guy who died in Yemen. And, when I came across it, I just couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Why was this guy murdered? Why did they set fire to an oil tanker? It was a, an enticing mystery. And it turned out I would spend with Matt the next sort of four or five years of my life trying to pull all the different threads about past. It’s partially a true crime story, but it’s also a story about how the world really works, you know, and how reliant we are on this incredibly old fashioned, barely regulated industry of shipping to give us all the stuff that we need in the modern world.

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Isabel Berwick
I think one of the points of the business book prize, and Andrew, I’m going to come to you now and correct me if I’m wrong, is that it takes us into those areas that perhaps we don’t know much about.

Andrew Hill
Yes, at some degree we may talk about this more. What has been established over the years is that it covers a wide range of books. Not actually always the ones that you’d expect to find on the shelf marked business books in a bookstore or library.

Isabel Berwick
So, what books are eligible for this prize? It’s really wide, isn’t it?

Andrew Hill
It is. And I mean it can cover fiction and non-fiction. It’s obviously mainly been non-fiction, but we have nominated some novels. There’s an English literature graduate and fiction fan would like it if more novels were nominated, but they struggle against some very strong narrative non-fiction in business. But it’s covered everything from histories to biographies to pure economics books, and through to the sort of management guides and books written by managers that might fall more usually into the business category.

Isabel Berwick
Yet, Fred, what books, not necessarily on this shortlist, but what would you recommend to someone who’s turned off by the term business books? Because some of these books, as Andrew just said, are just rollicking tales of people doing bad things, basically. Aren’t they?

Frederick Studemann
Absolutely. I think part of our role on the books desk at the FT is to make the broader, more general readership aware of what great business books there are out there and they can take many forms. I mean, Andrew highlighted one of this year’s shortlisted titles as being a thrilling read, but you could go back and look at others, whether it’s Empire of Pain, which was shortlisted last year, the sort of horrifying at times story of the Sackler empire going back a few years. The book Bad Blood, which I really enjoyed, which was the inside story of the whole Theranos scandal.

Isabel Berwick
You just mentioned, Empire of Pain and I wanted to ask Andrew about length of books, because some of these books are absolute whoppers. I mean, Empire of Pain is a huge book. I have to confess I listened to it on audiobook, which is often my tactic when something daunts me. I loved it. But is there a too long? And also, how many of these books do you have to read for this prize?

Andrew Hill
There is a too long. Sometimes books need an editor, just as articles do. And we’ve had a variety of winners ranging from the kind of real door stoppers. I mean, Sebastian Mallaby’s book this year, The Power Law, is a big book. The GE book that Fred just mentioned, William Cohan’s Power Failure, is another large book that was on the long list of the prize this year. But at the same time there have been quite short business books. Janesville by Amy Goldstein. The only business book I’ve ever read that made me cry was a winner in 2017 about families in Wisconsin responding to the cataclysm of the closure of the General Motors plant there, which would be one of my recommendations to people who dislike or think they dislike business books. And that was quite a short one. One of the constant criticisms of the judges is, well, this book’s really an overextended article. So, you know, that’s less of a criticism that I’ve heard over the years than this book was really much too long. And in answer to the question, how many do we read or get? There’s 600 entries now, upwards of 600 some years. So that is quite a task which has to be divided up between colleagues. And that’s the way we handle the first filtering of the books.

Isabel Berwick
In terms of the business books, as we might understand it in our line of work, which is about management and leadership — is there a book that has stood out for you over the years? Doesn’t have to been on the long list, but just one that you come back to or that has helped you in your career and thinking.

Andrew Hill
I’m not sure I’d say any particularly helped me in my career, but I do constantly recommend Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, the former president of Pixar, the animation studio, because that is about managing creative people and how to get creative ideas to emerge. And I mean, latterly, I’ve been reading a book called Changing Gear by Jan Hall and Jon Stokes, which is about moving through a career transition, particularly towards the end of your career, which might have particular relevance for me, which is really includes a lot of the sort of tips and ideas about how to think about next steps in any career. The latter is a practical book that I think could be valuable to anyone, really.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. I love a well-written, practical book. Uhm Fred, are there any books you’d recommend to someone who wants to understand people better, which is essentially what’s at the heart of business?

Frederick Studemann
It’s a book called Trust. It’s a novel by Hernan Diaz. It’s set in the business world. It’s set in the world of the 1920s — a Wall Street tycoon. It’s about power, money, family dynamics, relationships, but really particularly of how you manage your reputation, how you create a narrative around your life’s work or your success. And it’s done really brilliantly in terms of the story is told four times by different people, different perspectives. And what you realise then is you’re not quite sure what is the real story that you’re being told here. And it just makes you think, and particularly in an era where we’re now once again being supposedly impressed by big tycoon-type figures, billionaires who are sort of indulging in their every whim. I think it’s a very pertinent book and I think very pertinent for our readership as well.

Isabel Berwick
I just wanted to ask you and the business books are still coming by the sackload. A lot of them are terrible. I get the impression that this self-improvement and wellness market is increasingly merging with the business market. Perhaps this reflects how our lives and work have blurred. Is that a trend that you see continuing and has it come into the book prize yet?

Andrew Hill
It’s definitely come into the book prize. We’ve definitely had more self-improvement, self-help books, possibly a function a bit of the early pandemic starting to affect people and looking more inward. And that has been a trend that I think will continue. I mean, there is an interesting counter-trend. We had Dan Pink on the show earlier this year and I interviewed him about his new book, also excellent, The Power of Regret. But in that interview, he mentioned that he was really wondering whether the book was still the right vehicle for ideas. He does a lot of TED talks and podcasting and other things. And so there is, I think, the beginnings of a change where management and business thinkers are wondering, are there other ways in which we can get across our ideas? And indeed, a lot of business books have become podcasts and as we know, movies and series, latterly. So it could work the other way around as well.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, it’s a whole multimedia event.

Frederick Studemann
The book is a sort of instrument in boosting the other stuff sometimes, isn’t it? That you want to have the great lecture series or the podcast or even a film, but you need the book to anchor it and establish certain credibility.

Andrew Hill
I think that’s right. I think that is still what people feel. I mean, in the worst case, of course, it becomes I think I once called it, you know, the heaviest business card ever distributed. I go to conferences and people go, I’ve got a book out and I go, “oh, well that sounds very interesting.” And then they’ll work it out of their bag and you’re suddenly carrying a 400-page management tome around with you.

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Isabel Berwick
I love what the FT is doing with the Business Book Awards. Not just because they’re my employer, but because I think business books that we discussed in this podcast have sometimes been slightly unloved relation of the big sort of literary fiction and non-fiction, but the tales that people tell about business up tales about people just as much as any other tale, and tell us a lot more about the world we live in and the world we will be living in, in five or ten years’ time. And I think that’s a great thing. So if you’re looking for a Christmas book, anything on the shortlist is a great read. And my recommendation for Business Book of the Year? It’s a book called Fortitude by Bruce Daisley. He’s been a guest on this podcast during 2022. And what Bruce does is look at those terms like resilience and growth mindset and the whole industry that’s grown up around them and essentially debunks them. I think it’s a great book and I recommend it to any fans of the podcast.

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Isabel Berwick
With thanks to Andrew Hill, Frederick Studemann and the organisers of the FT Business Book of the Year Award for this episode. We’ll put links to the shortlisted books and our recommendations in the show notes. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. And we’re at workingit@ft.com or with me @IsabelBerwick on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for the Working It newsletter. We’ve got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and stories you won’t see anywhere else. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. Thanks to the producer Flo de Schlichting, executive producer Jo Wheeler, production assistance from Amalie Sortland and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT we have editorial direction from Manuela Saragosa. Thanks for listening.

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