Staff Picks
Financial Times Best Business Books of 2023
- Bland L.
- Monday, December 11, 2023
Collection
London’s Financial Times has released a list of the year’s best business titles. It includes books treating such timely topics as AI (The Coming Wave), cryptocurrency (Easy Money), and privacy (Your Face Belongs to Us).
Power and Progress
Our Thousand-year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity
Published in 2023
"Two bestselling authors overturn conventional wisdom about how economies work, revealing the untold story of who wins and who loses the rewards of prosperity, in a work that fundamentally transforms how we look at and understand the world"-- Provided by publisher.
Beijing Rules
How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World
Published in 2023
"Beijing Rules is a superb expose which reveals how China learned to master capitalism which it now wields in its own authoritarian form to achieve global dominance. As Bethany Allen, the China reporter for Axios, reveals, the long-standing belief that free-trade capitalism is a democratizing force--the assumption underlying much of American and Western policy since World War II--is demonstrably false. Capitalism is actually a two-way street: if democratic values can travel in one direction, authoritarianism can travel in the other. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully engineered what Cold War champions believed to be impossible: an unabashedly Communist Party leading a prosperous capitalist state. Written by the first American journalist to expose covert Chinese influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of western institutions bowing to Beijing's coercion--a glimpse of what American's future might look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted"-- Publisher's description.
Billionaires' Row
Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
Published in 2023
"A fly-on-the-wall account of the ferocious ambition, greed, and financial one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world: the new Manhattan megatowers known as Billionaires' Row-from a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal. To look south from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth: a series of soaring spires dotting the skyline from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires' Row, these slender high-rise condos have transformed the skyline of New York City almost in stealth, thanks to the city's developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and moguls from Russia, China, and the Middle East. In just a few years, the cutthroat real estate impresarios behind these "supertalls" turned what was once a rundown strip of Midtown into the most expensive street on Earth. Most of us, however, will never be invited inside these gargantuan towers. The saga of Billionaires' Row epitomizes the "new Gilded Age" of twenty-first-century wealth. Behind the blue-tinted façade of One57, you might see financier Bill Ackman riding in an elevator to his $91.5 million apartment with computer legend Michael Dell, who paid $100.47 million for his. One block over, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin shattered records with his $238 million home at 220 Central Park South, the imposing limestone tower where the musician Sting also purchased a penthouse of his own. Most owners, however, remain shrouded in mystery. For some, these monuments to wealth are a place simply to park money; they have never bothered to visit. In Billionaires' Row, Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Clarke reveals the riveting inside story of how a group of New York's most legendary developers went toe-to-toe with renegade upstarts in an ego-fueled race to build the tallest and most luxurious skyscrapers the world has ever known-and to burnish their legacies in the process. The result is a real-life drama complete with broken partnerships, broken marriages, lawsuits, and, for a few, triumph"-- Provided by publisher.
Material World
The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
Published in 2023
"The story of civilization from an entirely new vantage point--the six raw materials that have shaped and will continue to shape humanity's destiny. Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium: The struggle for these fundamental materials has created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. It is a story that is far from finished. Though we are told we now live in a weightless world of information, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting exponentially worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials--from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we continue to redouble our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients are the basis for everything. They power our phones and electric cars, build our homes and offices, enable the printing of our books, and supply our packaging. Our modern world would not exist without them, and the hidden battle to control them will shape our future. This is an epic journey across continents, cultures and epochs that captures the astonishing extent to which humanity's prosperity is intertwined with what we extract from the earth and adapt to our needs and desires. It is a story of our past and future, from the ground up"-- Provided by publisher.
The Right Kind of Wrong
The Science of Failing Well
Published in 2023
"Award-winning Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has influenced legion MBA grads as well as Big Think authors from Brené Brown to Adam Grant with her pioneering work on psychological safety. Now, Amy is bringing her work to the wider world, upending our entire cultural notion of failure with this guide to the science of failing well, which actualizes the potential of psychological safety for both individuals and organizations alike"-- Provided by publisher.
How Big Things Get Done
Published in 2023
"The secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale-from home renovation to space exploration-by the world's leading expert on megaprojects. Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple's iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months. These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston's "Big Dig"? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California's high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billion-and won't even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why? Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life's work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed "the world's leading megaproject expert." In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours"-- Provided by publisher.
Your Face Belongs to Us
A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It
Published in 2023
"In this riveting feat of reporting, Kashmir Hill illuminates the improbable rise of Clearview AI and how Hoan Ton-That, a computer engineer and Richard Schwartz, a Giuliani associate, launched a terrifying facial recognition app with society-altering potential. They were assisted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles Johnson and billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel. The app can scan a blurry portrait, and, in just seconds, collect every instance of a person's online life. It can find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family, even your home address (as well as photos of you that you may not even have known existed). The story of Clearview AI opens up a window into a larger, more urgent one about our tortured relationship to technology, the way it entertains and seduces us even as it steals our privacy and lays us bare to bad actors in politics, criminal justice, and tech. This technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. Ubiquitous in China and Russia, it was also developed by American companies, including Google and Facebook, who decided it was too radical to release. That did not stop Clearview. They gave demos of the tech to interested private investors and contracted it out to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country. American law enforcement, including the Department of Homeland Security, has already used it to arrest people for everything from petty theft to assault. Without regulation it could expand the reach of policing--as it has in China and Russia--to a terrifying, dystopian level"-- Provided by publisher.
Elon Musk
Published in 2023
"From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era--a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter"-- Provided by publisher.
Cobalt Red
How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
Published in 2023
"An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo's cobalt mining operation-and the moral implications that affect us all. Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. More than 70 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo-because we are all implicated"-- Provided by publisher.
Easy Money
Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
Published in 2023
"A famous actor and an experienced journalist present an entertaining debunking of cryptocurrency, from its initial promise of taking power from banks white providing quick riches to its current spectacular crash."
Blood in the Machine
The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
Published in 2023
Long-listed for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs-and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein)-- Amazon.com.
Five Times Faster
Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change
Published in 2023
"As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us? Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, diplomacy, and economics, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe"-- Provided by publisher.
The Coming Wave
Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
Published in 2023
A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order,and howwe mightcontain them while we have the chance-from acofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMindImagine a world in which anyone with a $20,000 desktop DNA synthesizer could develop and unleash a deadly virus. Imagine an undetectable deepfake video of a U.S. president making a racial slur racing across the internet on the eve of an election. Imagine terrorists or paramilitaries stockpiling autonomous weapons designed to make their own decisions about when to engage.As cofounder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI company now owned by Google, Mustafa Suleyman has witnessed firsthand just how rapidly our technology is advancing-and how flawed our approaches to grappling with these changes are. The coming decades, he argues, will be defined by a burst of innovation, an inevitable wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies across fields like synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Driven forward by immense strategic and financial incentives, these breakthroughs will solve huge challenges and create vast wealth-but upheaval, too, on a once unimaginable scale. Will humankind make it through the narrow corridor between dystopia and catastrophe?In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how this new technological super-wave fits a historical pattern of innovation and proliferation, while departing from it in key ways: namely, the speed of change, the breadth of risks, and the wave's potential to democratize access to dangerous, world-altering power. The cumulative risks threaten the very nation state, humanity's centuries' old "grand bargain" of living under centralized authority in exchange for security. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into catastrophe, humanity is left in an existential bind, with techno-authoritarianism on one side and even more catastrophic outcomes, like societal collapse, on the other.We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman firmly establishes "the containment problem"-or the challenge of maintaining human control over dangerous technologies-as the essential dilemma of our age, showing that radical steps must be taken if we are to live alongside technology of once unimaginable power.
The Case for Good Jobs
How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay & Meaning to Everyone's Work
Published in 2023
"Imagine you are a leader in a large company, and you volunteer at a local soup kitchen, helping the needy who can't afford warm meals. On your way out, the director stops you and says, "I just need you to know that many of the people visiting our services are actually your employees." This really happened. The leader was shocked. He assumed that because the company paid market rate, the company was doing right by its employees. But market rate isn't a living wage. Market rate doesn't make good jobs. Many leaders want to provide good jobs. They want to pay more, provide dignity and meaning in people's work, and give them opportunities for growth. But they don't know how to start, or they don't think it can be done without hurting the bottom line. Most want to win with customers but are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover-and that is partly driven by the low pay. It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show the way out: why good jobs combined with strong operations always lead to good outcomes for the business. And why, more than ever in a post-pandemic world, failing to provide good jobs will catch up with you and threaten your business. Ton, the preeminent voice of the good jobs strategy, lays out plainly what most companies and leaders are doing wrong-and how to get it right. She shows that by choosing good jobs, companies are positioning themselves for future success. Practical, prescriptive, and often provocative, Leading with Good Jobs is essential reading for leaders of any company that wants to-needs to-choose excellence"-- Provided by publisher.