FT and McKinsey Business Book longlist revealed

Books about rising inequality, how high-frequency traders rig the equity markets and why LGBT people still feel compelled to hide their sexuality at work are among the 16 titles on the longlist for the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
 
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press) is up against Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code (Allen Lane) and The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good Business by Lord John Browne (WH Allen) for the prize.
 
The award is in its 10th year and is backed for the first time by American global management consulting firm McKinsey. The winner of the award will receive £30,000 and each finalist receives £10,000.
 
Among the other longlisted books is Nick Davies’ investigation of the impact of the UK phone-hacking scandal on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch (Chatto & Windus) and Julia Angwin’s Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books), which offers a look at the dark side of data.

There are a few titles on the longlist about the UK’s financial crisis: Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank that Broke Britain by Ian Fraser (Birlinn Ltd); Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit by Charles W Calomiris and Stephen H Haber (Princeton University Press); Atif Mian a0nd Amir Sufi’s House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (University of Chicago Press); and GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle about the economic measure (Princeton University Press).
 
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book about the promise of new technology, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton Ltd) has also made the shortlist, along with The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster), which is out in October.
 
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Bantam Press), Pixar animation studio co-founder Ed Catmull’s advice to managers, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz (HarperCollins) are also longlisted.
 
Rounding off the list are Daniel Schulman’s history of the Koch corporate dynasty, Sons of Wichita:  How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (Grand Central Publishing), Howard French’s look at the growing Chinese presence in Africa, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (Alfred A. Knopf) and Rusell Gold’s analysis of the positives and negatives of fracking for gas The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster).

The award’s judging panel, chaired by FT editor Lionel Barber, comprises: Steve Coll, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York; chairman of General Atlantic LLC, Steven Denning; former president and c.e.o of the Harvard Management Company, Mohamed El-Erian; Herminia Ibarra, vice-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Women’s Empowerment; Rik Kirkland, partner and director of Publishing McKinsey & Company; and Shriti Vadera, non-executive director of BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca.
 
The winner will be announced on 11th November at an awards dinner in London. Last year’s winner was Brad Stone for his portrait of Jeff Bezos, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Bantam Press).
 
This year, the Financial Times and McKinsey have also launched an initiative to identify promising young authors, the £15,000 Bracken Bower Prize, which will go to the best proposal for a book on the challenges and opportunities of growth.