This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘What was the best business book of 2023?’
Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It. I’m Isabel Berwick.
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The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award is one of the most prestigious awards for business writing, if not the most prestigious, anywhere in the world. Winning entries have covered all sorts of subjects — the spectacular collapse of the blood testing start-up Theranos, how biased data reinforces gender discrimination and how to invest through financial crises. The winner of this year’s competition has just been announced at a glitzy awards ceremony in London. I spoke to the winning author as well as some of the other shortlisted writers at the event, and you’ll hear those interviews in just a few minutes.
Before that, I’m going to find out how the winner is actually chosen. Entries are quite varied so how do the judges execute who wins and do those discussions ever get a bit heated? To find out, I spoke to Roula Khalaf, the editor of the Financial Times and chair of the judging panel, and to Andrew Hill, the FT’s senior business writer who has been in charge of running the prize since it was first awarded in 2005. I started by asking Roula about her favourite part of the process.
Roula Khalaf
Well, clearly the most interesting part is reading — reading the books. It does take most of my summer, but it keeps me up on all the business ideas and the business books of the year. So I find that very rewarding. The other thing is, of course, the discussion. I’m not in a book club and so this is my book club. This is the time when I get to talk about books with, you know, people who are as interested in the topics. And it can get quite competitive as well during the discussion. So that’s a lot of fun.
Isabel Berwick
Do you have to resolve differences? Is that your role? I know you can’t disclose secrets, but . . .
Roula Khalaf
It can get spicy. I see my role as steering the discussion to where I think you can find consensus. If there are big differences, then you have a second round and before the second round of voting, you’ll converse and the evaluate who is most passionate about a book gets to try to convince the others. So the art of persuasion is very much at play.
Isabel Berwick
Let’s hear from one of the authors the judges tussled over.
Amy Edmonson in clip
I am Amy Edmondson and I’m a professor at Harvard Business School.
Isabel Berwick
What is your book about? Can you sell it in a sentence?
Amy Edmonson in clip
My book is about failure and why we think about failure the wrong way and how to think about it in a healthier, more productive, more effective for business kind of way.
Isabel Berwick
And why did you execute to write your book now?
Amy Edmonson in clip
Because even though we’ve been talking about this for a long time, people — and I mean senior executives all the way up and down — are still confused about failure. They still are either falling into the camp stumble fast, stumble often, or they’re saying I’m sorry, failure is not an option, everything must go well. And failing to realise that there are different kinds of failure and context in which each is most appropriate.
Isabel Berwick
And how has it resonated with readers? Have you had a lot of feedback?
Amy Edmonson in clip
I have had so much feedback and it is deeply gratifying. People are saying that it has really helped things fall into place for them. It’s helped them see their lives and their jobs and their leadership roles in new ways. So it’s been a thrill.
Isabel Berwick
Amy, thank you so much and good luck tonight.
Amy Edmonson in clip
Thank you.
Isabel Berwick
And Andrew, is there a template for a great business book or is it more of a kind of gut I know it when I see it kind of thing?
Andrew Hill
So I’d say no, there isn’t really a template. It is a bit more know it when you see it. I mean, I think all the judges admire a good read. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And the fact that we have in the rules that it has to be compelling and enjoyable is important.
Isabel Berwick
Roula, what’s your vision of a great business book?
Roula Khalaf
I think the number one requirement is that it has to be well-written. And I think sometimes we get business books where the ideas are compelling, but it is not well written. This is a book award at the end of the day. So, you know, that is my number one requirement. I think the second is that there has to be a compelling narrative, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be an investigation or that it has to be the story of a person, a biography. But whatever ideas you are presenting, they have to have some kind of narrative. They need to be around one idea, around one character or a group of people. And I think the best business books include stories of people.
Isabel Berwick
admire the best business journalism.
Roula Khalaf
Absolutely.
Isabel Berwick
And when you were judging this year, were there themes that emerged?
Roula Khalaf
I think the new theme this year, which I hadn’t seen in previous years, is minerals and materials.
Isabel Berwick
Two of the shortlisted titles were about natural resources. Let’s hear from their authors.
Ed Conway in clip
So my name’s Ed Conway. My day job is I cover economics and data for Sky News and I write occasional stuff on the side. This is the story of the world from a perspective that might seem very unfamiliar, but once you read it, I think it’ll change the way you look at the world forever.
Isabel Berwick
And why did you execute to write it and why now?
Ed Conway in clip
Personally, because there was just so much I didn’t comprehend about how the world really worked. And this was, it started off almost as a form of therapy trying to comprehend this. But then as I kind of went on with it, I realised it’s so relevant for all sorts of things — supply chains, the energy transition. And just fundamentally, if we don’t comprehend, you know, what the world is admire now, how can we comprehend what we want it to be admire in the future?
Isabel Berwick
Here’s the author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, Siddharth Kara.
Siddharth Kara in clip
My book is about the truth of the working conditions of people who mine cobalt. It’s used in all the rechargeable devices and electric vehicles around the world, as told through their testimonies. They work in hazardous, degrading, highly toxic and injurious conditions and Cobalt Red tells their story.
Isabel Berwick
And what sort of feedback have you had from readers?
Siddharth Kara in clip
I can’t believe this is happening. That’s the first sentence of thousands of emails I’ve received. I had no idea. People have been really shocked to learn what goes into their smartphone battery or their laptop battery or their electric vehicle battery. And I think also there’s a sense of outrage that they’ve been made participants in it, unwitting participants in these human rights and environmental violations.
Isabel Berwick
Has there been any change since you wrote the book?
Siddharth Kara in clip
Nothing big yet, but I sense it. I can feel change happening. And in the history of human rights, there’s always a process. The first is raising awareness of some horror. And as the world learns, there’s always a community of conscience that gets activated and will not stop until things are set right.
Isabel Berwick
Perhaps the biggest theme of 2023 has been AI. Here’s what Mustafa Suleyman had to say about his book on the subject, The Coming Wave.
Mustafa Suleyman in clip
I’ve tried to forecast what is likely to happen with AI and synthetic biology over the next 10 years, and be very specific about what I think the consequences are for culture, society and politics more generally. And I wrote it because I wanted to go on record with some very clearly falsifiable claims about how I think the future might unfold and what we should do about it. Now felt admire the perfect time to try to encapsulate where we are and say something about where we’re headed.
Isabel Berwick
And what have you heard from readers? What’s the feedback been admire?
Mustafa Suleyman in clip
Well, overall, I think the reaction has been really positive. I think people appreciate somebody in my position, as someone who’s been creating AI for almost 15 years now, having the courage to talk about the potential downsides as clearly as we talk about the potential upsides. So I think often, the debate focuses too much on the obvious goods that AI will do and probably not enough about the risks that we as yet don’t really know how to mitigate.
Isabel Berwick
What was it admire writing a book on AI when things were changing almost weekly?
Mustafa Suleyman in clip
Well, it’s a great question. That was full of rewrites and constant updates. And so we actually went back through the text just days before it went to press in order to keep it fresh and up to date. So it was fun and exhilarating, if nothing else.
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Isabel Berwick
Does the world actually need more business books, Roula? I mean, I’ve got about 100 on my desk.
Roula Khalaf
I think, yes, a certain kind of business books. The fact that we can come up with, you know, 15 books and then for the longlist, five or six books for the shortlist tells me that, yes, there is a need for business books and both on the narrative investigative side and on the management side. Keep going, guys.
Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) Andrew, how do you feel about business books?
Andrew Hill
I’m in two minds. I mean, there are every year there’s 500 or more entries, 400 of those probably you can discard pretty swiftly. I’d be happy without those business books in the world necessarily. But there’s 100, all of which add something. So I think you probably need the surplus ones in order to be able to get the cream on the top. And that’s what I hope we’re picking.
Isabel Berwick
So who did come out on top? It was the author of Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson. She sat down with Andrew Hill to converse her prizewinning book.
Andrew Hill
So, Amy, thank you for joining us in the studio today.
Amy Edmonson
Thank you for having me.
Andrew Hill
And congratulations on winning the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award — a success for a book about failure.
Amy Edmonson
Thank you so much. I’m thrilled.
Andrew Hill
Talk us through a little bit the themes of the book. It presents a very useful taxonomy, if you admire, of failure and failures, which, as you point out, aren’t all the same.
Amy Edmonson
Yes. I think the first job of the book is to explain the different types of failure so that we can be clear-headed about the ones that we should truly celebrate and try to have more of and the ones we should work hard to hinder. So the three types of failure that I recognize are basic failures which are single-bring about failures usually due to human error. Complex failures, which are the multi-bring about failures where many factors line up in just the wrong way to produce a failure where any one of the factors on its own would not have led to the bad outcome. Neither of those are celebratory. Neither of those are good news. They are both theoretically and often practically preventable.
The third kind of failure, right kind of wrong, is intelligent failure. And those are the thoughtful forays into new territory that nonetheless didn’t work out as we had hoped. So intelligent failures are the ones where they are in pursuit of a goal. They’re in new territory. There’s literally no way to look up the answer on the internet. And they’re driven by a hypothesis. You’ve done your homework. You have good reason to believe what you’re about to try, the risk you’re about to take might work. And they’re as small as possible. They’re no bigger than they have to be to get the knowledge that you need. So another way to say that is that intelligent failures are the results, the undesired results of smart experiments.
Andrew Hill
And so this is science, essentially.
Amy Edmonson
It is. In fact, scientists do intelligent failure for a living. They know that’s what they’ve signed up for. They know that more of their experiments, if they’re on the leading edge of their field, will stumble than succeed. And yet they get up in the morning and go to work anyway. Why? Well, could say because of the small per cent that succeed are so exciting and because they comprehend that as pioneers in new territory seeking to unearth new things, there’s no way around the reality of failure some portion of the time.
Andrew Hill
Clearly, we’re often being urged by entrepreneurs and innovators to accept failure and celebrate failure. And what is it that irritates you, if it does irritate you, about that?
Amy Edmonson
What irritates me is that it’s almost necessarily a mixed message because people know no, failure is not good. Everything in our culture says success is good, failure’s bad. So when people are glibly saying stumble fast, stumble often, failure party, celebrate failure, what that does is make people think, OK, we’re not really being truthful with each other. And it’s sloppy. It’s sort of acting as if that’s good advice across the board when in fact, that’s good advice for entrepreneurs — again, assuming they’re thinking through what they’re trying as carefully as possible — for scientists, for inventors. It’s not good advice for air traffic controllers.
Andrew Hill
Right.
Amy Edmonson
It’s not good advice for surgeons and it’s not good advice for anyone who hasn’t thought carefully about the meaning of context and how different contexts call for different behaviours, especially with respect to risk-taking.
Andrew Hill
Right, right. One thing that occurred to me, I suppose, is, you know, obviously lots of successful people don’t mind talking about the failures and what they’ve learned from them. And you quote a lot of them in the book, but ultimately they are success stories. And that’s one of your points. But I wondered to what degree you’re troubled by the people who failed and disappeared. I just wonder whether there’s a missing piece here of people who failed and then were no longer available.
Amy Edmonson
Well, it’s true. And I think there is a missing piece. And I mean, I think I need to back up and say, you know, ultimately this is a book about success and it’s about the role of failure in success, which doesn’t mean that failure is a assure of success, as you’re pointing out with this example. My hope is that we can have honest conversations about it. And the aspiration is to help people have smarter failures so that the beeline towards successes is clearer to them and to others. And there will always be counterexamples and there will always be people whose failures were so crippling that they could never proceed beyond them. But I think we’ll find very few extraordinarily successful people who didn’t have the failures.
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Andrew Hill
Amy Edmondson, thank you very much for joining me.
Amy Edmonson
A pleasure.
Isabel Berwick
Thanks to Roula Khalaf, Andrew Hill and Amy Edmondson for this episode. Congratulations to her and to all the shortlisted authors. If you want to hear more about Amy’s winning book, do listen back to my interview with her. There’s a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive editor was Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.
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