FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist revealed

The 15-strong longlist for the £30,000 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year has been announced, featuring a line-up where workplace culture, climate change and the pandemic loom large.

The prize celebrates authors whose book offers the “most compelling and enjoyable insight” into business issues. This year's 15 longlisted entries were whittled down from a record-breaking 600 submissions by FT journalists.

The list is once again dominated by titles from Penguin Random House: Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment by Maxine Bédat (Portfolio), The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy (Random House Business), The Key Man: How the Global Elite was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale, by Simon Clark and Will Louch (Penguin Business), The Conversation: How Talking Honestly About Racism Can Transform Individuals and Organizations by Robert Livingston (Penguin Business), A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman (Penguin Business), The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane) and What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, by Minouche Shafik, (The Bodley Head).

For HarperCollins, the list features two books exploring the work environment and corporate culture: The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell (Mudlark) and Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, by Tsedal Neeley (Harper Business), as well as Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein (William Collins).

Also listed is Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World by Dan Breznitz (Oxford University Press), The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, by Michael E Mann (Scribe UK) and This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth (Bloomsbury).

Harvard Business Review Press also gets a nod with Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston, alongside Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador).

The shortlist will be announced at an online event on 23rd September, while the winner will be confirmed on 1st December.