Goldman Sachs
Shortlist Announced for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book
of the Year Award 2011
14 SEP 2011
Thursday 15th September 2011: The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs
today announced the shortlist for the seventh annual Financial Times
and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, which aims to
identify the book providing the most compelling and enjoyable insight
into modern business issues. The shortlist is:
* Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global
Poverty
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Perseus Books, Public
Affairs, USA)
* Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar
Barry Eichengreen (Oxford University Press, UK)
* Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer,
Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
Edward L. Glaeser (The Penguin Press, USA; Macmillan, UK)
* Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
Margaret Heffernan (Walker & Co, USA; Simon & Schuster, UK)
* Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Richard Rumelt (Crown Business, USA; Profile, UK)
* The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Daniel Yergin (The Penguin Press, USA; Allen Lane, UK)
The distinguished panel of judges, chaired by Lionel Barber, Editor,
Financial Times, this year comprises:
* Vindi Banga, Partner, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice
* Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business
School
* Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the United States Securities and
Exchange Commission
* Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University, Milan, European
chairman of the Trilateral Commission, honorary president of
Bruegel
* Jorma Ollila, Chairman of Nokia and Royal Dutch Shell
* Shriti Vadera, Director of Shriti Vadera Ltd, Non-Executive
Director of BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca
Lionel Barber, Editor, Financial Times, said: "I am delighted with the
breadth and depth of this year's shortlist. The books are
intellectually stimulating, offer something provocative and different
and open up new vistas on the business world. Themes range from
tackling poverty, to the future of the dollar, and energy security in
the modern age. I would like to thank the judges for reading an
outstanding long list."
The overall winner will be announced at the Awards Dinner co-hosted by
Lionel Barber, Editor, Financial Times and Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman
and Chief Executive Officer, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc at The
Wallace Collection in London on 3rd November 2011. Lord Patten will be
presenting the keynote speech at the event.
The winner of the Business Book of the Year Award 2011 will be awarded
£30,000, and each of the remaining shortlisted authors will receive
£10,000 each.
Previous winners of the Award are Raghuram Rajan for Fault Lines
(2010); Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009); Mohamed
El-Erian for When Markets Collide (2008); William D. Cohan for The Last
Tycoons (2007); James Kynge for China Shakes the World (2006); and
Thomas Friedman, as the inaugural Award winner in 2005, for The World
is Flat.
THE SHORTLIST FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND
GOLDMAN SACHS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2011:
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Perseus Books, Public Affairs,
USA)
Poor Economics is a journey into the incredibly multi-faceted and
complex economic lives of the poor. For more than fifteen years,
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have worked with the poor in
dozens of countries spanning five continents, trying to understand the
specific problems that come with poverty and to find proven solutions.
Their book is at once radical in its rethinking of the economics of
poverty and entirely practical in the suggestions it offers, allowing a
ringside view of the lives of the world's poorest. Drawing on a very
rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomised control
trials they have pioneered at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
(J-PAL), they show why the poor, despite having the same capacities and
aspirations as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.
They help us understand why the poor need to borrow in order to save,
why their children go to school but often do not learn, why they miss
out on free life-saving immunizations but pay for drugs that they do
not need, why they start many businesses but do not grow any of them,
and many other puzzling facts about living on less than 99 cents per
day.
Poor Economics argues that so much of anti-poverty policy has failed
over the years because of an inadequate understanding of poverty. The
battle against poverty can be won, but it will take patience, careful
thinking, and a willingness to learn from evidence.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta,
Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University. He is currently the
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee
is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis
of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an
Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including
the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor
to many organisations, including the World Bank and the Government of
India.
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation
and Development Economics at MIT. She studied at the Ecole Normale
Superieure in Paris, and at MIT. She was educated at the École Normale
Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and
prizes, including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American
economist under forty in 2010, and a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in
2009. She was recognised as one of the best eight young economists by
The Economist magazine, one of the hundred most influential thinkers by
Foreign Policy since the list has existed, and one of the "forty under
forty" most influential business leaders by Fortune magazine in 2010.
Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar
Barry Eichengreen (Oxford University Press, UK)
For a quarter of a century after World War II, the dollar reigned
supreme. Only the United States emerged strengthened from the war; its
economy towered over the world like none other. It accounted for fully
half of global industrial production. Only its currency was freely
traded.
The dollar, the world's international reserve currency for over eighty
years, has been a pillar of American economic hegemony. In the words of
one critic, the dollar possessed an "exorbitant privilege" in
international finance that reinforced U.S. economic power. In
Exorbitant Privilege, eminent economist Barry Eichengreen explains how
the dollar rose to the top of the monetary order before turning to the
current situation.
The current crisis has placed serious strains on the dollar, and many
believe that US influence in the world will be severely curtailed with
the rise of competing currencies such as the Euro and the Chinese
renminbi. However, Eichengreen suggests that, while we are most likely
entering an era when the world will have more than one reserve
currency, this does not in itself constitute a crisis. Moreover,
predictions of the dollar's demise are greatly exaggerated. The most
likely outcome is that the dollar will only slowly be supplanted by
other currencies in a gradual transition that will resemble the
relatively stable situation that prevailed before World War I.
Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Political Science and Economics at
the University of California, Berkeley. He has written for the
Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other
publications.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer,
Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
Edward L. Glaeser (The Penguin Press, USA; Macmillan, UK)
In 2009, for the first time in history, more than half the world's
population lived in cities. In a time when family, friends and
co-workers are a call, text, or email away, 3.3 billion people on this
planet still choose to crowd together in skyscrapers, high-rises,
subways and buses. Not too long ago, it looked like our cities were
dying, but in fact they boldly threw themselves into the information
age, adapting and evolving to become the gateways to a globalised and
interconnected world. Now more than ever, the well-being of human
society depends upon our knowledge of how the city lives and breathes.
Understanding the modern city and the powerful forces within it is the
life's work of Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser who is hailed as
one of the world's most exciting urban thinkers. Travelling from city
to city, speaking to planners and politicians across the world, he
uncovers questions large and small whose answers are both
counterintuitive and deeply significant. Should New Orleans be rebuilt?
Why can't my nephew afford an apartment in New York? Is London the new
financial capital of the world? Is my job headed to Bangalore? In
Triumph of the City, Glaeser takes us around the world and into the
mind of the modern city - from Mumbai to Paris to Rio to Detroit to
Shanghai, and to any number of points in between - to reveal how cities
think, why they behave in the manners that they do, and what wisdom
they share with the people who inhabit them.
Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics
at Harvard University. He studies the economics of cities, housing,
segregation, obesity, crime, innovation and other subjects, and writes
about many of these issues for Economix. He serves as the director of
the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport
Institute for Greater Boston. He is also a senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the University of
Chicago in 1992.
Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
Margaret Heffernan (Walker & Co, USA; Simon & Schuster, UK)
Margaret Heffernan argues that the biggest threats and dangers we face
are the ones we don't see - not because they're secret or invisible,
but because we're willfully blind. A distinguished businesswoman and
writer, she examines the phenomenon and traces its imprint in our
private and working lives, and within governments and organisations,
and asks: What makes us prefer ignorance? What are we so afraid of? Why
do some people see more than others? And how can we change?
Covering everything from our choice of mates to the SEC, Bernard
Madoff's investors, the embers of BP's refinery, the military in
Afghanistan, and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders,
this provocative book demonstrates how failing to see - or admit to
ourselves or our colleagues - the issues and problems in plain sight
can ruin private lives and bring down corporations. Heffernan explains
how willful blindness develops before exploring ways that institutions
and individuals can combat it.
Margaret Heffernan has been the CEO of several businesses. Born in
Texas and educated at Cambridge University, she worked for BBC Radio
for five years where she wrote, directed, produced, and commissioned
dozens of documentaries and dramas. Heffernan is author of The Naked
Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters
and How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of
Business Success, and is a regular contributor to Real Business and
Fast Company magazine.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Richard Rumelt (Crown Business, USA; Profile, UK)
Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader,
whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church
pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. In Good
Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a
growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values,
fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals
with "strategy." He debunks these elements of "bad strategy" and
awakens an understanding of the power of a "good strategy."
Richard Rumelt received his doctoral degree from Harvard and holds the
Harry and Elsa Kunin chair at UCLA Anderson School of Business. He is
one of the world's most sought-after educators on strategy and general
management and is a consultant to small firms such as the Samuel
Goldwyn Company and giants such as Shell International, as well as to
organisations in the educational and non-profit worlds. Rumelt was a
founding member of the Strategic Management Society and served as its
president in 1995-98. He has recently appeared on CNBC, and been
featured in the Financial Times, The McKinsey Quarterly and The
Economist, among others.
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Daniel Yergin (The Penguin Press, USA; Allen Lane, UK)
The Quest continues the riveting story Daniel Yergin began twenty years
ago with his No.1 International Bestseller The Prize, revealing the
on-going quest to meet the world's energy needs - and the power and
riches that come with it, to prove that energy is truly the engine of
global political and economic change.
From the jammed streets of Beijing, the shores of the Caspian Sea, and
the conflicts in the Middle East, to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley,
Yergin tells the inside stories of the oil market, the rise of the
'petrostate', the race to control the resources of the former Soviet
empire, and the massive corporate mergers that have transformed the oil
landscape. He shows how the drama of oil - the struggle for access to
it, the battle for control, the insecurity of supply, its impact on the
global economy, and the geopolitics that dominate it - will continue to
shape our world. And he takes on the toughest questions: will we run
out; are China and the United States destined for conflict; what of
climate change? Yergin also reveals the surprising and turbulent
histories of nuclear, coal, and natural gas, and investigates the
'rebirth of renewables'- biofuels, wind, and solar energy - showing how
understanding this greening landscape and its future role are crucial
to the needs of a growing world economy.
Daniel Yergin is one of the most highly respected and influential
authorities in the world on energy, international politics and
economics. He is a recipient of the United States Energy Award for
'lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international
understanding'. Dr. Yergin received the Pulitzer for The Prize: The
Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, which became a No. 1 bestseller
and was made into an eight-hour PBS/BBC series seen by millions of
people around the world. He is chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy
Research Associates, the leading research and consulting firm in its
field. He serves as CNBC's Global Energy Expert.
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