MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
September 27 – October 4, 2007 Edition
Financial Times
Picks Shortlist
For Book of Year
NEW YORK, NY/9/25/07–The shortlist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (www.ft.com/bookaward) was announced today.
The shortlist is:
Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
Iain Carson and Vijay V Vaitheeswaran (Twelve/HGB USA)
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co
William D Cohan (Doubleday)
The Age Of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
Alan Greenspan (Penguin Press)
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them
Philippe Legrain (Princeton University Press)
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House)
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams (Portfolio)
The judges, Lionel Barber, Lloyd C. Blankfein, Sir Martin Sorrell, Rachel Lomax, N.R Narayana Murthy, Jeffrey Garten and John Gapper met in New York to decide on the six books which, in their opinion, provided ‘the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.’ The winning author will receive £30,000 and the other five shortlisted authors will each receive £5,000. The winner will be announced at a gala event at The British Library, London, on October 25, at which Lakshmi Mittal, President and CEO of ArcelorMittal, widely recognized for the leading role he has played in restructuring the steel industry, will be the keynote speaker.
“This is an excellent and diverse group of finalists, covering everything from the history of high finance to the latest developments in internet and energy technology,” Lionel Barber Editor of the Financial Times said. “We’re expecting a particularly lively discussion in October when we have to pick a winner.”
“We had a strong set of books to select from,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs. “We chose as finalists books that we think are important to a wide range of business people, regardless of industry, seniority, or professional discipline.”
The judging panel for the 2007 Award is:
” Lionel Barber, editor, Financial Times
” Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc
” John Gapper, chief business commentator and associate editor, Financial Times
” Jeffrey Garten, Juan Trippe Professor of International Trade, Finance and Business, Yale School of Management
” Rachel Lomax, deputy governor for monetary policy, Bank of England
” NR Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor, Infosys Technologies
” Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive, WPP
The shortlist is:
Zoom
Iain Carson and Vijay V Vaitheeswaran (Twelve/HBG USA)
ZOOM discusses what may be the most important challenge facing the industrial world: How to make the transition from the Age of Petroleum to a cleaner and better future. The book takes readers inside the global race to build the car of the future, as pioneers in Japan, India, China, and the USA tackle the challenge of creating automobiles that will run on cleaner energy sources. With wide-ranging analysis and a keen view of the key players in the intersecting worlds of energy and automobiles, Zoom traces the history of the linked industries of oil and automobiles, and how the two have shaped domestic capitalism and the international landscape, creating both progress and peril.
Iain Carson is the European Business Editor for The Economist. He also writes about the manufacturing industry and the defence sector. Previously, he was Industry Editor for The Economist, covering the airline, transportation and manufacturing industries. He has also been Business Correspondent for BBC TV, presenter of Channel Four’s “The Business Programme” and Business Editor of The Observer. Iain lives in England.
Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran is an MIT-trained engineer who spent ten years covering global environmental and energy issues for The Economist. He is the author of Power to the People (FSG). Vijay is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lectured at Stanford, Yale and Oxford, and is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in New York.
The Last Tycoons
William D Cohan (Doubleday)
For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the “Great Men” who worked at Lazard Frères & CO allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.
William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. The Last Tycoons is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth-a story of high drama in the world of high finance.
William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co. He is a graduate of Duke University and received both an MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and an MBA from its Graduate School of Business. He lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.
The Age Of Turbulence
Alan Greenspan (Penguin Press)
The most remarkable thing that happened to the world economy after 9/11 was …nothing. What would have once meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly, partly due to the efforts of the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan. The post 9/11 global economy is a new and turbulent system – vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even twenty years ago.
The Age of Turbulence discusses this new world – how we got here, what we’re living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good or ill, channelled through Greenspan’s own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure.
Alan Greenspan was born in 1926 and reared in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City. After studying the clarinet at Juilliard and working as a professional musician, he earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from New York University. In 1954, he CO founded the economic consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan & Co. From 1974 to 1977, he served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Gerald Ford. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.
Immigrants
Philippe Legrain (Princeton University Press)
Immigration divides our globalising world like no other issue. We are swamped by bogus asylum-seekers and infiltrated by terrorists, our jobs stolen, our benefit system abused, our way of life destroyed. Or so we are told. This book asks why ever-rising numbers of people from poor countries are arriving in Europe, North America and Australasia? Can we keep them out? Should we even be trying? Combining compelling first-hand reporting from around the world, incisive socio-economic analysis and a broad understanding of what is at stake politically and culturally, Immigrants advises us to rally behind the cause of freer migration, because They need Us and We need Them.
Philippe Legrain, 33, is a journalist who writes primarily about globalisation, migration and European issues. He studied economics and politics of the world economy at the London School of Economics. He first wrote for The Economist, before moving to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) where he was special adviser to director-general Mike Moore. He was briefly editor of World Link, the magazine of the World Economic Forum, before becoming chief economist, then director of policy, at Britain in Europe.
He has written for the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman and The Ecologist, as well as The New Republic, Foreign Policy and the Chronicle Review. In 1999, he was highly commended as Young Financial Journalist of the Year in the Harold Wincott Press Awards. He is a Visiting Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, and is the author of Open World: The Truth about Globalisation. Philippe lives in London.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House)
Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own personal lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that the reason we ignore the phenomenon of Black Swans until after they occur, is that we are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the ‘impossible’. The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 47, is an essayist, philosopher of randomness, researcher, and practitioner of financial mathematics. As a pioneer of complex financial derivatives, he had a lengthy senior trading career in New York City’s Wall Street firms, before he reduced his financial mathematics activities to start a second career as an epistemologist of chance events and focus on the development of his black swan theory of unexpected rare events. Taleb’s literary approach is to provide a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with scientific commentary. He is currently teaching at the London Business School, and lives mainly in New York.
Wikinomics
Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams (Portfolio)
While some leaders fear the heaving growth of massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. An insightful guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.
Don Tapscott, one of the world’s leading authorities on business strategy, is Chief Executive of international think tank New Paradigm. Founded in 1993, New Paradigm produces groundbreaking research focused on the role of technology in productivity, business design, effectiveness and competitiveness.
Tapscott is the author of 10 books about information technology in business and society, including Paradigm Shift, Growing Up Digital and The Naked Corporation. He is also adjunct professor of management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. His clients include top executives at many of the world’s largest corporations and government leaders from many countries. He holds a Master’s degree in Research Methodology and an (Hon.) Doctor of Laws.
He lives in Canada.
Anthony D. Williams is an author and avid researcher examining the impact of new technologies on social and economic life. His work has been featured in Business 2.0 and Optimize magazine and widely circulated in syndicated research programs. Anthony is Vice President and Executive Editor at New Paradigm where he is responsible for ensuring high standards of quality, innovation, effective communication, and client value. Anthony was previously a leader in Digital 4Sight’s multi-client research business. He led a multi-million dollar effort to understand how transparency is revolutionizing business and helped charter a new course for digital governance for a global consortium of twenty top-level government agencies. Anthony holds a Masters in Research from the London School of Economics and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government.
About the Financial Times:
The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business newspapers, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing extensive news, comment and analysis, the newspaper is printed in 23 cities across the globe, has a daily circulation of 426,830 (ABC figures, August 2007) and a readership of more than 1.3 million people worldwide. FT.com is one of the world’s leading business information websites, and the Internet partner of the FT newspaper. Since its relaunch in May 2002, the website has continued to be the definitive home for business intelligence on the web, providing an essential source of news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community. FT.com attracts 5.29 million unique monthly users (ABC electronic figures, January 2007) generating 40.4 million page views and has 100,000 subscribers.
About Goldman Sachs:
Goldman Sachs is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of services worldwide to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and high net worth individuals. Founded in 1869, it is one of the oldest and largest investment banking firms. The firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong and other major financial centers around the world.
