FT Business Book of 2024

In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labour continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century.But no products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority.The pharmaceutical industry (or Big Pharma) creates life-saving vaccines and ramps drug prices up to near-unaffordable levels. Amazon gives us next-day delivery on almost everything and has its workers urinate in bottles rather than take breaks. John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation — and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.'

Thanks to increases in life expectancy, we can now expect to live for a long time. Most of us would welcome an extra day in the week, so why do so many of us view the prospect of additional years with fear and skepticism? The reason is society is not currently structured to support long lives.Rather than thinking in terms of the needs of a rising number of older people, we must support the young and middle-aged to prepare differently for the longer futures they can expect. The Longevity Imperative outlines the innovations needed to make the most of longer lives and the substantial changes required to our health system, economy, and financial sector, as well as in how we manage our careers, health, finances, and relationships.Instead of seeing longevity as a problem, economist Andrew J. Scott challenges us to view it as an opportunity. This book charts a course to address the individual, social, political, economic, and cultural changes required so that all of us—regardless of age—can live lives that are not just longer but healthier, happier, and more productive.From a leading expert on longevity, an urgent call for individuals, institutions, and society to adapt to the reality of living longer lives.

A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought, as profound as the invention of gunpowder or the advent of the nuclear age, is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial-intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal.Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically created to build a bridge to Valley technologists and accelerate bringing state-of-the-art software and hardware to the battlespace. Given authority to cut through red tape and function almost as a venture capital firm, Shah, Kirchhoff, and others in the Unit who came after were tasked particularly with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from so-called “primes”—behemoth companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing.Taking us inside AI labs, drone workshops, and battle command centers—and, also, overseas to Ukraine’s frontlines—Shah and Kirchhoff paint a fascinating picture of what it takes to stay dominant in a fast-changing and often precarious geopolitical landscape.In an era when America’s chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley was always advisable. Today, it is an urgent necessity.A riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X—whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America, from the two men who launched the unit.

Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from poverty and made our lives far healthier and longer. As a result, the unfettered pursuit of growth defines economic life around the world. Yet this prosperity has come at enormous costs: deepening inequalities, destabilizing technologies, environmental destruction and climate change. Confusion reigns. For many, in our era of anemic economic progress, the worry is slowing growth in the UK, Europe, China and elsewhere. Others understandably claim that, given its costs, the only way forward is "degrowth", deliberately shrinking our economies. At this time of uncertainty about growth and its value, economist Daniel Susskind has written an essential reckoning. In a sweeping analysis full of historical insight, he argues that we cannot abandon growth but shows instead how we must redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value. He explores what really drives growth and offers original ideas for combating our economic slowdown.Lucid, thought-provoking and brilliantly researched, Growth is a vital guide to one of our greatest preoccupations.

Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon.Ours is the only species that lives in groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways. First, the peer instinct to conform to what most people do. Second, the hero instinct to give to the group and emulate the most respected. And third, the ancestor instinct to follow the ways of prior generations. These tribal instincts enable us to share knowledge and goals and work as a team to transmit the accumulated pool of cultural knowledge onward to the next generation.Countries, churches, political parties, and companies are tribes, and tribal instincts explain our loyalties to them and the hidden ways that they affect our thoughts, actions, and identities. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irrationality, we can recognize them as powerful levers that elevate performance, heal rifts, and set off shockwaves of cultural change.Weaving together deep research, current and historical events, and stories from business and politics, Morris cuts across conventional wisdom to completely reframe how we think about our tribes. Bracing and hopeful, Tribal unlocks the deepest secrets of our psychology and gives us the tools to manage our misunderstood superpower.A revelatory, paradigm-shifting work from a renowned Columbia professor that demystifies our tribal instincts and shows us how to use them to create positive change.Endorsements“one of the great social and cultural psychologists” — Amy Cuddy

From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in."They declined his offer too, not realizing how much the thin-skinned Musk didn’t like it when people said no. Soon enough though, Hassabis got another email. This time, it was from Google."When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly becoming apparent: untested automations could undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs, and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence — OpenAI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) — started their journeys determined to solve humanity’s greatest problems. But they couldn’t develop their technologies without huge amounts of money — money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table.Featuring a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, Supremacy is a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and of ruthless, relentless human progress — progress that will impact all of us for years to come.