FT Business 2023

A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear: progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals, while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again—brought under control. Cutting-edge technological advances can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.With their bold reinterpretation of economics and history, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson fundamentally change how we see the world, providing the vision needed to redirect innovation so it again benefits most people.

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future.These are the six most crucial substances in human history. They took us from the Dark Ages to the present day. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, and create life-saving medicines. But most of us take them completely for granted.In Material World, Ed Conway travels the globe — from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan and the eerie green pools where lithium originates — to uncover a secret world we rarely see.Revealing the true marvel of these substances, he follows the mind-boggling journeys, miraculous processes and little-known companies that turn the raw materials we all need into products of astonishing complexity. As we wrestle with climate change, energy crises and the threat of new global conflict, Conway shows why these substances matter more than ever before, and how the hidden battle to control them will shape our geopolitical future. This is the story of civilisation — our ambitions and glory, innovations and appetites — told literally from the ground up.Endorsements"A compelling narrative of the human story" — Tim Marshall, author of Prisoners of Geography"Lively, rich and exciting... full of surprises" — Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves.Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated.An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all.EndorsementsThe revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller.Shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

For several decades China's ascendancy has been supported by an astonishingly broad and deep portfolio of quiet coercion. Stories of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian reach are breathtaking — the gagging of sports stars and huge Western brands; Hollywood self-censorship; infrastructure deals in exchange for political loyalty in multilateral organizations; and of course — communications firms. But these are just the most visible examples.Beijing Rules exposes the armoury of strategies with which China has exploited Western weakness to position itself as leader in the game of tying market access to political acquiescence; punitive tariffs; online disinformation operations; use of private companies to spy on global users; leveraging vaccines for geopolitical gain; and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong. With these weapons and dextrous manoeuvrings during the global pandemic, China positioned itself to take its place at the apex of world powers.Bethany Allen, an internationally recognized investigator into China's covert power, shows Western institutions have bowed to and even enabled Beijing's coercion. As we come reeling out of a global pandemic and eyes are on a new war in Europe, this revealing analysis sounds the alarm about the most significant shift in the new world order, and what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we take for granted.The remarkable story of China's two-decade quest for global dominance.Endorsements"Allen has shown remarkable courage in writing this... A disturbing, insightful book about China's hidden, multitiered war — and how the West can fight back." — Kirkus Reviews

To look south and skyward from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global capital: a series of soaring spires stretching from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires’ Row, this set of slender high-rise residences has transformed the skyline of New York City, thanks to developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and foreign oligarchs. And chances are most of us will never be invited to step inside.In Billionaires’ Row, Katherine Clarke reveals the captivating story of how, in just a few years, the ruthless real-estate impresarios behind these “supertalls” lining 57th Street turned what was once a run-down strip of Midtown into the most exclusive street on Earth, as legendary Trump-era veterans went toe-to-toe with hungry upstart developers in an ego-fueled “race to the sky.” Based on far-reaching access to real estate’s power players, Clarke’s account brings readers inside one of the world’s most cutthroat industries, showing how a combination of ferocious ambition and relentless salesmanship has created a new market of $100 million apartments for the world’s one-percenters—units to live in or, sometimes, just places to stash their cash.Filled with eye-popping stories that bring the new era of extreme wealth inequality into vivid relief, Billionaires’ Row is a juicy, gimlet-eyed account of the genius, greed, and financial one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world—a stranger-than-fiction saga of broken partnerships, broken marriages, lawsuits, and, for a few, fleeting triumphs.A fly-on-the-wall account of the ferocious ambition, greed, and financial one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the new Manhattan megatowers known as Billionaires’ Row — from a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billion—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours. For example:• Understand your odds. If you don’t know them, you won’t win.• Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it’s wrong.• Think right to left. Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there.• Find your Lego. Big is best built from small.• Be a team maker. You won’t succeed without an “us.”• Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.• Know that your biggest risk is you.Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House, to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, to a home renovation in Brooklyn gone awry, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done—on time and on budget.The secrets to successfully planning and delivering projects on any scale—from home renovation to space exploration—by the world’s leading expert on megaprojectsEndorsements“This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining. What more could you ask for?” — Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow“Over-budget and over-schedule is an inevitability. Incompetence and grift is outrageous. Bent Flyvbjerg, with this terrific data-driven book, has shown that there is another way.” — Frank Gehry

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines under penalty of death, won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.Endorsements"The most important book to read about the AI boom" — Wired."Gripping" — The New Yorker.Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Wired, and the Financial Times.A Next Big Idea Book Club "Must-Read".

Wherever you look, money is being replaced by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data—the list goes on.But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities?Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extra-monetary economies, Rachel O’Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy.But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. Amazon’s Turk workers are getting paid in gift cards. Online streamers trade in wishlists. Foreign remittances are sent via phone credit. Bitcoin, gift cards, NFTs, customer data, and game tokens are the new money in an evolving economy.It is a development challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state. Tokens may offer a flexible, even subversive route to compensation. But for the platforms themselves they can be a means of amassing frightening new powers.An essential read for anyone concerned with digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy.The essential guide to this new landscape of NFTs, Web3, crypto and DAOs and a warning of the political consequences of what happens when platform capitalism comes for the money in your pocket.EndorsementsLonglisted for the FT Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2023.A best book of GQ, Los Angeles Times, and Wired.

We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks—operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability.We are not prepared.Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming strategic and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth—but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale.In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face unprecedented harms arising from unchecked openness on one side, and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman establishes “the containment problem”—the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age.An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a cofounder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind.Endorsements“A fascinating, well-written, and important book.” — Yuval Noah Harari“Essential reading.” — Daniel Kahneman“An excellent guide for navigating unprecedented times.” — Bill Gates

From MIT professor and pre-eminent voice on Good Jobs comes a leadership guide for choosing excellence and providing good jobs that offer a living wage, dignity, and opportunities for growth. From healthcare facilities to call centers, fulfillment centers to factories, and restaurants to retail stores, companies are struggling to find or keep workers because the jobs they offer are low-paying, stressful, and provide little chance for growth and success. Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them, but they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—turnover that's partly driven by low pay. It is a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton shows why good jobs, combined with strong operations, lead to higher productivity and greater competitiveness. More than ever, in a world with tight labor markets, failing to provide good jobs will catch up with you and threaten your business. As the leading scholar on good jobs and president of the Good Jobs Institute, Ton has helped executives at many companies implement a good jobs system. With expertise drawn from time spent on the front lines with workers and their managers, she knows what's keeping most companies mired in mediocrity and how implementing a good jobs system makes them more competitive, more resilient, and more likely to attract and retain loyal customers and dedicated employees. Practical, prescriptive, and often provocative, The Case for Good Jobs is essential reading for company leaders who want to—who need to—choose excellence.

We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us? Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

An entertaining and well-researched account of the rise and fall of cryptocurrency. At the height of the pandemic, TV star Ben McKenzie was the perfect mark for a dad stuck at home with some cash in his pocket, worried about his family, armed with only the vague notion that people were making heaps of money on something he—despite a degree in economics—didn’t entirely understand. Lured in by grandiose, utopian promises, and sure, a little bit of FOMO, McKenzie dove deep into blockchain, Bitcoin, and the various other coins and exchanges on which they are traded. But after scratching the surface, he had to ask, “Am I crazy, or is this all a total scam?” In Easy Money, McKenzie enlists the help of journalist Jacob Silverman for an investigative adventure into crypto and its remarkable crash. Weaving together stories of average traders and victims, colorful crypto “visionaries,” Hollywood’s biggest true believers, anti-crypto whistleblowers, and government operatives, Easy Money is an on-the-ground look at a perfect storm of irresponsibility and criminal fraud. Based on original reporting across the country and abroad, including interviews with Sam Bankman-Fried, Tether cofounder Brock Pierce, Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky, and more.This is the book on cryptocurrency you’ve been waiting for.EndorsementsInstant New York Times bestsellerLonglisted for the Financial Times 2023 Business Book of the Year“A smart, savvy road map through the mayhem of the cryptocurrency madness.” — Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Alexander Hamilton“One of the crypto industry’s unlikely but most prominent critics.” — Washington Post

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure—simple, complex, and intelligent—Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. She illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. This is the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.With vivid, real-life stories from business, pop culture, history, and more, Edmondson gives us specifically tailored practices, skills, and mindsets to help us replace shame and blame with curiosity, vulnerability, and personal growth. You’ll never look at failure the same way again.A revolutionary guide that will transform your relationship with failure, from the pioneering researcher of psychological safety and award-winning Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person's online life — their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it were everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI — helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor — and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel, who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology to the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it. Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”Endorsements“The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.” — John Carreyrou, author of Bad BloodLonglisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award