Best Books of 2008 From the FT Management Blog

If you follow business books, you no doubt know that The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs award one book each year The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. What you may have escaped your business book radar is The Financial Times Management Blog and their picks of the 2008 crop. Most of the books that made the FT/Goldman Sachs shortlist made this list as well (I'll point them out below), the sole exception being William J. Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange. (Quick note: The FT.com Management Blog is based in the UK, and some of the books' publishers and subtitles are different than they are here in the States. I've gone with the US information below. If you're reading this overseas and need the UK information, head on over to the original post.) Without further ado, the list is:

• When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change by Mohamed El-Erian, McGraw-Hill (The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year)
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Yale University Press (Jack Covert Selects)
• The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford, Random House (Jack Covert Selects)
• A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, Harvard Business Press (Jack Covert Selects)
• McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny, Knopf (FT/Goldman Sachs runner up)
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Bantam (FT/Goldman Sachs runner up)
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown & Company
• The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew by Mark de Rond (So far as I can tell, this has not been released in the States, but we do have our own, unrelated Last Amateurs about NCAA basketball)
• Cold Steel: The Multi-billion-dollar Battle for a Global Industry by Tim Bouquet & Byron Ousey, Little Brown Book Group UK (FT/Goldman Sachs runner up - not yet available in the US)
• Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press (FT/Goldman Sachs runner up)
• Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton, The Penguin Press
• The Ten Commandments of Business Failure by Don Keough, Portfolio

One more book was good enough to stop press, being added after the initial post. That book was Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott, published by McGraw-Hill.