The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company 2014 Business Book of the Year Award

There has been a shake up around one of the major business book awards given every year, with McKinsey & Company taking the place of Goldman Sachs as the partner of the Financial Times for the tenth year of their prestigious award. Submissions have been open since last month, and they officially announced the launch of the 2014 Business Book of the Year Award yesterday.

Also a first this year, they have announced an additional award—the Bracken Bower Prize—which "will be given to a promising young writer with the best proposal for a book about an emerging business theme." Dominic Barton of McKinsey & Company said this new award is "aimed at encouraging the next generation to join the conversation on the challenges and opportunities of growth globally." Business books have seen something of a youth movement in recent years, and I think they'll find there are many more young voices waiting in the wings for their opportunity to contribute.

They usually put out a longlist for the overall award in August, but it looks like they'll be skipping that step this year, going straight to the announcement of the shortlist on September 24 and the overall winner at a dinner in London on November 11. Submissions end June 30.

The past winners of this award have been:

• The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2005)
• China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future—And the Challenge for America by James Kynge, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2006)
• The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. by William D. Cohan, Doubleday (2007)
• When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change by Mohamed El-Erian, McGraw-Hill (2008)
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed, Penguin Books (2009)
• Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan, Princeton University Press (2010)
• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, PublicAffairs (2011)
• Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll, Penguin Books (2012)
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone, Little Brown & Company (2013)

As you can see, the award has always favored books that are big-picture, high-finance, and big-business-oriented. It will be interesting to see if that will change at all, if it will look at books that delve more into the nuts and bolts of everyday business operations, now that McKinsey & Company is involved instead of Goldman Sachs.

Whatever the case, we will be sure to update you here as the books are announced.