The FT Press/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Longlist

I speculated back in May when submissions opened for The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company 2014 Business Book of the Year Award that the books they looked at would be more focused on business nuts-and-bolts issues now that a consultancy firm (McKinsey) had taken over for an investment bank (Goldman Sachs) as the Financial Times' partner on the awards. I also thought they would not be announcing a longlist as they had in the past because it was not on their awards schedule. It seems I was wrong on both counts, because The Financial Times and McKinsey announced a longlist this morning, and the books on it are mostly big-picture books, not nut-and-bolts business and management books. That said, the list is very good, and any inquiring mind—business or otherwise—would be well served diving into the books on it. They are:

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press
• China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard W. French, Alfred A. Knopf
• Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Random House
• Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin, Times Books/Henry Holt
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis, W.W. Norton
• Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit by Charles W. Calomiris & Stephen H. Haber, Princeton University Press
• GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle, Princeton University Press
• Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies, Faber & Faber
• House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, University of Chicago Press
• Shredded: The Rise and Fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland by Ian Fraser, Birlinn Ltd
• Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman, Grand Central Publishing
• The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold, Simon & Schuster
• The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good Business by John Browne, HarperBusiness
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, HarperBusiness
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, W.W. Norton

We will keep you updated as they whittle down the list in September, and announce the overall winner at an awards dinner in London in November.