Six books addressing major business challenges—ranging from US-China rivalry and the effects of sanctions to the roots of artificial intelligence and the quest for prosperity—have been named finalists for this year’s Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.
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House of Huawei : inside the secret world of China's most powerful company
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The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world. On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world's most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies' female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the U.S.-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the international spotlight.In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei's reclusive founder Ren Zhengfei and how he built a sprawling corporate empire - one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. The book dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed and national glory that Huawei helped to build - and that has also ensnared it.Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei tells an epic story of familial and political intrigue that presents a fresh window on China's rise from third-world country to U.S. rival, and shines a clarifying light on the security considerations that keep world leaders up at night. House of Huawei holds a mirror up to one of the world's most mysterious companies as never before.
Breakneck : China's quest to engineer the future
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From an indispensable voice on China, comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China's tumultuous and astounding growth. The state has constructed towering bridges, gleaming railways and sprawling factories to improve economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout society.China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Here Wang blends political and economic analysis with reportage into a provocative new framework for understanding China - one that helps us see America more clearly, too. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad.As relations between the US and China are tense and uncertain and the potential for dreadful conflict looms, Wang offers an inventive new way of thinking about the two superpowers. Breakneck reveals that each country points towards a better path for the other. How much better the world would be, he argues, if Americans could live in a society not only governed by lawyers, and Chinese citizens could live with a state that values their individual liberties.
The thinking machine : Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the world's most coveted microchip
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AI tech giant Nvidia is as valuable as Apple and Microsoft.It has shaped the world as we know it.This is the inside story of the company that is inventing the future and its charismatic CEO Jensen Huang. In June 2024, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of videogame equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process reinvented the computer.It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, becoming one of the wealthiest men alive.And it's the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars and new movies, art and books, generated on command.
How progress ends : technology, innovation, and the fate of nations
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Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award How 1,000 years of global history show why technological and economic progress is often followed by stagnation and even collapse In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change. By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today. Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.
Chokepoints : how the global economy became a weapon of war
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The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis - Russia, China, and Iran.
Abundance : How We Build a Better Future
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MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 - FINANCIAL TIMES and the NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB 'Spectacular ... Inspires hope' New York Times'Ambitious' New YorkerThe real threat to liberal democracy isn't just autocrats - but a lack of effective action by so-called progressives. We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability and public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas. It's time for change.Bestselling authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have spent decades analysing the political, economic and cultural forces that have led us here. In this once-in-a-generation intervention, they unpick the barriers to progress and show how we can, and must, shift the political agenda to one that not only protects and preserves, but also builds. From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.