《金融时报》年度商业图书名单公布:2024最佳商业好书
从16本长名单中脱颖而出的六本入围图书的诞生,奖金为30,000英镑的奖项将于12月9日在伦敦颁发。入围图书的每位作者也都将获得10,000英镑。
01、The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong by John Kay
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1 mb
Overview: LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
For generations, we have defined a corporation as a business run by a capitalist elite, that uses its accumulated wealth to own the means of production and exercise economic power.
That is no longer the reality. In the twenty-first century, our most desired goods and services aren't stacked in warehouses or on container ships: they appear on your screen, fit in your pocket or occupy your head.
But even as we consume more than ever before, big business faces a crisis of legitimacy. The pharmaceutical industry creates life-saving vaccines but has lost the trust of the public. The widening pay gap between executives and employees is destabilising our societies. Facebook and Google have more customers than any companies in history but are widely reviled.
John Kay, one of the greatest economists of our time, describes how the pursuit of shareholder value has destroyed some of the leading companies of the twentieth century. Incisive and provocative, this book redefines successful commercial activity and leadership, the knowledge economy and what the future of the modern corporation might be.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
02、Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together by Michael Morris
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 11 mb
Overview: A revelatory, paradigm-shifting work from a renowned Columbia professor and “one of the great social and cultural psychologists” (Amy Cuddy) that demystifies our tribal instincts and shows us how to use them to create positive change.
Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon.
Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways. First, the peer instinct to conform to what most people do. Second, the hero instinct to give to the group and emulate the most respected. And third, the ancestor instinct to follow the ways of prior generations. These tribal instincts enable us to share knowledge and goals and work as a team to transmit the accumulated pool of cultural knowledge onward to the next generation.
Countries, churches, political parties, and companies are tribes, and tribal instincts explain our loyalties to them and the hidden ways that they affect our thoughts, actions, and identities. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irrationality, we can recognize them as powerful levers that elevate performance, heal rifts, and set off shockwaves of cultural change.
Weaving together deep research, current and historical events, and stories from business and politics, Morris cuts across conventional wisdom to completely reframe how we think about our tribes. Bracing and hopeful, Tribal unlocks the deepest secrets of our psychology and gives us the tools to manage our misunderstood superpower.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
03、Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 2.8 Mb
Overview: Discover the never-before-told story of the ruthless shadow race between Microsoft and Google, as both compete to develop a mass-market AI while juggling existential questions of ethics, human progress and the future of the world as we know it.
"They declined his offer too, not realizing how much the thin-skinned Musk didn’t like it when people said no. Soon enough though, Hassabis got another email. This time, it was from Google."
When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to light: that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.
It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence – Open AI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) – started their journeys determined to solve humanity’s greatest problems. But they couldn’t develop their technologies without huge amounts of money – money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table.
From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, Supremacy is a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and of ruthless, relentless human progress – progress that will impact all of us for years to come.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Tech & Devices
04、The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives by Andrew J. Scott
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 3 mb
Overview: “A manifesto to guide the longevity revolution” (David Sinclair) for individuals, institutions, and society to adapt to the reality of living longer lives
Thanks to increases in life expectancy, we can now expect to live for a long time. Most of us would welcome an extra day in the week, so why do so many of us view the prospect of additional years with fear and skepticism? The reason is simple: society is not currently structured to support long lives. Rather than thinking in terms of the needs of a rising number of older people, we must instead support the young and middle-aged to prepare differently for the longer futures they can expect.
The Longevity Imperative outlines the innovations needed to make the most of these longer lives: substantial changes to our health system, economy, and financial sector, as well as in how we manage our careers, health, finances, and relationships. Instead of seeing longevity as a problem, economist Andrew J. Scott challenges us to view it as an opportunity. This book charts a course to address the individual, social, political, economic, and cultural changes required so that all of us—regardless of age—can live lives that are not just longer but healthier, happier, and more productive.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
05、Growth by Daniel Susskind
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.1 Mb
Overview: A vivid account of the past, present, and future of economic growth, showing how and why we must continue to pursue it while responding to the challenges it creates.
Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from the struggle for subsistence and made our lives far healthier and longer. Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. But to abandon humanity's progress would be folly. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
In a sweeping analysis full of historical insight, Susskind shows how policymaking came to revolve around a single-minded quest for greater GDP. This is a surprisingly recent development: economic growth was barely discussed until the second half of the twentieth century. And our understanding of what drives it is more recent still. Only lately have we come to see how humankind emerged from its millennia of stagnation: through the sustained discovery of powerful and productive new ideas.This insight undermines the mantra that "we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet," for the world of ideas is infinitely vast. Yet growth's critics are right to insist that we can no longer focus on its upsides alone. We must confront the tradeoffs, Susskind contends: sometimes, societies will have to deliberately pursue less growth for the sake of other goals. These will be moral decisions, not simply economic ones, demanding the engagement not just of politicians and experts but of all citizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction > General > Business
06、Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 2.3 Mb
Overview: A riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X—whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America’s military: from the two men who launched the unit.
A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal.
Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically designed as a bridge to Valley technologists that would accelerate bringing state of the art software and hardware to the battle space. Given authority to cut through red tape and function almost as a venture capital firm, Shah, Kirchhoff, and others in the Unit who came after were tasked particularly with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from so-called “primes”—behemoth companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing.
Taking us inside AI labs, drone workshops, and battle command centers—and, also, overseas to Ukraine’s frontlines—Shah and Kirchhoff paint a fascinating picture of what it takes to stay dominant in a fast-changing and often precarious geopolitical landscape.
In an era when America’s chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley was always advisable. Today, it is an urgent necessity.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
下载地址:
|