Shortlist Announced for Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award

The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs today announced the shortlist for the eighth annual Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, now an essential calendar fixture for business people and authors alike. The award aims to identify the book providing the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.

This year's distinguished judges have chosen the six most influential business books in 2012:

• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Crown Business, Profile Books)

• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust
John Coates (The Penguin Press, Fourth Estate)

• Private Epmire: ExxonMobil and American Power
Steve Coll (The Penguin Press, Allen Lane)

• Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster; Little, Brown)

• What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits Of Markets
Michael J. Sandel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Allen Lane)

• Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence
William L. Silber (Bloomsbury Press)

The judging panel, chaired by FT editor Lionel Barber, comprises:

· Vindi Banga, Partner, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice

· Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School

· Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum

· Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission

· Jorma Ollila, Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell

· Shriti Vadera, Director of Shriti Vadera Ltd, Non-Executive Director of BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca

Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, said: “The quality of submissions this year was outstanding, and we therefore have a very powerful shortlist. It has a strong emphasis on leadership and broader institutional and political issues, reflecting the mood of the world today.”

The winner will be announced at the award dinner on 1st November, co-hosted by Lionel Barber and Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. at The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York.

The winner of the Business Book of the Year Award 2012 will be awarded £30,000, and each of the remaining shortlisted authors will receive £10,000.

Previous winners of the award are: Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo for Poor Economics (2011); Raghuram Rajan for Fault Lines (2010); Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009); Mohamed El-Erian for When Markets Collide (2008); William D. Cohan for The Last Tycoons (2007); James Kynge for China Shakes the World (2006); and Thomas Friedman, as the inaugural Award winner in 2005, for The World is Flat.

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