Want to Understand How the Business World Is Changing? Here Are the Financial Times' 10 Books of the Year

The subjects range widely: gender discrimination, the rise of Alibaba, Brazil's polarized society, and how to prepare for a life that may last a hundred years.

After The New York Times and The Guardian published their best-books-of-the-year lists, Britain's Financial Times this week put out its own list, covering 24 subjects and overlapping a good deal with the other two. That is no great surprise: in the introduction FT books editor Lorien Kite wrote for the list, the year's two keywords are "Brexit" and "Trump."

We have picked out the 10 best business books of 2016 to introduce here, in the hope that they help you see how the business world is changing.

The links below each cover lead to the full review.

Iris Bohnet, an American scholar and writer, is a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book, What Works: Gender Equality by Design, takes on gender equality — an issue that draws attention both on moral grounds and in the workplace — and was shortlisted for this year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Bohnet studies gender, and the book argues for what she calls "behavioral design." Her research finds that organized efforts to remove bias do more than individual willpower. Drawing on data from government agencies, companies and campuses around the world, she sets out methods anyone can follow to attack gender discrimination.

Robert Cialdini, an American social psychologist, wrote the global bestseller Influence, which Fortune named one of the "75 Smartest Books You Must Read."

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is the first book Cialdini has written alone in thirty years, and it reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list after publication. Drawing on research in psychology, business and the social sciences, and on cases as ordinary as advertisements and annual press releases, he explains how people make decisions and stresses how much the moment before the persuasion matters.

Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built is by Duncan Clark, a business consultant known as a "China hand" who came out of Morgan Stanley's investment bank and who visited the apartment where Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999. As an early adviser to Alibaba Group, and over two decades in China, he watched what the internet did to the country.

Working from personal recollection and exclusive interviews, and setting the story against China's vast economic and social change, Clark describes how Jack Ma built Alibaba Group and reshaped the global economy. Alongside the company, he passes on stories about Ma himself. The Financial Times' verdict: this is essential reading for anyone who hopes to make their way in China's new economy.

American writer Alex Cuadros was Bloomberg News' Brazil correspondent and has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Slate. He lived in São Paulo from 2010 to 2016, and that time became the basis of his first book, Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil. In Brazil he watched how the powerful shape and control ordinary lives through the economy, politics and the media, and he also went into the favelas to record what people with nowhere to turn are up against.

In the book Cuadros exposes the murky, notorious world of Brazil's billionaires and asks one central question: does the wealth Brazil has piled up show an engine driving the country forward, or the gulf between rich and poor? Glenn Greenwald — author of No Place to Hide, the account of Edward Snowden's exposure of the PRISM program — praised it, saying that "Cuadros paints a portrait, with deep insight and reporting, of a society struggling amid hope and turmoil."

How can people stay competitive at work as automation advances? Thomas Davenport, an American scholar once named one of the world's "Top 25 Consultants" by Consulting magazine, and Julia Kirby, a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, wrote Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines to answer that, and offer a fresh reading of the future between people and machines.

Machines bring hope as well as threat, the two authors argue. Rather than ask which job the machines will take next, ask which job they will hand us next. They set out five workable ways to think and act that help readers use machines to create more value. Manoj Saxena, former head of IBM Watson's business unit, praised the book highly: "Every knowledge worker, corporate executive and government leader should read it. Davenport and Kirby are right: humans will form a mutually supportive relationship with machines, rather than being automated by them."

What is actually slowing innovation down? In The Innovation Illusion: How So Little is Created by So Many Working So Hard, Swedish economist Frederik Erixon and entrepreneur Björn Weigel reject the popular idea that technology itself has hit a ceiling, and show readers how government regulation, companies and policymakers hold innovation back.

The two authors examine what happened at big companies such as Nokia, IBM and Apple, and pursue three themes: the falling economic vitality of Western economies, the growing number of companies that refuse market competition and innovation, and over-regulation that keeps innovation from spreading.

Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine, has a full Silicon Valley résumé: he started out as a strategist at Goldman Sachs, gathering and studying large amounts of data. He went to Silicon Valley to start his own company, and was eventually recruited as a product manager in the advertising department of a still-private Facebook. Infighting at Facebook later pushed him over to Twitter.

In the book Martínez discloses one Silicon Valley secret after another, along with the messy evolution of social media and online marketing. He writes with humor and shares sharp observations, ranging from startups and credit derivatives to "Big Brother" and data tracking. The New York Times called it "an irresistible all-around guide to startup tech companies."

Jeff Gramm, author of Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism, is a hedge fund manager and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School in the United States. Using a wealth of cases and original letters from well-known investors, he tries to describe one of the longest-running conflicts in the history of capitalism: the clash of interests among the directors, managers and shareholders of public companies.

Gramm traces shareholder activism from the 1920s to the present, and he also offers a new answer to the question of what a public company really is. By working through different eras and the "battles" fought inside boardrooms, he helps readers see the many things that set shareholders and management against each other.

American scholar Adam Grant is a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and was named by the Thinkers50 website one of the 2015 "50 Most Influential Business Thinkers". A leading researcher on success and the workplace, he has had his findings covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time and other papers. His 2013 book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drive Our Success was one of the Financial Times' and The Wall Street Journal's books of that year.

Propose something new and you will meet resistance. How do we build new approaches and stay clear of risk? In his new book Grant works through examples from business, politics, sport and entertainment to explore how to tell a good idea from a bad one, how to share a new one, when to act on it, and what to do about fear and doubt.

If living to a hundred becomes ordinary, how should we plan a life? Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at London Business School, and Andrew Scott, a professor of economics there, make a forecast of the hundred-year life to come in The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson called the book "brilliant, timely, and also unsettling about the future." It was shortlisted for this year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award as well.

Gratton and Scott argue that life today runs in three stages — education, career, retirement — and that this structure is changing at its root: once lifespans stretch, every stage of life stretches with them, and the way we use our careers and our free time changes sharply. Most of those changes are good, but they warn in the book that the hundred-year life could become a privilege of the rich, who have more room to retrain and switch careers.

Cover image from Dana Barrett