Parmy Olson speaks at the FT Schroders award ceremony in London, where she won the Business Book of the Year honor for her Pan Macmillan title, ‘Supremacy.’ Image: FT Schroders
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Focusing on OpenAI and DeepMind
In news released overnight, the United Kingdom-based Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award has named Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World the 2024 winner of its £30,000 (US$38,316) purse. In the UK, the book is published by Pan Macmillan / Macmillan Business and in the States by Macmillan / St. Martin’s Press.
The author, Parmy Olson, is a technology columnist with Bloomberg, her work being focused on artificial intelligence, social media, and technology regulatory issues.
She has written about the evolution of AI since 2016, when she covered Silicon Valley for Forbes magazine, before becoming a technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She’s the author of We Are Anonymous, a 2012 exposé of the eponymous hacker collective, and she was named by Business Insider as one of the Top 100 People in UK Tech in 2019.
In the publisher’s promotional copy on the book, consumers read, “Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media, and more.
“With exclusive access to a network of high-ranking sources, Olson uses her 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.”
This competition is this year observing its 20th anniversary, and for our readers who may be familiar with the Financial Times but not Schroders, the latter is an international investment manager established in 1804. The award program looks for a work that provides the “most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.”
Roula Kahlaf
In the award program on Monday afternoon at the Peninsula London, the FT editor Roula Kahlaf said, “Hassabis and Sam Altman are two of today’s most influential entrepreneurs.
“In her deeply reported account, Parmy Olson brilliantly frames the development of artificial intelligence as a thrilling race to master the technology, build a business, and dominate the technological future.”
Peter Harrison
And Peter Harrison, the outgoing Schroders Group CEO, says, “This was an evenly matched shortlist of very high quality but Supremacy is a timely and compelling winner, which provides deep insights into the defining technology of our age that are impossible to find elsewhere.
Chaired again by Khalaf, the jury panel this year included:
- Mimi Alemayehou, Semai Ventures
- Daisuke Arakawa, Nikkei
- Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
- Sherry Coutu, Angel Investor
- Mohamed El-Erian, Queens’ College, Cambridge, Allianz, Gramercy
- Peter Harrison, Schroders
- James Kondo, International House of Japan
- Randall Kroszner, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
- Shriti Vadera, Prudential and Royal Shakespeare Company
The FT Schroders Business Book 2024 Shortlist
Image: FT Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024
In addition to Olson’s winnings of £30,000, each of the other shortlisted authors in this contest gets £10,000 (US$12,771).
It would be great to see the Business Book of the Year join the Booker prizes in fiction, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, the British Academy Book Prize, and ALTA’s National Translation Awards in the States in nonfiction in following up on the winner’s announcement with some data as to what impact the program’s top honor has on sales.
| Title | Author(s) | Publisher |
| The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong | John Kay | Profile Books (UK), Yale University Press (USA) |
| Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together | Michael Morris | Penguin Random House / Thesis (UK and USA) |
| Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World | Parmy Olson | Pan Macmillan / Macmillan Business (UK), Macmillan / St. Martin’s Press (USA) |
| The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives | Andrew J. Scott | Hachette / Basic Books (UK and USA) |
| Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War | Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchoff | Simon & Schuster / Scribner (UK and USA) |
| Growth: A Reckoning | Daniel Susskind, | Harvard University Press / Belknap Press (UK and USA) |
Comments
In a comment on the shortlist, Kahlaf is quoted, saying, “Our six finalists, picked from a very strong longlist, focus on some of the most interesting and controversial issues on leaders’ minds, including the quest to achieve better economic growth, the purpose of technology, the evolution of the corporation, and the impact of tribal instincts and improving longevity.
“It will be a hard task to select a winner from this range of exceptionally interesting and relevant titles.”
And Harrison, the Schroders Group CEO, says, “In the second year of our partnership with the FT, we have arrived at a shortlist of exceptional books.
“These are insightful and compelling, written with great skill underpinned by strong research and writing.
“They raise challenging contemporary issues about the ways in which businesses impact our economies and societies. In doing so, these books highlight the difficult choices business leaders and policymakers face in an era of disruption.”
Previous Winners of the Business Book of the Year
- Amy Edmondson for Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us To Thrive (2023)
- Chris Miller for Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022)
- Nicole Perlroth for This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021)
- Sarah Frier for No Filter: The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture (2020)
- Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019)
- John Carreyrou for Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018)
- Amy Goldstein for Janesville: An American Story (2017)
- Sebastian Mallaby for The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (2016)
- Martin Ford for Rise of the Robots (2015)
- Thomas Piketty for Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
- Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013)
- Steve Coll for Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012)
- 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)
- Thomas Friedman for The World is Flat (2005)
More from Publishing Perspectives on awards programs in books and the publishing industry is here. More on the FT Business Book of the Year award is here, more on business books in general is here, more on the United Kingdom’s market is here, and more on the United States’ market is here.