The winner of this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award affirms the wisdom of the idiom “too good to be true.” Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou, chronicles the meteoric ascent and crash of Theranos, the blood-testing company that touted near-magical diagnostic technology that turned out to be bunk.
Kevin Sneader, managing director of McKinsey, and Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times and chair of the judging panel, presented the awards last night at the National Gallery in London. Charlotte Hogg, CEO, Visa Europe, gave the ceremony’s keynote address.
“Bad Blood is a distinctive piece of work,” said Sneader. “There are lessons here about the importance of governance and the proper trade-offs between fostering innovation and conducting due diligence. Above all, it combines deep reporting with the narrative pulse of a well-told detective story.”
Lionel Barber said, “Bad Blood is a brilliant piece of enterprise journalism. Carreyrou cracked the story of Theranos despite threats. He just gives us the facts and they are devastating. It’s well written and reads at times like a thriller.”
Carreyrou, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, was first alerted to a Theranos by a tip from a reader. After legal threats against him and his sources, he broke the story in a front page exposé in 2015. Theranos soon became the subject of intense scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, investors, and patients who had received incorrect test results. “I hope that people read this book and keep in mind that this Silicon Valley playbook doesn't apply very well to regulated industries and especially doesn’t [apply] when lives are at stake,” Carreyrou said in his acceptance speech.
Since the book’s publication, Theranos announced that it would dissolve and return any remaining cash to creditors.
The judging panel spent Monday deliberating the merits of the six finalists for the £30,000 prize. Judges for the award included Lionel Barber, Financial Times editor and chair of the judging panel; Mitchell Baker, executive chairwoman at Mozilla; Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz; Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School; Randall Kroszner, professor of economics at University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Dambisa Moyo, global economist and author; Shriti Vadera, chair of Santander UK; and Rik Kirkland, our head of global publishing at McKinsey.
For the fifth time, we presented the Bracken Bower Prize to the best proposal for a business book by an author under 35. This year’s winner was Andrew Leon Hanna, for his book proposal 25 Million Sparks, which examines the rise of refugee entrepreneurs in a global crisis. It beat entries from 22 countries on topics ranging from technology to gender to the ethics of business. Past winners of the Bracken Bower Prize have gone on to publish books based on their proposals, including 2014 winner Saadia Zahidi, 2015 winners Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, and 2015 finalist, Irene Sun.
The Business Book of the Year Award is given to the book that provides “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance, and economics.” Since 2005, the prize has shortlisted 83 books that comprise a thorough overview of business in a tumultuous era.
Each of this year’s other shortlisted authors will receive £10,000. They include the following:
- Capitalism in America, by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and Adrian Wooldridge
- Give People Money, Annie Lowrey’s analysis of the prospects for universal basic income
- The Billionaire Raj, a perspective of India’s gilded age by James Crabtree
- The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato’s treatise on creating a more sustainable form of capitalism
- New Power, an examination of bottom-up movements and how they develop, by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms