MoneyWeek book review: business books of the year

Last week MoneyWeek looked at Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, one of the five finalists for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. We’re currently reading the winner, James Kynge’s China Shakes The World, and will be reviewing it in due course. In the meantime, here’s a round-up of the other three contenders.

By Cris Sholto Heaton

Published 14 November 2006 In Features

Last week MoneyWeek looked at Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, one of the five finalists for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. We're currently reading the winner, James Kynge's China Shakes The World, and will be reviewing it in due course. In the meantime, here's a round-up of the other three contenders.

Bo Burlingham's Small Giants about "companies that chose to be great instead of big" has received the least attention of all the books on the shortlist. Maybe that's because, as some of the competition judges felt, a compendium of tales about small US firms lacks the breadth to be of global interest. But Burlingham's "quietly subversive message" is relevant to small businesses everywhere, says Jonathan Guthrie in the FT. In essence, his view is that "private entrepreneurs should exploit their freedom to define shareholder value broadly", like the California construction boss who deliberately cut sales because "people were working too hard. Everybody was stressed out". It's a very valid point, says Guthrie, although Burlingham's preference for "a kind of folksy authenticity" may spoil the book for cynical readers.

From small to very large: it requires no effort to deduce what Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect is about. Fishman's effort is one of several about the Beast of Bentonville, and "in many ways the most satisfying", says The Economist, thanks to "frequent unexpected insights" into its business model. The book's only failing, said some of the judges, is that Fishman's coverage of the firm's US activities was stronger than his review of its global impact.

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As for Marc Levinson's The Box, Publisher's Weekly neatly summarises everyone's initial reaction: "A book about the history of the shipping container? At first, one has to wonder, why?" But the book is "an engaging tale", says BusinessWeek's Michael Arndt. It demonstrates the extent to which international trade "owes its exponential growth to something utterly ordinary and overlooked". Shipping containers have made it far faster, cheaper and easier to ship goods around the world. As The Economist puts it: "Without the container, there would be no globalisation."