Books of the Year 2024
(Originally posted on LinkedIn): Every December since 2020, I’ve posted my favourite books of the year here. It’s the biggest month of the year for book sales, many of us will catch up with reading over the holidays, and with the space for book reviews in the media shrinking, authors need all the shares they can get. Caveat: there’s no fiction here (I just haven’t read enough this year) but if the list is a little wonky in both senses of the word, I can genuinely say I enjoyed every book.
On to the books. Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc is a disturbing but clear-sighted view of geopolitics and authoritarian regimes behaving with impunity. In that context, Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom is a manifesto for change: liberty is not merely the absence of repression, but something to be affirmed. I bought my copy in California on the 2nd of November and reading it over the following week provided helpful balance to the news media.
In terms of developing a strategy for the world we’re in, I suspect that Tony Blair’s On Leadership is a book that few readers will be indifferent to, either way, but it sets out a clear, pragmatic view of strategy and delivery. The pragmatic theme is developed by David Richards and Julian Lindley-French: their book The Retreat from Strategy assesses the UK’s place in the world and finds the strategy wanting, arguing that leaders have confused values and strategy (something one or two business leaders are guilty of too).
On that note, John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century examines the evolution of modern business and where things have gone wrong. Some of the failures Kay writes about could be explained through Dan Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine which addresses a specific aspect, the failure of organisations to take responsibility for their actions, through a lens of decision making and systems thinking. Decisions are also a key part of Kelly Clancy’s superb Playing with Reality, which looks at how games have influenced human behaviour.
AI was a huge part of my professional year, and two books shaped my thinking. On a practical level, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is an accessible guide that I’ve recommended and gifted many times this year. For a wider view, Verity Harding’s AI Needs You looks at previous waves of innovation for a guide to how AI can be regulated: I found her comparison with the Warnock Commission and the development of regulation around IVF particularly interesting.
Finally, for the publishers in my network, if you’d like to do a better job of pitching books than I’ve done here, my friend James Spackman’s first book is an invaluable practical guide: both the reference I wish I’d had when I started in the business, and something to learn from now.