The Best Business Book of 2021 (According to Every Other Best-of-2021 List)
More selections this year, but a single book breaks through
You probably don’t need to read another article about how strange 2021 was. The effects of the pandemic continued to reverberate forward into this year. Business book sales recovered from a low in 2020, but as we moved into the fall, those strong sales were threatened by supply chain constraints in raw materials, printer capacity, and distribution.
As we look back at the books published this year, there is an equally interesting story that emerged.
First, A Little History
When I started looking at business best-of lists three years ago, my primary goal was to see if there were any books chosen by groups from different segments of the book publishing ecosystem. Journalists at The Financial Times or Strategy + Business look through a different lens than retailers at BookPal, Porchlight Book, and Amazon. I thought this meta-analysis could give us a view into the must read books and provide a needed shortcut given the thousands of new works published each year. A consensus on a chosen title might also illuminate a broader theme about the year passed.
In 2019, the first year of the best-of, best-of list, that consensus was bright and clear. Three books were chosen by five of the six lists. Range by David Epstein, Nine Lies about Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashely Goddall, and Loonshots by Safi Bahcall. The theme was clear. I wrote, “Each book tackles something we are all struggling with as we end the second decade of the 21st century: how to get better at solving complex problems, as individuals and as groups of people.”
Last year, we highlighted five books, but only one of those reached that high bar of appearing on five lists. That book was No Rules Rules by Netflix CEO Reed Hasting and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer. The closer look at the beliefs behind the media company’s unique management practices captured broad attention.
This summer, I looked back at the business best-of lists of prior years. I wondered how often there was broad consensus. Turns out the last two years have been the exception. Every other year, going back to 2016, and including this year, most best-of selections only appeared on three lists. In 2018, there were two only books: When by Dan Pink and New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. In 2017, six books each got three votes from the business year-end lists. You can see a bibliography of all the books at the end of this article¹.
I think this context is particularly important because there was only one book on this year’s list.
The Book of The Year
The books chosen by the listmakers this year had more variation than any of the last five years (over 100 titles across five lists), and only one book in 2021 got three votes. The book is The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations by Robert Livingston.
Published in February by Currency, Livingston says his book is “a road map and compass for our shared journey towards a more racially just and equitable destination.” Livingston’s approach is different from other recent bestsellers like Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me and Ibram Kendi’s Stamped From The Beginning. An additional reader’s note on the cover “A Science-Based Approach.” gives a clue.
Livingston says “racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.” Most dictionaries would provide a similar definition. The real conversation begins when we start to discuss how prevalent racism is in the world or whether we as individuals evaluate and treat others in a racist manner. Rather than memoir or sharing the stories of the lived experiences of individuals affected by racism, Livingston shares a vast array of psychological and sociological findings that show racism being anchored in biases and beliefs. The research shows both how pervasive and how difficult it can be to see those biases.
Take Black job candidates. Field research continues to show that Black applicants get fewer interview requests than identical White candidates. Sociologist Devah Pager reports that 34% of White applicants receive interview callbacks versus only 14% of Black applicants. Simply changing a first name on a resume (say from Emily to Lakisha) shifts perception and callback percentages. Economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan estimate the benefits of being White is equivalent to eight years of additional work experience. Pager also looked at the impact of of a prior criminal record to see how Black and White applicants fared in the job market. The most stark findings in Pager’s work is the fact that White felons get more callbacks for interviews than Black nonfelons (17% versus 14%). I would encourage you to stop and read that last sentence one more time and just take a minute to reflect on that.
We could look at the book selections for 2021 through a similar lens and gather more facts. Only eleven people of color appear as authors on the 102 books that were chosen this year². As a group that represents almost 40% of the U.S. population, books by BIPOC authors consist of 11% of the selections.
These are just facts—facts about the nature of the job market, facts about year-end publishing recognitions—based on race. Livingston says sharing facts and research and correcting cultural and historical representation is the first step to addressing racism, to look more deeply at how different racial groups are treated.
The next step is concern, in Livingston model. We have to ask ourselves if we care about the problem and the people it harms. And then are we going to change and correct the problems of racism as individuals and the organizations. In book publishing, this is starting to happen. There have been several executive hires in the last eighteen months including Dana Candy, the first Black person to lead a major publishing house. Last month, Penguin Random House released the results of their first diversity audit and said:
“Our Contributor demographics do not reflect U.S. reader demographics when it comes to race and ethnicity. Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous representation is low, while white representation is overindexed. Significant growth in the underrepresented contributor populations is required to accurately reflect U.S. demographics.”
Discussions about race are not easy, but Robert Livingston’s The Conversation provide a roadmap for you to explore your views on racism and continue challenge the organizations we work in to do better.
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Footnotes:
1 — Best-of Selections from prior years…
- 2016: Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez, Deep Work by Cal Newport, Small Data by Martin Lindstrom, and Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
- 2017: Hit Makers by Derek Thompson, Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, Janesville by Amy Goldstein, Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin, The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and Scale by Geoffrey West
- 2018: New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, and When by Daniel Pink
- 2019: Loonshots by Safi Bahcall, Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Godall, and Range by David Epstein
- 2020: No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, If Then by Jill Lepore, No Filter by Sarah Frier, Reimagining Capitalism in A World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson, and Uncharted by Margaret Heffernan
2 — I made determinations for the race of authors based on how they self-identified or through information that was available online. I fully understand that I may have both incorrectly identified the race of individuals or missed others in my attempt to identify the race of authors selected this year for the best business books of the year. I am open to correct on either count. Below is a list of books whose have at least one author who identifies as BIPOC.
- AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
- An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
- Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance by Erica Dhawan
- My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future by Indra Nooyi
- Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere by Tsedai Neeley
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine
- The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations by Robert Livingston
- The Wake-Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change by Michelle Mijung Kim
- The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black American — and How We Can Fix It by Dorothy A. Brown
- Transformation in Times of Crisis: Eight Principles for Creating Opportunities and Value in the Post-Pandemic World by Nitin Rakesh and Jerry Wind
- What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society by Minouche Shafik
