Don't Be Evil: The 2019 Porchlight Business Book of the Year

On Thursday of last week, we were in New York City to tell our friends in the publishing industry that we had chosen Rana Foroohar's Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—and All of Us as the 2019 Porchlight Business Book of the Year.

As our Owner, President & CEO Rebecca Schwartz  told the crowd assembled: “For many years, the mantra echoing from Silicon Valley has been one of disruption. And disrupt they have, as Rana Foroohar’s Don’t Be Evil well explores. With some of the finest business reporting and writing of the year, this year’s Porchlight Business Book Award winner thoroughly documents the results of that disruption, making it essential reading for those who wish to understand both the daily news and its broader implications.”

There are many important and exigent discussions we need to have in the business world and as a society—about the health of individuals, organizations, and our overall economy, about the rise of economic inequality and decline in innovation, about the credibility of the information we receive and the durability of our democratic institutions—and all of them are tied in a big way to the rise of Big Tech. There are many books that covered these developments this year, but Rana Foroohar’s examination of the industry and its effects on our world is the most well rounded, all-encompassing, and even handed of them, which is why we’ve named it the Porchlight Business Book of the Year.

This week, we'd like to spread the word (as in, the actual words in the book) a bit further by offering 20 copies to our readers. We hope that, if you win, you'll pass the book along to others when you're finished. It is one we believe in, whose reporting and suggested solutions we believe need to be spread. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rana Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor for the Financial Times and CNN’s global economic analyst. Her previous book, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street, was shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award in 2016. For 13 years, she was an economic and foreign affairs editor and a foreign correspondent at Newsweek. During that time, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. After this, Foroohar worked at Time for six years as an assistant managing editor and economic columnist. She has earned awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs and the East West Center. Foroohar is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of Bernard College, Columbia University, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The books for this giveaway are being offered by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Currency is an exciting new imprint dedicated to publishing thought leaders across a range of creative disciplines to help us navigate and succeed in an uncertain and rapidly evolving world. With a primary focus on business, innovation, entrepreneurship, finance, economics, organizational & societal transformation, it provides a platform for relevant, inspiring voices who challenge established boundaries and orthodoxies, encourage conversation, and offer new perspectives on building lives with meaning and purpose.