Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles–And All of Us by Rana Foroohar | Currency
That the best book of 2019 came out of the Current Events and Public Affairs category should be no surprise. 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. 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.
Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry
Mark Fortier, President of Fortier Public Relations
Upon choosing Fortier for his eponymous award, Covert said, “Always impeccably prepared from the day I first met him well over twenty years ago when he was working in the offices of a New York City PR firm, Mark Fortier moved on to start his own company and built one of the premier public relations firms in our industry. His success stems from the human relationships and connections he forms and the hard work he puts into publicizing the best books in the genre year in and year out.”
Mark Fortier is the President of Fortier Public Relations, which he founded in 2007. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Fortier started his career in publishing with stints at George Braziller, Penguin, and Columbia University Press, before moving to Goldberg McDuffie where he worked for nine years. He has worked with almost every major publisher and many of the world’s best known CEOs, promoting books authored by 32 of the Thinkers50 list and nonprofit organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of America, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Fortier’s work has been recognized by Newsday, The New York Post, Publishers Weekly, Book Publishing Report, and PRWeek.
CATEGORY WINNER
Leadership & Strategy
It's How We Play the Game: Build a Business. Take a Stand. Make a Difference. by Ed Stack | Scribner
Ed Stack’s book is the literal application of Sinek’s theory. (#seetitle: It’s How We Play the Game.) Stack grew the company his entrepreneurial father started from a mere $300 from his mother’s cookie jar stash into a sports store behemoth that takes its civic duties as seriously as its business successes, focusing on supporting youth sports, especially in urban areas, to enrich young people’s lives, but also leveraging their market share to influence gun reform to save young people’s lives.
Leadership & Strategy | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Management & Workplace Culture
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff | W.W. Norton & Company
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff leads us toward a more satisfying and safe relationship with technology, markets, and culture—a cooperative one that celebrates humanity and encourages us to stay connected not to the internet, but to each other. Being human, Rushkoff believes, isn’t an illness to be eradicated, but a singular gift that should be fed rather than starved. The purview of Team Human is broader than the workplace, but it's lessons can and should be applied there.
Management & Workplace Culture | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Marketing & Sales
The Invisible Brand: Marketing in the Age of Automation, Big Data, and Machine Learning by William Ammerman | McGraw-Hill Education
The Invisible Brand is not only filled with helpful information to assist with companies’ marketing strategies, but is also a great primer about data, AI and how and why the world around us has changed so fast. With that change comes changes in the way we do things, like developing and consuming marketing messages. A guide to marketing for the modern business, it is also for anyone who wants to be aware of the invisible brands operating around us and how they can influence you in your daily life.
Marketing & Sales | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Creativity & Innovation
Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back Into Your Work and Life by Tania Katan | Currency
Creativity and innovation are highly sought after skills in all types of businesses, but do the people who possess those skills feel accepted for who they are in those sometimes conservative spaces? Tania Katan is a blazing sparkler of energy who exudes positivity and a desire to ease those fears of alienation. Katan is familiar with the desire to fit in, and she turns difficulties like her parents' divorce, breast cancer diagnosis, and coming out into catalysts that empowered her to embrace her creativity. The many stories and exercises detailed in Creative Trespassing will help you gain the confidence to embrace your creativity, and bring to work what your business didn’t even know it needed.
Creativity & Innovation | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Personal Development & Human Behavior
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell | Melville House
Artist and Stanford University professor Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing is a richly layered discussion of technological disruption, notions of productivity, and civic engagement. Life-changing and community-changing work requires deep, unbroken attention, and so we must develop a new relationship with the digital tools designed to continuously and systematically disrupt that focus. Our attention is a gift. Our attention is what knits us to those around us. Odell’s book is based on “a refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough,” and will help you pay attention to what really matters.
Personal Development & Human Behavior | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Current Events & Public Affairs
Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—and All of Us by Rana Foroohar | Currency
As global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times Rana Foroohar lays out in her new book, “the supposedly decentralized Internet economy has spawned a handful of ruthless oligopolies that have begun to use their power to undermine start-up growth, job creation, and labor markets.” But Foroohar doesn’t just point out the many transgressions coming out of Silicon Valley and the challenges they pose to us as a society, she also offers solutions, from a “national commission on the future of data and digital technology” to a digital New Deal to ensure employment and “remake the real economy for the digital age.”
Current Events & Public Affairs | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Narrative & Biography
The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society by Binyamin Appelbaum | Little, Brown and Company
Appelbaum’s lucid study is at once journalistic and narrative, deeply researched and richly detailed. He documents the transition from the classic New Deal conviction that the government has an essential role in investing in what makes citizens’ lives better to the full-throated rejection of non-military federal spending in favor of faith in unfettered markets. Appelbaum argues that in privileging shareholder capitalism, the cost is not only Gilded Age levels of income inequality, but the instability of liberal democracy itself.
Narrative & Biography | Runners Up
CATEGORY WINNER
Big Ideas & New Perspectives
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff | PublicAffairs
Drawing on the work of the best economists, social scientists, and journalists of the day as well as the likes of Thomas Paine, Hannah Arendt, and W.H. Auden, Shoshana Zuboff blends social science and theory, qualitative research and philosophy, reportage, history, literature, and personal essay to produce a compelling argument, some of the best writing of the year, and a call to action for collective effort against the encroaching tyranny of surveillance capitalism.