By Amit Roy
ORGANISERS of the Bracken Bower Prize, who are looking for business book proposals from people under 35, are convinced there is plenty of writing talent among Eastern Eye readers.
Judges are looking for a proposal for a book “that aims to provide a compelling and enjoyable insight into future trends in business, economics, finance or management”.
And the £15,000 award “will go to the best proposal for a business book about the challenges and opportunities of growth, by an author or authors under 35”.
“It aims to encourage a new generation of business writers,” the judges say.
Those who want to submit proposals this year should hurry - the deadline is September 30, 5pm, BST.
The prize is named after Brendan Bracken, chairman of the Financial Times (1945-1958), and Marvin Bower, managing director of McKinsey (1950- 1967), and the competition is open to anyone who is not older than 35 on November 30, 2017.
Those who apply “are asked to submit an essay or article of no more than 5,000 words that conveys the argument, scope and style of a proposed full-length business book and include a description of its structure”.
There is clearly a conviction that the Asian community, which is served by Eastern Eye’s carefully researched Asian Rich List and the GG2 Power List, is teeming with more good ideas than in the rest of the population.
Indeed, three years ago, the winner of the inaugural Bracken Bower Prize was Saadia Zahidi, a Pakistani woman, whose proposal was titled “Womenomics in the Muslim World”.
Originally from Islamabad, she grew up partly in Britain and studied economics at Smith College, a women’s establishment in Massachusetts. She worked as a senior director at the World Economic Forum in Geneva.
Her parents believed in the transformative power of education for their two children, both daughters. Zahidi said, “I come from a very normal, lower middle class family, where no girl ever left the country. I got scholarships to study abroad.”
Her book, Fifty Million Rising, about the new generation of Muslim women entering the workforce, will be published this year.
Christopher Clearfield and András Tilcsik, whose proposal won in 2015, expect their book Meltdown, about how to prevent corporate crises becoming catastrophes, to appear in 2018.
In 2016, the award was won by Nora Rosendahl, for her proposal “Mental Meltdown”, about the heavy pressure faced by working millennials.
“The reach, the contacts and the push to write . . . have been immensely valuable,” said Rosendahl, who admitted she would not have started writing had it not been for the incentive offered by the prize.
In her proposal, she wrote: “The financial meltdown has caught all the media attention. Yet, an invisible and far more dangerous meltdown is happening in the shadows - a mental meltdown. We can now see the early symptoms: increasing rates of burnout, exhaustion and stress-related diseases. But the worst is yet to come, and the millennial generation is at greatest risk.
“When we look at the statistics, we can only conclude that our workforce is slowly deteriorating from the inside.
“An estimated one in four working-age women and men in the developed world are exhausted or burnt out. Depression will be the leading cause of disease globally by 2030, according to the World Health Organisation. In the UK, stress has already emerged as the top cause of illness.
“This may sound like a topic for a mental health seminar, but the business world should take note.
“What makes mental meltdown such a dangerous and costly enemy is that it has many consequences. The Benson-Henry Institute estimates that 60 to 90 per cent of doctor visits are to treat stress-related conditions. Studies show that US employers already spend 200 to 300 per cent more on indirect costs of healthcare - in the form of sick days, absenteeism, and lower productivity - than they do on actual healthcare payments. In Germany work days lost to psychological illness have gone up over 80 per cent in 15 years, and it is estimated that burnout is costing the country up to €10 billion annually.
“Nothing is more expensive than sending a good worker into retirement in their mid-forties because they are burnt out.
“Fundamentally, how our society speaks about career success has given workaholism elite status. Digital devices keep us ‘always on’, adding to the mental load even when we are off work. The start-up boom is creating heroic stories of overcommitted entrepreneurs for the rest of us to admire.
“In short, the output of a whole generation is at risk, and we are celebrating the disease.
“In the workplace, the future reads like a recipe for added mental load. Artificial intelligence will threaten tens of millions of knowledge jobs, effectively pushing out comfortable routine tasks and increasing the need for high-quality thinking. Careers are becoming more fragmented: freelance and project work is on the rise; and those lucky enough to hold down a steady job face pressure to succeed and move on to the next role faster.”
Clearfield, the winner from 2015, is one of the judges this year. The others are: Jorma Ollila, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell and Nokia; Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, London Business School; and Tina Bennett, a literary agent with WME in New York.
Up to three finalists will be invited to New York on November 6, where the prize will be awarded at a dinner that will also honour the winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
The shortlist, whittled down from a long list of 17, was announced last week at a lunch at Bafta and included: The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Maths Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History, by David Enrich; Janesville: An American Story, by Amy Goldstein; Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought, by Andrew W Lo; The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, by Brian Merchant; Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen Pao; and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel.
Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times and one of the judges, said: “After an exceptionally robust debate on a wide ranging long list, we have chosen six titles on topics that range from the making of the iPhone to the evolution of financial markets. These books offer a compelling insight into today's business trends.”
The judges believe that Britain’s Asian community can come up with even more exciting ideas.
It is remarkable, noted one, that no one has so far written about how the Ugandan Asians, who arrived as a refugees in 1972, have completely transformed the economic landscape in Britain.
