ON September 16, 2008, the day after Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, judges of the Business Book of the Year Award gathered at the Financial Times in London to select six finalists for that year’s prize.

One judge, Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, at that time the award’s sponsor, was embroiled in the aftermath of the Lehman collapse and the bailout of AIG. He understandably decided he had more urgent priorities in New York that day.

The world was moving into the most perilous phase of the deepest financial and economic crisis for generations. But of the longlist of 15 books, only two directly addressed the market turmoil — Charles Morris’s The Trillion Dollar Meltdown and the eventual winner, When Markets Collide, by Mohamed El-Erian.

In the week in which the FT and McKinsey, the award’s current backer, named Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the 2014 business book of the year, it is instructive to look back at the 152 ‘business books of the decade’ — the titles long listed for the award since 2005 — as a guide to a turbulent 10-year period.

The 2014 FT and McKinsey business book prize goes to Thomas Piketty

As a tool for predicting the 2008 crisis, the longlist was not that useful. Publishing lead times are notoriously long and most commentators failed to predict the strength of the financial shock. Mr Morris had to update his title for later editions to The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, and it took until the end of 2009 to bring Andrew Ross Sorkin’s anatomy of the crisis, Too Big to Fail, to publication.

Shriti Vadera, former UK government minister, adviser and company director, who has been an award judge since 2010, says she has been struck how books about the crisis ‘started with a narrative of the story’ but have since moved on to address the underlying reasons and potential solutions.

But while it has got harder for authors to find new and original facts about the crisis after 2008, thoughtful analyses of why the economic and financial system went wrong — and what to do next — continue to be judged ‘compelling and enjoyable’ enough to make the final.

For instance, Raghuram Rajan, now head of the Reserve Bank of India, won the award in 2010 with Fault Lines, which challenged the complacency of policy makers in the developed world as they tried to repair the cracks in the global economy.

House of Debt by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi was a finalist this year. According to the FT review by Lawrence Summers, former US Treasury secretary — the book ‘persuasively demonstrates’ the inadequacy of conventional interpretations of the events of 2008-10 as a problem caused by failing banks, rather than overly indebted households. By contrast, Mr Summers pointed out, the narratives outlined by leading actors in the crisis such as his successor Hank Paulson, read like”generals’ war memoirs”.

The FT’s choice of longlisted books tells us four main things about how business, and business books, have evolved since 2005, when Tom Friedman’s paean to globalisation The World is Flat was the inaugural winner. (I have been involved in selecting the longlist for the judges since the award was launched.)

First, that in times of trouble books that look back can provide as much, if not more, insight as those that try to an-alyse the present or predict the future.

Of the 152 longlisted books, 21 are histories or biographies. Eleven of those books have made it to the final, including two winners: Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed’s majestic history of the blunders of Depression-era central bankers, in 2009, and The Last Tycoons, William Cohan’s detailed chronicle of the development of Lazard Frères, the bank, in 2007. Piketty’s Capital, with its sweeping three-century view of wealth and inequality, could even count as a third winner from the history category.

Second, that however hard executives may search for formulas to help them run their companies better, truly original and readable books on leadership and management are rare.

Of the hundreds submitted over 10 years, fewer than 30 books that fall into that category have made the longlist, eight have reached the final and none has so far won. Yet when the award was launched — with a broad remit to identify titles that offered the best insights into modern business issues, ‘including management, finance and economics’ — this was the category that I expected to dominate the award.

Third, that whatever the challenge to economic orthodoxy posed by most analysts’ inability to spot the crisis coming, books by economists and about economics continue to push their way to top of the list.

Finally, that the appetite for business books remains strong, even as the form of the book itself has changed, with ebooks becoming the medium in which many judges prefer to receive the longlisted titles they read each summer.

Technology and innovation (a constant sub-theme of the books featured over the past decade) have changed the landscape. It seemed appropriate that Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, about the way Amazon has harnessed technology to challenge traditional retailing and publishing, won last year.

One strong objective of the book award was to identify winners whose insights would endure. Have the judges found any ‘classic’ business books? Lady Vadera suggests it may be ‘too early to tell’. But the winners have proved pretty durable so far.

As for the next 10 years, the likelihood is the award will see more entries from emerging market authors, and from women, breaking into what has seemed a mostly male preserve.

Of the 178 authors and co-authors who have written books that made the longlist, only 23 were women (including Esther Duflo, who, with Abhijit Banerjee, wrote 2011’s winner, Poor Economics). The strike rate is low — but it roughly matches the proportion of female to male authors among more than 2,000 entries for the award since 2005. The balance is shifting, though. Forty per cent of entrants — and all three finalists — for the new Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under 35, launched by the FT and McKinsey this year, were women.

The winning proposal, by Saadia Zahidi, is for a book called Womenomics in the Muslim World — about the vast and largely untapped potential of Muslim women. If she carries it through to publication, it should be a future contender for the book award itself before another decade is up.

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, November 17th, 2014