KEY POINTS:
From the memoir of the newly loquacious Alan Greenspan to a workplace guide with an unspeakable word in the title, books about business generated their share of discussion in 2007.
In The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, former Fed chairman Greenspan caused some political aftershocks by writing that the Iraq war was all about oil and that President George W. Bush had abandoned fiscal discipline.
Of course, controversy makes money as well as headlines, and the book has been a bestseller since its release in September.
But £30,000 ($80,400) in prizemoney slipped away when Turbulence missed out on the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.
Instead, the judges chose The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co after a tough debate, the Financial Times said.
They finally concluded that author William Cohan had provided "the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues".
While Lazard had cultivated an image of "great men" providing sage advice to movers and shakers around the globe, Cohan - a former banker there - revealed infighting, back-stabbing and greed no different from the rest of Wall Street.
Needless to say, the book had the Street buzzing when it came out in April. It also incurred the wrath of Lazard, which called the account "substantially inaccurate" and Cohan a "junior banker" who hadn't worked there in more than 10 years.
Meanwhile, another former junior banker, Dana Vachon, became what The Huffington Post blog called publishing's golden boy of the moment last spring after he fictionalised and satirised his short career at JPMorgan Chase & Co in Mergers and Acquisitions.
The highly touted book brought Vachon a US$650,000 ($859,000) advance and a movie deal, but didn't make the bestseller lists.
One notable book that did was The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't by Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton.
While there's no shortage of advice on how to cope with office bullies, Sutton advises against even tolerating them. He suggests companies "view acting like an asshole as a communicable disease" and to adopt a "no-jerks" rule not only for their own staffs, but also for clients and customers.
The book won the publishing industry's Quill Award in the business category.
The recipient of another prize debunked a key part of the very category in which it won. The Halo Effect ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers was named business book of the year by the getAbstract awards committee at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, found more than a couple of delusions in management bibles like Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence.
His conclusion was there's no magic secret to success.
- REUTERS
