Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, an exuberant account of the challenges and benefits of globalisation, has won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Judges of the £30,000 prize, meeting on Monday at the FT’s headquarters in London, decided that Friedman’s book – a best-seller worldwide – provided “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues” of any title published in English in the past year.

The annual award was launched earlier this year with the aim of picking out the year’s best books from among the hundreds published every year in the fields of business, finance, economics and management.

The other finalists were The Search, by John Battelle, the story of the rise of the internet search business Freakonomics, an exploration of everyday life through economic analysis, by Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner; Fast Second, by Constantinos Markides and the late Paul Geroski, which explains how companies can bypass innovation and still win; Pietra Rivoli’s examination of world markets, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy; and DisneyWar, the inside story of intrigue at the Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner, by James Stewart.

Each of the five other shortlisted authors will receive £5,000

Mr Friedman, who is a New York Times columnist and thrice winner of the has won the Pulitzer Prize, three times, said he was “thrilled and honoured” to be the award’s first recipient. Writing in Tuesday’s FT, he says the most important lesson managers should take from his book is to “think horizontally”.

“The world is moving from a place where value was created in vertical silos of command and control to a world where value is increasingly going to be created horizontally by how you connect and collaborate,” he writes.

Lionel Barber, FT editor, who chaired the judging panel, said Friedman was “a worthy winner” and also paid tribute to the other finalists.