The judges of the Financial Times/ Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award yesterday selected The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman as the winner of the inaugural £30,000 prize, an-nounced last night at a gala ceremony in London. One test of whether the panel has chosen well will be whether managers adopt the winning title as a useful guide to doing business in the modern world and whether it endures to become one of the great business books of the early 21st century.

As one of the judges Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor at Infosys Technologies, said when selecting the shortlist in September: "Will you remember [the finalists] three years on? Have they brought out some kind of discontinuity in how we think about the world? Is there something [in the book] that makes you do anything in a different way?" Here, Thomas Friedman and the authors of the five other shortlisted books lay out the lessons for executives contained in each title, and recommend an eclectic list of their own favourite business books.