A Blackberry sign is seen in front of their offices on the day of their annual general meeting for shareholders in Waterloo, Canada June 23, 2015.© Mark Blinch / Reuters
A book revealing the inside story of BlackBerry's rise and fall by Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff has made the longlist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry is one of 15 books to crack the list, which is heavy with titles chronicling successes and struggles in the technology industry.
The Canadian bestseller explores in detail how Waterloo, Ont.-based entrepreneurs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis effectively created a new era of instant wireless communication, only to watch their dominance of the sector slip away from them even faster than they had built it.
Other longlisted books include Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk, a biography of the energetic founder of Tesla electric cars; Digital Gold, Nathaniel Popper's look at the advent of the digital currency Bitcoin; Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free on piracy's assault on the commercial music business; and Anne-Marie Slaughter's take on gender gap issues, Unfinished Business.
The award's judges, a panel that includes FT editor Lionel Barber, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and economist-author Dambisa Moyo, will choose up to six books for the shortlist. The winner of the £30,000 ($60,825 Canadian) prize is to be named on Nov. 17.
James Bradshaw