People
The operators, researchers, and writers behind the ideas — every one cited with their standing to speak.
Martha W. AlibaliResearcherResearcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; co-author of the 2001 expert-blind-spot paper.Sam AltmanOperatorCEO of OpenAI since 2019 and president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, where he says he observed thousands of founders firsthand. His essays on ambition and success counsel judging people by their rate of improvement, not their current level of experience or accomplishment.Marc AndreessenOperatorCo-created the Mosaic browser, co-founded Netscape and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and wrote the pmarca-blog guides to hiring and executives, but he was never the operating CEO of any of the companies he built, and his management writing is a founder's playbook, not research.AristotlePhilosopherGreek philosopher (384–322 BCE) whose Nicomachean Ethics is not a management text but the founding text of virtue ethics, still one of the three standing positions in moral philosophy today.Brian ArmstrongOperatorCo-founder and CEO of Coinbase, which he has run since 2012 and took public in 2021. He wrote up his own executive-hiring process in 2017, and its first step is to go talk to three great practitioners in the function before writing anything down.Lisa Feldman BarrettResearcherUniversity Distinguished Professor at Northeastern whose lab studies the brain, body, emotion, thought, and action. Her work tests what feelings can tell people about events.Ed BatistaExecutive CoachExecutive coach and lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He teaches self-management, leadership, and interpersonal skills.Roy F. BaumeisterResearcherEmeritus professor in the University of Queensland School of Psychology and coauthor of the 2001 review Bad Is Stronger Than Good. His research helps explain why failures can dominate judgment.Christopher M. BerryResearcherIndustrial-organizational psychologist and John F. Mee Chair of Management at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, researching the validity and fairness of pre-employment tests and the measurement of employee job performance; co-author of the 2022 reanalysis that revised the field's validity estimates for personnel selection.Iris BohnetResearcherAlbert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. She studies how the design of choices can reduce bias in organizations.Vanessa BohnsResearcherDepartment Chair and Braunstein Family Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell's ILR School; a social psychologist whose experiments find that requesters underestimate how often people will comply with a face-to-face request — and swing to overestimating compliance when the same request is made by email.Ellen BratslavskyResearcherSocial psychologist and coauthor of the 2001 review Bad Is Stronger Than Good. Her research helps explain why failures and complaints can dominate judgment.Alison Wood BrooksResearcherO'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where her research on the science of conversation has appeared in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Science.Jerome S. BrunerResearcherCognitive and developmental psychologist who taught at Harvard, Oxford, and NYU Law; author of The Process of Education (1960) and, with David Wood and Gail Ross, co-author of the 1976 paper that introduced the concept of instructional scaffolding.Jeffrey BussgangOperatorCo-founder and general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School (before that, an operator: a cofounder of Upromise and an executive team member at Open Market through its 1996 IPO). Author of Mastering the VC Game, which introduced the Jungle/Dirt Road/Highway metaphor for startup-stage maturity.Colin CamererResearcherBehavioural economist, at the University of Pennsylvania when he co-wrote the 1989 experiments naming the curse of knowledge; later Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.Diana ChapmanExecutive CoachCo-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership (2015). She turns leadership coaching into a set of named team practices.Harry CollinsResearcherEmeritus professor of sociology at Cardiff University; decades-long ethnographer of gravitational-wave physics who co-authored Rethinking Expertise, which warns that fluent talk about a domain is not proof of expertise in it.Tiphaine ColliotResearcherAt Rennes 2 University when she co-authored the 2018 IDEA paper on how incompletely students capture what they hear — on average, one third of a lesson's important ideas.James M. CookResearcherSociologist, at Duke University when he co-wrote "Birds of a Feather" with McPherson and Smith-Lovin; his work is on networks and political behaviour.Tyler CowenResearcherEconomist at George Mason University; co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, host of Conversations with Tyler, and co-author of Talent.Robert X. CringelyJournalistPen name Mark Stephens made famous as InfoWorld's gossip columnist (1987-95) and as author of Accidental Empires (1992), whose Commandos, Infantry, Police model of company growth is the direct, credited source for Simon Wardley's Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners. A technology journalist and industry observer, not a management researcher, and one whose claimed Stanford doctorate and professorship the university publicly contradicted in 1998.Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiResearcherHungarian-American psychologist who originated the theory of flow, the state of full absorption when a challenge matches a person's skill, while chairing psychology at the University of Chicago and later as the C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University.Anne-Laure Le CunffResearcherResearch associate at King's College London and founder of Ness Labs. Her work links neuroscience to learning, reflection, and work habits.Kristina Graci deLunaOperatorPartner on Andreessen Horowitz's People Practices team, focused on HR and recruiting; co-author of a16z's public hiring-process guide. Her authority is practitioner-grade, built running hiring and HR for a16z's portfolio companies, not from management research or company-building.Jerker DenrellResearcherProfessor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, working on what organisations wrongly learn from their own experience. His 2012 PNAS paper with Chengwei Liu showed that where extreme performance requires luck rather than skill, the very highest performers may not have the highest expected ability, so imitating the top of the distribution is a mistake.Jim DethmerExecutive CoachCofounder and coach at the Conscious Leadership Group and coauthor of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. He turns coaching ideas into named practices for leaders and teams.Hubert DreyfusPhilosopherA Harvard-trained Berkeley philosopher (1929–2017) and the leading American interpreter of Heidegger, whose 1965 RAND report and 1972 book What Computers Can't Do argued that human expertise is embodied skill rather than rule-following, a claim the AI establishment first ridiculed and later substantially conceded. With his younger brother Stuart, an operations researcher, he built that argument into the five-stage Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.Stuart DreyfusResearcherA mathematician, not a management scholar: professor emeritus of operations research at Berkeley who co-authored Applied Dynamic Programming, a foundational text of the field, with Richard Bellman at RAND. With his older brother Hubert, a philosopher, he built the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to argue about artificial intelligence, not to teach managers.Peter F. DruckerTheoristCelebrated by BusinessWeek as 'the man who invented management': author of The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive, and adviser to General Motors, Sears, IBM, and many other companies and nonprofits.Graham DuncanInvestorCo-founder and co-chief investment officer of East Rock Capital, a multi-family investment office that has spent two decades finding and seeding talented external investment managers rather than picking stocks itself. Harvard Business School published a 2024 case study on East Rock's talent-first approach; Duncan writes essays distilling his method for judging people into practical questions any manager can borrow.Douglas EngelbartResearcherElectrical engineer who founded and led SRI's Augmentation Research Center (1959–1977), where his team built the computer mouse and hypertext as pieces of a larger research program on augmenting human intellect. His 1962 report and 1968 'Mother of All Demos' argued tools should amplify human judgment, not replace it.EpictetusPhilosopherStoic philosopher whose teachings survive in the Discourses, Fragments, and Handbook. His main concerns included integrity, self-rule, and personal freedom.Anders EricssonResearcherPsychologist at Florida State University (1947–2020) who originated the concept of deliberate practice and led the study of expert performance; co-author of Peak, which brought deliberate practice to general readers.Robert EvansResearcherProfessor of Sociology at Cardiff University and co-founder, with Harry Collins, of the 'Third Wave of Science Studies' (the research programme behind Rethinking Expertise, 2007, and its periodic table of expertises for judging who counts as a knowledgeable authority).Catrin FinkenauerResearcherProfessor of Youth Studies at Utrecht University who studies close relationships. Her research helps explain trust and how people affect each other.Francis J. FlynnResearcherOrganisational behaviour researcher, at Columbia Business School when he co-wrote the studies showing people underestimate by as much as half how often others will say yes to a direct request.Camille FournierOperatorFormer CTO of Rent the Runway and Managing Director at Two Sigma; author of The Manager's Path, a widely-adopted handbook for engineering management transitions from tech lead through CTO.Elad GilInvestorInvestor who runs Gil & Co and author of *High Growth Handbook*, tactical advice for companies past product-market fit. He was a VP at Twitter (which bought his startup Mixer Labs), started Color Health, and holds a PhD from MIT.Andy GroveOperatorIntel's third employee and its CEO from 1987 to 1998, Grove drove the industry-defining shift from memory chips to microprocessors and wrote the canonical text on operating discipline, High Output Management.Boris GroysbergResearcherRichard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and author of Chasing Stars, a study of more than 1,000 star Wall Street analysts at 78 investment banks showing that star performance is substantially firm-specific and typically declines for years after a move to a new firm.Andy HertzfeldOperatorOriginal Macintosh system-software author who later cofounded Radius, General Magic, and Eazel. He created Folklore.org to collect stories about the Mac's creation.Pamela HindsResearcherRodney H. Adams Professor in Stanford's School of Engineering and professor of Management Science & Engineering, where she co-directs the Center on Work, Technology, and Organization. Her 1999 experiments found that among people who know a task, the more expert they are the worse they predict how long a novice will take.HoraceWriterRoman lyric poet (65–8 BCE) of the Augustan age who coined aurea mediocritas, 'the golden mean,' in Odes 2.10 (Aristotle originated the underlying doctrine).Ben HorowitzOperatorCo-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz; previously co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B in 2007. Author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things and of the foreword to the 2015 Vintage edition of Andy Grove's High Output Management.Keith HoustonWriterWriter of Shady Characters, including an article on Thomas Jefferson's ivory notebook. He also writes software for medical images.John E. HunterResearcherIndustrial-organizational psychologist who spent nearly all of his career in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University; co-developed psychometric meta-analysis with Frank L. Schmidt and co-authored their 1998 meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research.Meg JayWriterClinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Virginia who specialises in adult development, and author of *The Defining Decade*. Her chapter on weak ties covers the Ben Franklin effect and the well-formed ask.Steve JobsOperatorCo-founder of Apple and, after rejoining the company in 1997, its Chief Executive Officer. In 1984 he introduced the original Macintosh — the product of over two years of work by his team — at Apple's annual shareholders meeting.Leslie K. JohnResearcherJames E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, a behavioural scientist working on what makes people disclose or withhold information. She wrote an HBR article with Alison Wood Brooks.Charles JohnsonWriterThe author named on the 1724 A General History of the Pyrates; the writer's identity remains uncertain. The work presents itself as a history of pirates.Claire Hughes JohnsonOperatorRan Stripe's operations as COO for seven years, scaling it from 160 employees to over 7,000, and now serves the company as a corporate officer and advisor; before that, a decade as a Google vice president across AdWords online sales, Google Offers, and the self-driving car project. She wrote Scaling People, the operating playbook distilled from both records.Daniel KahnemanResearcherPsychologist and Nobel laureate in economics; co-creator with Amos Tversky of prospect theory and the heuristics-and-biases research program, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow.Dave KelloggInvestorTwo-time enterprise-software CEO (MarkLogic, Planful/Host Analytics) and former SVP Marketing at Business Objects whose Kellblog essays define what managers, directors, and VPs are actually paid to do.Kenneth A. KiewraResearcherEducational psychologist at the University of Nebraska; lead author of the 2018 IDEA paper showing students record only about a third of a lesson's important points in their notes.Gary KleinResearcherCognitive psychologist who ran his own applied-research firm for 27 years studying how experts like firefighters and fighter pilots actually decide under pressure; he originated the recognition-primed decision model and the premortem technique, and helped found the naturalistic decision making movement.Kaley KlempExecutive CoachExecutive coach and YPO-certified facilitator who coauthored The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. She teaches named practices for leaders and teams.Kenneth R. KoedingerResearcherLearning-sciences researcher at Carnegie Mellon University; co-author of the 2001 expert-blind-spot paper and a longtime builder of intelligent tutoring systems.Vanessa K. B. LakeResearcherPsychologist, in Columbia University's Department of Psychology when she co-wrote the 2008 studies finding that people underestimate by as much as 50% how likely others are to comply with a direct request for help.Max LandsbergExecutive CoachExecutive coach, former McKinsey & Company partner, and author of The Tao of Coaching (1996), which introduces the Skill/Will matrix.Richard P. LarrickResearcherBehavioural decision researcher at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business; co-author with Jack Soll of the averaging principle — combining a few judgments produces a more accurate estimate than the average individual judge alone.Jenna LeJeuneResearcherClinical psychologist and cofounder-president of Portland Psychotherapy who also works there as a research therapist. Her work helps people name values and act on them.Filip LievensResearcherLee Kong Chian Professor of Human Resources at Singapore Management University researching personnel selection and situational judgment tests; co-author of the 2022 Sackett et al. reanalysis that revised the field's estimates of which selection methods predict job performance.Chengwei LiuResearcherStrategy and behavioural-science researcher, at Warwick Business School when he co-wrote the 2012 PNAS paper with Jerker Denrell showing that extreme performance can signal luck rather than ability.George LoewensteinResearcherBehavioural economist, at the University of Chicago when he co-wrote the 1989 curse-of-knowledge experiments; by his own account, he helped found the field of behavioural economics.Michael LoppOperatorEngineering leader at Apple, Netscape, Borland, Palantir, Slack, and Pinterest who has written a two-decade chronicle of the craft of engineering management under the pen name Rands.Junrong LuResearcherEducational researcher at the University of Nebraska; co-author of the 2018 IDEA paper on student note-taking.Jason LuomaResearcherCEO and senior scientist at Portland Psychotherapy. His research covers shame, self-stigma, connection, ACT, and psychedelic-assisted therapy.Tobi LutkeOperatorCo-founder of Shopify and its Chief Executive Officer since 2008; known for the trust battery, a mental model he describes for how trust builds between people through repeated interactions.Steve MagnessExecutive CoachPerformance coach and author of Do Hard Things. He has worked with pro teams, executives, entrepreneurs, artists, and elite athletes.Timothy MansfieldOperatorCEO of the Interaction Consortium, a Sydney software and strategy consultancy, and a former academic researcher with a PhD in computer science from the University of Queensland; he wrote a 2018 explainer of Simon Wardley's Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners model — a short version of the cycle, not its origin.David McClellandResearcherHarvard psychologist (1917-1998) whose 1973 paper "Testing for Competence Rather Than for 'Intelligence'" argued that aptitude tests fail to predict job performance and that you should instead sample the behaviour the job requires. Later competency-modeling literature counts the paper as one of several parallel streams behind competency-based assessment, alongside assessment-center research, job analysis, and Gardner's multiple-intelligences work.Miller McPhersonResearcherProfessor Emeritus of Sociology at Duke University; lead author of the 2001 review "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks," on how strongly people's networks are made of people like themselves, and how little new information a homogeneous network can carry.Nancy McWilliamsResearcherPsychotherapist, Rutgers teacher, and former president of the American Psychological Association's Division 39. She helped write the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual.Danny MeyerOperatorFounder of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack, and author of Setting the Table, the canonical text on hospitality as an operating discipline.Ethan MollickResearcherEthan Mollick is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School and co-director of its Generative AI Labs, holding the endowed Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar chair. A former startup co-founder with an MIT Sloan PhD in management, he built an empirical research record in entrepreneurship years before turning the same method on generative AI in his bestseller Co-Intelligence.Mitchell J. NathanResearcherLearning-sciences researcher; at the University of Colorado when he co-wrote the 2001 paper naming the expert blind spot — advanced content knowledge that leads experts to assume things about learners in conflict with how learners actually perform.Gideon NaveResearcherCarlos and Rosa de la Cruz Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School; co-author, with Steven D. Shaw, of a 2026 SSRN working paper on how AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender.Richard E. NisbettResearcherSocial psychologist at the University of Michigan whose 1977 paper with Timothy Wilson showed people have poor introspective access to their own reasoning, and whose later research showed reasoning itself can be taught; co-author with Lee Ross of The Person and the Situation, the fundamental-attribution-error synthesis.Shane ParrishJournalistWriter of Farnam Street and host of the Knowledge Project podcast; New York Times bestselling author of Clear Thinking and The Great Mental Models.Paul C. PriceResearcherProfessor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, studying judgment and decision-making; with Eric Stone, showed that people prefer more confident advisors even when confidence doesn't track accuracy, the bias managers repeat when weighing advice from consultants, forecasters, and their own teams.Keith RaboisOperatorChief operating officer of Square, executive at PayPal and LinkedIn, co-founder of Opendoor, and the Khosla Ventures partner who led or co-led the first institutional rounds into DoorDash and Affirm.Lauren RiveraResearcherProfessor of management and corporate ethics at Northwestern's Kellogg School. Her fieldwork shows how firms use cultural fit when they judge merit.M. Mahdi RoghanizadResearcherBehavioural researcher, at the University of Waterloo when he co-wrote the 2017 study finding a request made face to face is far more likely to succeed than the same request by email.Gail RossResearcherDevelopmental psychologist who, as a Harvard graduate researcher, co-authored Wood, Bruner & Ross's 1976 paper naming instructional scaffolding. The rest of her long research career stayed in pediatric and clinical psychology, entirely outside management.Lee RossResearcherSocial psychologist at Stanford University; coined the term 'fundamental attribution error' in 1977 and co-authored The Person and the Situation, showing that observers systematically overweight disposition over situation when judging others' behavior, a core bias in performance judgment.Paul R. SackettResearcherIndustrial-organizational psychologist at the University of Minnesota whose 2022 reanalysis of the field's personnel-selection meta-analyses reshaped which hiring predictors (structured interviews, cognitive tests) actually hold up once range-restriction errors are fixed.Edgar ScheinResearcherOrganizational psychologist who taught at MIT Sloan for over six decades; author of Organizational Culture and Leadership and the 1996 paper reframing Kurt Lewin's change theory as a model of managed learning.Frank L. SchmidtResearcherIndustrial-organizational psychologist at the University of Iowa; co-author with John E. Hunter of the 85-year meta-analysis of selection methods that is the canonical reference for hiring predictor validity.Steven D. ShawResearcherPostdoctoral Researcher at the Wharton School; co-author, with Gideon Nave, of a 2026 SSRN working paper on how AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender.Ronald R. ShortTheoristCofounder of Learning in Action and author of Learning in Relationship. His work treats relationships as live settings for leadership development.Nate SilverOperatorFounder of FiveThirtyEight and author of On the Edge. The book draws on reporting, interviews, and his direct experience with risk.Akhilesh SinghResearcherResearcher at Lovely Professional University, Punjab; co-author of the 2025 Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine paper on the costs of non-probability sampling.Geoff SmartOperatorCo-author of WHO: The A Method for Hiring; Chairman of ghSMART, whose research (interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 60 CEOs, investors, and thought leaders) produced the Scorecard method.Lynn Smith-LovinResearcherSociologist of emotion, identity and social networks, at the University of Arizona when she co-wrote "Birds of a Feather" and later Robert L. Wilson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Duke.Jack B. SollResearcherDecision-sciences researcher, at INSEAD when he co-wrote the averaging-principle work with Richard Larrick; his research is on how people combine and misweight advice.Robert SoutheyWriterEnglish poet laureate remembered as the author of The Three Bears. His work also included prose and history.Andy SparksOperatorFounder of Management Craft and, since 2020, a full-time executive coach to founders and CEOs, more than 60 leaders and 1,800 hours of practice. He co-founded and ran Holloway and co-founded Mattermark as its COO, and writes here about the one-to-one-hundred transition he has now watched from both seats.Steven SpielbergOperatorFilm director interviewed by the Academy of Achievement about creative work and intuition. His account shows how one expert notices a quiet hunch.James SpradleyResearcherAnthropologist at Macalester College who wrote or edited twenty books on ethnography, including *The Ethnographic Interview* (1979), his handbook on interviewing people about a world you do not belong to. He died of leukemia in 1982.Randy StreetOperatorCo-author of WHO: The A Method for Hiring and senior advisor at ghSMART, the leadership advisory firm whose studied hiring decisions produced the scorecard method; its first Managing Partner, 2009-2021.Jeff StumpOperatorOperating partner leading the Talent Network team (Andreessen Horowitz's in-house executive-search practice); co-author, with Kristina Graci deLuna, of a16z's public hiring-process guide.Frederick Winslow TaylorTheoristMechanical engineer who rose from shop laborer to chief engineer at Midvale Steel, where his experiments from 1881 produced time study and the task idea. He later ran the famous pig-iron and metal-cutting studies at Bethlehem Steel, served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1906, and set out scientific management in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).Philip E. TetlockResearcherLeonore Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; ran the twenty-year Expert Political Judgment study showing most pundits' forecasts barely beat chance, then was Principal Investigator of the Good Judgment Project, which identified what actually makes some forecasters reliably better.Deepanjali TripathyResearcherResearcher at Vedic Degree College, Odisha; co-author of the 2025 Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine paper on consecutive and snowball sampling.Jyoti Shankar TripathyResearcherMental-health researcher at Lovely Professional University, Punjab; lead author of the 2025 critique of consecutive and snowball sampling in Indian mental-health research.Claire VoOperatorProduct operator who launched ChatPRD in 2023 and now works on it full time. Her writing gives a product leader's view of working norms and preferences.Kathleen D. VohsResearcherDistinguished McKnight University Professor and Land O'Lakes Professor in Marketing at Minnesota's Carlson School. She studies psychology in markets and workplaces.Simon WardleyTheoristFormer CEO of Fotango, now a researcher at Leading Edge Forum/DXC; created Wardley Mapping (2005) and renamed Robert Cringely's Commandos, Infantry, Police model as the Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner framework for organizing teams as activities evolve from novel to commoditized.Martin WeberResearcherEconomist at the Institut fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften; co-author of the 1989 experiments showing better-informed people cannot ignore what they know when predicting what others will do.Liz WesselOperatorCo-founder and former CEO of WayUp, the early-career hiring platform, from 2014 to its 2021 merger with Yello; now a partner at First Round Capital, where she popularized the 'calibration call' hiring technique.Timothy D. WilsonResearcherSherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Virginia. His research tests how well people can explain their own judgments.Brie WolfsonOperatorCreator of the Kool-Aid Factory, a project that helps organizations treat culture with the same care they give products. Her work offers practical ways to write and shape company norms.David WoodResearcherDevelopmental psychologist at the University of Nottingham whose 1976 paper with Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross introduced instructional scaffolding — support calibrated to the learner's current competence, then progressively withdrawn.Charlene ZhangResearcherIndustrial-organizational psychologist and research scientist at Amazon; Paul Sackett's PhD advisee at the University of Minnesota; co-author of the 2022 reanalysis that revised the field's validity estimates for personnel-selection predictors.