Sources
The books, articles, papers, and talks Management Craft draws on — each one traced back to its original.
Books
Accidental EmpiresBook · 1992Robert X. Cringely's 1992 book on the personal-computer industry. Chapter 12, 'On the Beach,' describes company growth through three waves — Commandos, Infantry, Police — the model Simon Wardley later credited as the direct source for his own Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner. Cringely's authority is that of a well-sourced industry reporter, not a credentialed scholar; his widely repeated claim to a Stanford doctorate was disproven in 1998.Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of PerformanceBook · 2010Groysberg's study of star Wall Street analysts who changed firms, showing that star performance is substantially firm-specific and typically declines after a move — performance does not travel intact.Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AIBook · 2024Mollick, a Wharton professor who researches how AI reshapes work, argues for an augment-don't-surrender posture — always invite AI to the table, but stay the human in the loop — that Management Craft draws on for using AI to build observing expertise without outsourcing the definition of greatness.Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?Book · 2005Tetlock's twenty-year forecasting study of expert political judgment, including the fox-hedgehog distinction, the inverse relationship between an expert's media fame and forecasting accuracy, and the finding that many experts underperformed simple benchmarks.Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday LifeBook · 1997Csikszentmihalyi's 1997 popularization of his flow-state research, extending 1990's Flow into everyday life and work. It's MC's source for the Flow Channel — the challenge-skill balance that predicts when work produces full engagement rather than anxiety or boredom.Flow: The Psychology of Optimal ExperienceBook · 1990Csikszentmihalyi's 1990 book introducing flow — the state of full absorption that arrives when challenge matches skill — built on decades of experience-sampling research at the University of Chicago. Its skill–challenge balance is the model behind the Flow Channel: the case for matching an assignment's difficulty to a report's current skill.High Output ManagementBook · 1983Grove's canonical text on management as a measurable, improvable craft, written by Intel's operating chief at the company's peak.Managing Humans: More Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering ManagerBook · 2021Michael Lopp's collected essays on the specific situations of engineering management, in the comic Rands voice, drawn from two decades running teams at Apple, Netscape, Slack, Pinterest, and other Silicon Valley operating companies.Mastering the VC GameBook · 2010Flybridge Capital co-founder and Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang's insider's guide to the venture game — the source of the Jungle, Dirt Road, Highway metaphor for startup stages.Mind Over MachineBook · 1986Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's case that human expertise is intuitive rather than rule-following — the book-length elaboration of the five-stage skill-acquisition model behind MC's Dreyfus Model. First published by Free Press in 1986; the revised 1988 paperback is the edition to cite.Nicomachean EthicsBook · 340 BCEAristotle's foundational treatise on virtue ethics, written around 340 BCE; Book II's doctrine of the mean — each virtue a balance between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency — is the direct ancestor of the over-doing/under-doing pattern used across Management Craft's competency levels.OdesBook · 23 BCEHorace's four-book collection of Latin lyric odes (23–13 BCE). Ode 2.10 coined the phrase aurea mediocritas — 'the golden mean' — the name behind MC's Golden Mean tool, though Aristotle originated the underlying idea in the Nicomachean Ethics.Peak: Secrets from the New Science of ExpertiseBook · 2016Ericsson and Pool distill three decades of Ericsson's deliberate-practice research into a popular account of what separates real expertise from naive experience — including the finding that skills decay without continued deliberate work — which Management Craft cites for why observing expertise must be practiced, not assumed to arrive with tenure.Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite JobsBook · 2015Rivera's study of hiring at elite professional-service firms, documenting how evaluators screen on institutional pedigree and cultural similarity, penalizing candidates with non-standard paths.Rethinking ExpertiseBook · 2007Collins and Evans propose a periodic table of expertises — the distinction between contributory expertise (can do the work) and interactional expertise (can talk the work fluently without doing it) — demonstrated by the imitation-game experiment where Collins, a sociologist, passed as a gravitational-wave physicist to real physicists in written Q&A; Management Craft cites it as the standing warning that fluent talk is not proof of expertise.Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company BuildingBook · 2023Johnson's operating manual for building and managing high-performance teams at scale, distilled from leadership roles at Google and Stripe.Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in BusinessBook · 2006Meyer's account of building Union Square Hospitality Group on 'enlightened hospitality' — staff cared for first, so they in turn care for guests, community, suppliers, and investors — drawn from the two decades since he opened Union Square Cafe in 1985. Read for how he built and sustained a service culture at scale, not just described one.Sources of Power: How People Make DecisionsBook · 1998Klein's book on naturalistic decision making — how experienced practitioners such as firefighters, nurses, and military commanders actually make decisions under pressure, including the recognition-primed decision model and what experts notice (and are surprised by) that novices miss.Superforecasting: The Art and Science of PredictionBook · 2015Tetlock and Gardner's account of the Good Judgment Project, profiling the traits of the best forecasters — actively open-minded, reflective, and quick to take responsibility for their misses.Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the WorldBook · 2022Economist Tyler Cowen and investor Daniel Gross's 2022 book on how to spot talent, drawn from their years vetting founders and grantees at Pioneer and Emergent Ventures. Its core claim: obsession with the craft and genuine enjoyment of hard work are stronger signals than credentials.The Effective ExecutiveBook · 1966Peter Drucker's guide to the five disciplines of executive effectiveness — managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strength, concentrating on priorities, and making effective decisions — from the management theorist credited with founding management as a discipline.The Hard Thing About Hard ThingsBook · 2014Horowitz's book on building and running a company through the decisions that have no good outcomes, drawn from his time running Loudcloud/Opsware.The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and HiringBook · 2019Ozzie Osman's 2019 Holloway guide, co-written with dozens of engineering leaders and recruiters, on building a technical interview process from scratch — candidate-company fit, IC leveling, rubric design, interviewer panels, and debrief sessions. MC's most operational reference for turning hiring theory into a repeatable process.The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social PsychologyBook · 1991Ross and Nisbett's synthesis of social psychology's central finding — situational forces shape behavior more than observers expect, and observers systematically over-attribute outcomes to disposition (Ross's 1977 fundamental attribution error) — the lens Management Craft uses for separating a candidate's own contribution from the rocketship they happened to ride.The Tao of CoachingBook · 1996Max Landsberg's 1996 book, written by a former McKinsey partner turned executive coach, that coined the Skill/Will matrix — the name and the 2x2 that Skill vs. Will still carries today for diagnosing whether an underperformer needs training or motivation.WHO: The A Method for HiringBook · 2008Smart and Street's synthesis of ghSMART's research — over 1,300 hours of interviews with more than twenty billionaires and dozens of CEOs, plus a University of Chicago statistical study matching 313 CEO assessments to financial outcomes — into the Scorecard framework (mission, outcomes, competencies) that shaped how a generation of founders learned to hire.
Articles
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VPArticle · 2015 The single best piece on what each management level actually requires: two-time SaaS CEO Dave Kellogg's ladder of accountability — managers are paid to execute the plan, directors to run their areas with limited oversight, VPs to get the right answer.ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the WebArticle · 2023 Chiang's New Yorker essay arguing a large language model is a lossy compression of its training corpus. Management Craft cites it for the consequence that a model's picture of 'great' is the compressed market average, never your company's localized standard.Founder Mode: A Liar's PerspectiveArticle · 2024 Graham's response to the Founder Mode discourse, arguing from her operating experience that the archetype papers over the actual management work founders have to do as their companies scale.Graham Duncan: Talent WhispererArticle · 2024 Colossus's 2024 profile of Graham Duncan — the source of the 'Talent Whisperer' epithet — covering his approach to assessing investors and operators, including looking for the joy a great performer takes in the work itself.Hiring for a new role/function? Do this.Article · 2025 Liz Wessel — First Round Capital partner and former WayUp CEO — on the practice she named the 'calibration call': a short call with two people who know the best performer in a role you haven't hired for before, run before you start interviewing.Hiring, Managing, Promoting, and Firing ExecutivesArticle · 2007 Andreessen's pmarca-blog guide to executive hiring and management, including the base-rate warning that an executive hire is at best a 50/50 proposition even when done well.How To Be SuccessfulArticle · 2019 Altman's essay distilling thirteen maxims for outlier success, including the evaluation counsel that you are 'mostly looking for rate of improvement' in people rather than experience or current accomplishment — slope over level.How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked WithArticle · 2007 Andreessen's pmarca-blog essay (June 6, 2007) on hiring, arguing for screening on drive, curiosity, and ethics rather than raw intelligence or experience, with traits that can be spotted early in a career.How to Make People DecisionsArticle · 1985 Drucker's July 1985 HBR piece on staffing decisions — executives' .333 batting average, the widow-maker job that defeats two proven performers in a row, and the discipline of matching assignments to people.How to organise your teamsArticle · 2023 Wardley's 2023 field guide to reorganizing a company around what he renamed Explorers, Villagers, and Town Planners — retiring the original 'Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners' terms for their colonialist overtones — a deliberately hard, multi-year restructuring he warns most companies shouldn't attempt.Managing OneselfArticle · 1999 Drucker's 1999 Harvard Business Review essay on self-knowledge as the foundation of effectiveness, identifying learning style (writing, talking, reading, doing) as a critical and often unexamined variable. The hbr.org page is the January 2005 Best-of-HBR reprint.Netflix Culture DeckArticle · 2009 Netflix's internal culture document, publicly posted by CEO Reed Hastings in 2009, delivers its ideas as noun-plus-behavioral-bullets — a format MC's own values pages draw on — built around two claims that reshaped how founders think about culture: a great workplace is stunning colleagues, and freedom is the product you offer responsible people.Performing a Project PremortemArticle · 2007 Klein's September 2007 Harvard Business Review piece introducing the premortem: before a project starts, assume it has failed and ask the team to generate the reasons why.Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners: How Innovation WorksArticle · 2018 Mansfield's concise explanation of Wardley's Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner model as a cycle for moving from invention to usable product to industrialized utility.Pioneers, Town Planners and those missing SettlersArticle · 2011 Wardley's early Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner note, later updated to credit Robert X. Cringely's Commandos, Infantry, Police model from Accidental Empires as the source.Startup States: Jungle, Dirt Road, HighwayArticle · 2022 Sparks's explanation of Bussgang's Jungle, Dirt Road, Highway metaphor, including the hiring and operating mistakes founders make when they confuse company stages.The 6 O'Clock ScholarArticle · 1984 Carol Krucoff's Washington Post profile of historian Daniel Boorstin (January 29, 1984) — the earliest verified print locus of Boorstin's line 'The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge,' widely misattributed to Stephen Hawking. An earlier variant appears in The Discoverers (1983); locus verified via Quote Investigator.The Hiring ProcessArticle · 2023 Andreessen Horowitz's step-by-step guide to running an executive hiring process, and where the MOC (Mission, Outcomes, Competencies) role-definition format comes from. The most detailed public walkthrough of the framework in practice, with a sample CFO MOC worth studying.The Playing FieldArticle · 2018 Duncan's 2018 essay mapping the five levels of the investing game — apprentice to steward — and what he looks for when assessing investors, including an internal locus of control. Duncan co-founded East Rock Capital and has spent his career picking the people who pick investments.What's Going On Here, With This Human?Article · 2021 Duncan's 2021 essay distilling twenty-five years of assessing people into a method for seeing candidates clearly. The source of his reference-call sample-size questions — how many people the reference has seen in the role, who the best was, and where the candidate sits on a 1-100 scale against that gold standard.
Papers
A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill AcquisitionPaper · 1980The Dreyfus brothers' original 1980 monograph, prepared for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, laying out the five-stage novice-to-expert model of skill acquisition. It's the root document behind their 1986 book Mind Over Machine, the source for MC's Dreyfus Model of how competency develops from rule-following to intuitive judgment.Advice taking and decision-making: An integrative literature review, and implications for the organizational sciencesPaper · 2006Bonaccio and Dalal's integrative review of the advice-taking literature in judgment and decision-making research, covering how decision-makers use, weigh, and discount advice — including egocentric discounting, the tendency to underweight others' advice relative to one's own opinion.Advice taking in decision making: Egocentric discounting and reputation formationPaper · 2000Yaniv and Kleinberger's experiments showing that decision makers systematically discount advice relative to their own opinion — egocentric discounting — weighting advisors' input at a fraction of their own judgment.Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual FrameworkPaper · 1962Engelbart's 1962 SRI report proposing that tools should augment human intellect rather than replace it — offered as a research hypothesis to be tested, not a finished result. The intellectual lineage behind treating management tools as amplifiers of human capability.Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to DisagreePaper · 2009Kahneman and Klein's adversarial-collaboration paper on when intuitive expert judgment can be trusted: only in environments of sufficient regularity, with adequate opportunity to learn them through feedback — the test to run before trusting anyone's gut, including your own.Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview QuestionsPaper · 2019Highhouse, Nye, and Zhang's 2019 study in Applied Psychology, across two samples of working adults, found that narcissism and sadism, not job-relevant judgment, predict which interviewers elect to ask brainteaser questions like "why are manhole covers round." For hiring managers: the trait these questions reveal reliably is the interviewer's own callousness, not the candidate's fit.Intuitive Evaluation of Likelihood Judgment Producers: Evidence for a Confidence HeuristicPaper · 2004Price and Stone's experiments on how evaluators judge advisors: given identical track records, people consistently prefer the more confident advisor — including the overconfident one — a bias Management Craft flags as a trap for anyone judging candidates or peers on stated conviction rather than proof.Kurt Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed LearningPaper · 1996Schein's adaptation of Kurt Lewin's 1940s unfreeze-change-refreeze model into a framework for managed learning — the version of Lewin's change theory managers actually use. MC's source for the move that makes behavior change stick: your motivation to change must outweigh the comfort of staying the same.Patterns of Mean-Level Change in Personality Traits Across the Life Course: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal StudiesPaper · 2006Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer's meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples showing personality traits shift in predictable directions with age — conscientiousness, drive, and responsibility all rise, especially in young adulthood. Grounds the case that someone can still grow into a role, not just be assessed as a fixed quantity today.Rethinking Management Education as Craft EducationPaper · 2026Two Copenhagen Business School scholars argue management should be understood as a technical craft, the family that includes surgery, engineering, and watchmaking, and propose four modes of teaching it that way: technical foundations, learning from masters, simulation, and the craft of research. A conceptual/argument paper, not an empirical study; in press at Business Horizons as of this writing.Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection for Restriction of RangePaper · 2022Sackett, Zhang, Berry, and Lievens' 2022 meta-analysis correcting a systematic statistical overcorrection in decades of personnel-selection research, re-ranking structured interviews (r = .42) above cognitive-ability tests (r = .31) as predictors of job performance. The revised numbers behind why MC treats structured interviews as the strongest lever in a hiring process, not cognitive testing.Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee SelectionPaper · 2008Highhouse's focal article on why practitioners persist in preferring intuitive, unstructured judgment in employee selection despite decades of evidence favoring structured methods, including the null benefit of interviewing experience for gut judgment.System 0: The Overlooked Explanation of Expert IntuitionPaper · 2014Stuart Dreyfus — co-creator of the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition — grounding expert intuition in the brain's procedural learning system, which he calls System 0. The neuroscience behind the model's top rungs: why experts act well without deliberating.The Rank-Order Consistency of Personality Traits From Childhood to Old Age: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal StudiesPaper · 2000Roberts and DelVecchio's meta-analysis of 152 longitudinal studies on personality rank-order stability, showing consistency is only moderate in childhood (~.31) and climbs to ~.74 by ages 50-70. The evidence that where someone ranks among peers is still unsettled while young — why scouting talented people early can catch value the market hasn't priced yet.The Role of Tutoring in Problem SolvingPaper · 1976Wood, Bruner, and Ross's 1976 paper coining 'scaffolding': a tutor reduces a task's complexity so a novice can succeed, then withdraws support as competence grows. MC borrows the term for how templates — job descriptions, frameworks, checklists — support a manager attempting something for the first time.The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research FindingsPaper · 1998Schmidt and Hunter's meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research, ranking predictors of job performance by validity — general mental ability at the top for decades. The estimates Sackett et al. (2022) later revised, demoting cognitive-ability tests below structured interviews.The Value of Hiring Through Employee ReferralsPaper · 2015Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman, and Housman's study of nine large firms comparing referred and non-referred hires, finding referred workers yield higher profits per worker — with hires referred by above-median-performing employees the most profitable.Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive SurrenderPaper · 2026Shaw and Nave's Wharton working paper coining 'cognitive surrender': across three experiments (N = 1,372), people who could consult an AI took its answer on a majority of trials, gaining accuracy when it was right and losing it when it was wrong. MC's shorthand for what happens whenever a manager hands off judgment to a template, job description, or model instead of doing the work themselves.Using advice from multiple sources to revise and improve judgmentsPaper · 2007Yaniv and Milyavsky's studies of judges revising estimates with advice from multiple advisors, showing accuracy gains that flatten quickly as the number of opinions grows and that judges egocentrically discount others' advice.
Talks
How to OperateTalk · 2014 Rabois's Stanford CS183B lecture on running a company day to day, synthesizing his operating work at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square into a practitioner manual for early-stage executives.Macintosh IntroductionTalk · 1984 Steve Jobs's introduction of the original Macintosh at Apple's January 24, 1984 shareholders meeting — the launch that put 'insanely great' into the vocabulary of product standards (on screen at the event; Jobs's canonical prose use is the February 1985 Playboy interview).
Podcasts
Danny Meyer on The Tim Ferriss Show (Episode 665)Podcast · 2023 Danny Meyer — founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack — interviewed by Tim Ferriss in April 2023. The episode where he lays out hiring '51 percenters' (weighting emotional skills at 51 percent over technical's 49) and the can/can't · will/won't matrix he ran across his restaurants.Tobi Lutke on The Knowledge ProjectPodcast · 2018 The Knowledge Project ep. 41 (September 18, 2018), where Lutke elaborated the trust battery concept — introduced in his 2016 NYT Corner Office interview — and described how Shopify uses it to think about interpersonal dynamics at scale.