Sources
The books, articles, papers, and talks Management Craft draws on — each one traced back to its original.
Books
A General History of the PyratesBook · 1724The 1724 pirate history published as Captain Charles Johnson's: lives of pirate captains and accounts of crew rules, votes, and shared gains.Accidental EmpiresBook · 1992Robert X. Cringely's 1992 book on the personal-computer industry. Its account of company growth through three waves — Commandos, Infantry, Police — is 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 · 2024Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at Wharton specializing in entrepreneurship and innovation, argues for an augment-don't-surrender posture — always invite AI to the table, but be the human in the loop.Discourses, Fragments, HandbookBook · 2014Epictetus on what is within our power: judgment, choice, and action. Robin Hard's translation brings together the Discourses, Fragments, and Handbook.Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real ToughnessBook · 2022Steve Magness's book on resilience and toughness: facing stress with care, choice, and flexibility rather than rigid persistence.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 Basic Books book on the psychology of engagement in everyday life and work. It sets out 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. It names that balance the flow channel: pushed out by boredom or anxiety, a person gets back in, but at a higher level of complexity.High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 PeopleBook · 2018 Elad Gil's operational manual for companies past product-market fit, paired with long-form interviews with Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Claire Hughes Johnson and Keith Rabois.High Output ManagementBook · 1983Grove's canonical text on management as a measurable, improvable craft, written by Intel's operating chief.How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the BrainBook · 2018Lisa Feldman Barrett's book on the theory of constructed emotion: how past experience and signals from the body help the brain make emotions.Learning in Relationship: Foundation for Personal and Professional SuccessBook · 1998Ronald Short's book on learning through workplace relationships: testing assumptions, discussing conflict, and changing how you act.Managing Humans: More Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering ManagerBook · 2021Michael Lopp's stories of engineering management, narrated by Rands — the semi-fictional guide he blogs under — the stories fictional, sometimes set in a company he actually worked for, each built to explain one leadership insight. Lopp has spent more than 25 years in software development, at companies including Apple, Slack, Netscape, Symantec, Borland, Palantir, and Pinterest.Mastering the VC GameBook · 2010Flybridge Capital co-founder and Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang's insider's guide to financing and company-building — what a VC needs to say yes, and what a term sheet's economics and control provisions actually decide. It also lays out the jungle, dirt road, and highway metaphor for the phases of a start-up.Mind Over MachineBook · 1986Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's book arguing that intuition, not rule-following, is what skill acquisition finally produces — past the competent stage, an expert is not following rules at all. It lays out the five stages of skill acquisition: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert.Nicomachean EthicsBookAristotle's treatise on virtue ethics. Its doctrine of the mean holds that every virtue is a state lying in the mean between an excess and a defect, both of which belong to vice.OdesBook · 23 BCEHorace's Latin lyric odes. Ode 2.10 coined the phrase aurea mediocritas — 'the golden mean' — though Aristotle originated the underlying idea in the Nicomachean Ethics.On the Edge: The Art of Risking EverythingBook · 2025Nate Silver's book on risk-taking and expected value, from poker to venture capital, through the cultures he calls the River and the Village.Peak: Secrets from the New Science of ExpertiseBook · 2016Ericsson and Pool distill more than thirty years of Ericsson's research on expert performers into an account of what separates purposeful practice from naive practice — doing a thing repeatedly and expecting the repetition alone to improve you.Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite JobsBook · 2015Rivera's study of hiring at elite professional-service firms — investment banking, consulting, and law — built from 120 interviews and nine months inside one firm's recruiting department. Evaluators screen on school prestige and on cultural similarity to themselves, a pair of filters that penalizes students who spent their time on academics or paid work rather than on extracurriculars.Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical ProcessBook · 2011Nancy McWilliams's clinical book on personality structure: how levels of functioning and character types inform diagnosis and treatment.Rethinking ExpertiseBook · 2007Collins and Evans map expert judgment onto a periodic table of expertises, separating contributory expertise — the ability to do the work — from interactional expertise, mastery of a specialist domain's language without the practical competence to do it.Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company BuildingBook · 2022Claire Hughes Johnson's guide to managing well while you build a company — tools for putting solid company structures in place and for navigating all kinds of management situations. Johnson led business teams at Google for ten years and was Stripe's chief operating officer from 2014 to 2021.Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in BusinessBook · 2006Meyer's account of the priority order he calls 'enlightened hospitality' — his own employees placed ahead of guests, then community, suppliers, and investors — drawn from the business he started with Union Square Cafe in 1985 and built into Union Square Hospitality Group, which he became CEO of in 2003.Sources of Power: How People Make DecisionsBook · 1998Klein's book on naturalistic decision making — how experienced firefighters, nurses, pilots, and military leaders make decisions in the field, where time pressure, high stakes, and inadequate information are the defining conditions. It introduces the recognition-primed decision model, which Klein's team named and developed out of their firefighter study: experts don't compare options, they recognize the situation and take the first workable response.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 thoughtful updaters who change their minds when the facts do.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: an obsessive drive to keep practicing and improving at the craft is a stronger signal than credentials.The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable SuccessBook · 2015Dethmer, Chapman, and Klemp's framework of fifteen paired commitments distinguishing leading from above the line versus below the line.The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them NowBook · 2021Clinical psychologist Meg Jay's book on the twenties, first published in 2012 and updated in 2021, whose "Weak Ties" chapter draws on Granovetter's research to show how to get a stranger to help you.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 Ethnographic InterviewBook · 1979James Spradley's 1979 book on interviewing an insider about a world you do not belong to, built from his own fieldwork with jailed tramps, cocktail waitresses at Brady's Bar, and Kwakiutl salmon fishermen. Its taxonomy of descriptive questions runs grand tour, mini-tour, example, experience and native-language questions.The Hard Thing About Hard ThingsBook · 2014Horowitz's book on running a company through decisions where there are no good moves, drawn from his years running Loudcloud and its successor Opsware.The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and HiringBook · 2019Ozzie Osman's 2019 Holloway guide, co-written with input from dozens of hiring managers and other experts, on building a technical interview process from scratch — candidate-company fit, IC leveling, rubric design, interviewer panels, and debrief sessions.The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social PsychologyBook · 1991Ross and Nisbett synthesize experimental social psychology around one finding: situations shape behavior more powerfully than scientists or laypeople expect, and people keep explaining behavior by personality instead — what the book calls the fundamental attribution error, crediting Ross's 1977 paper.The Principles of Scientific ManagementBook · 1911Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 monograph founding scientific management — the argument that every element of a workman's job can be studied, measured, and redesigned by the management, replacing rule-of-thumb methods and 'soldiering' with a science of work. Its four principles and its worked examples (pig-iron handling, shoveling, bricklaying) made it the first named system of management and the text the rest of the field grew up answering.The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least WasteBook · 1914Lillian Moller Gilbreth's 1914 study of the mind at work under scientific management — the first book to treat management itself as a subject for psychology, and the doctoral work that helped establish the field. It runs the psychology of the worker through the elements a manager controls — individuality, functionalization, measurement, standardization, records, teaching, incentives, and welfare — arguing that the human factor is what decides whether a system of least waste actually works.The Tao of CoachingBook · 1996Max Landsberg's 1996 book, written by a former McKinsey partner turned executive coach, introducing the Skill/Will matrix — the 2x2 for diagnosing whether an underperformer needs training or motivation.Thinking, Fast and SlowBook · 2011Daniel Kahneman's book on System 1 and System 2: fast intuition, slow thought, and the biases that shape decisions.Values in Therapy: A Clinician's Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful LifeBook · 2019Jenna LeJeune and Jason Luoma's book on values in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): choosing a direction in life and putting it into action.What Works: Gender Equality by DesignBook · 2018Iris Bohnet's book on gender equality through behavioral design: changing interviews, information, and accountability to make choices fairer.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).
Articles
calibre | caliber, n. — etymologyArticle The Oxford English Dictionary's etymology for *calibre | caliber*, which records the word as a borrowing from French whose French, Italian, and Spanish forms are of uncertain origin, and reports a suggested source in the Arabic *qālib*, a mould for casting metal, or some cognate derivative of *qalaba*, to turn.Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VPArticle · 2015 Dave Kellogg's ladder of accountability across three management levels: managers are paid to drive results with support, directors to drive results with little or no supervision, and VPs to make the plan and get the right answer.ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the WebArticle · 2023 Ted Chiang's New Yorker essay arguing that a large language model is a lossy text-compression of the web: it stores statistical regularities and reconstructs missing text by interpolation. Its hallucinations are compression artifacts — plausible enough that catching them means comparing against the originals.Graham Duncan: Talent WhispererArticle · 2024 Colossus's 2024 profile of Graham Duncan — titled for the 'Talent Whisperer' epithet — on his approach to assessing talent through interviews and references. It includes his look for the joy a great performer takes in the work itself.Hiring for a New Role/Function for Your First Time? Do This First.Article · 2026 Wessel's February 2026 X Article, the fullest statement of her 'calibration call' practice: before writing a job description or engaging a recruiter, find two or three people who are exceptional at the role and spend thirty minutes each learning how they actually work.Hiring for a new role/function? Do this.Article · 2025 Liz Wessel — a First Round Capital partner and former WayUp CEO — on running short 20-minute 'calibration' calls with two people who know the best performer in a role you're hiring for the first time. She runs them before interviewing begins, to see what 'great' looks like.Hiring, Managing, Promoting, and Firing ExecutivesArticle · 2007 Andreessen's blog guide of August 28, 2007 to hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives, including the warning that even a well-run executive hire is at best a 50/50 proposition.House Cats and Street CatsArticle · 2025 Iz Shalom's 2025 essay on what a decade in big tech left him unprepared for as a founder: the 'house cat,' trained to manage perception and stay in his lane, against the 'street cat' with 'a healthy disregard for what's considered reasonable' whose only concern is the survival of the business.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 Foster Psychological Safety with a Personal User ManualArticle · 2019 Anne-Laure Le Cunff's article on creating a personal user manual for work: six prompts to explain your work style, communication, and feedback needs.How to HireArticle · 2013 Sam Altman's essay of hiring advice for founders, urging you to learn a role yourself before you hire for it: "If you don't understand it, it's very hard to get the right person."How to Hire ExecutivesArticle · 2017 Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong's 2017 write-up of the seven-step process he uses to hire executives, which he says takes three to six months end to end.How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked WithArticle · 2007 Andreessen's blog essay of June 6, 2007 on hiring, arguing that raw intelligence is overrated and that candidates should be screened instead on drive, curiosity, and ethics.How to Make People DecisionsArticle · 1985 Drucker's July 1985 Harvard Business Review piece on staffing decisions — executives bat no better than .333, and a 'widow-maker' job can defeat two proven performers in a row. His discipline: think through the assignment first, because each one demands a different kind of person.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 arguing that lasting effectiveness comes only from self-knowledge — knowing your strengths, how you perform, and your values, and from those deciding where you belong. It presses two questions most people never examine: whether you are a reader or a listener, and how you learn — by writing, by doing, or by hearing yourself talk.Miscellany № 83: Thomas Jefferson's Ivory PolyptychArticle · 2017 Keith Houston's article on Thomas Jefferson's ivory polyptych, a notebook for weather and seasonal observations, and the tradeoffs of writing tools.Netflix Culture DeckArticle · 2009 Netflix's culture document, posted publicly by Reed Hastings in 2009. It is built around two ideas: that a great workplace is stunning colleagues, and that responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of it.Performing a Project PremortemArticle · 2007 Klein's September 2007 Harvard Business Review piece introducing the premortem: before a project starts, the team is told it has failed spectacularly and generates the plausible reasons why. The method draws on 1989 research finding that this 'prospective hindsight' raises the ability to correctly identify reasons for an outcome by 30%.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.Pirate FlagArticle · 2004 Andy Hertzfeld's account of how Steve Jobs's pirate slogan became the Macintosh team's pirate flag, made by Steve Capps and Susan Kare.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, based on thousands of executive searches across hundreds of companies.The Most Productive People Know Who to IgnoreArticle · 2014 Ed Batista's article on productivity triage: choosing which demands to decline and handling the emotional cost of saying no.The Playing FieldArticle · 2018 Duncan's essay mapping five levels of the investing game — from apprentice to steward — drawn from having interviewed and assessed more than 5,000 investment managers. The great ones, he argues, view investing as a game and know exactly which one they're playing.The Surprising Power of QuestionsArticle · 2018 Two Harvard Business School researchers on conversation as a skill with technique behind it, drawn from their own studies of question-asking and disclosure. Its most useful finding for anyone running an interview is that the follow-up question does most of the work, and it costs nothing to prepare.What's Going On Here, With This Human?Article · 2021 Duncan's essay distilling twenty-five years of a game of strategy applied to people into his approach to reading candidates, including his reference sample-size questions — the reference's sample size in the role, who the best they ever saw 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 report for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, laying out the five-stage novice-to-expert model of skill acquisition. It's the report behind their 1986 book Mind Over Machine, and describes how competence 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 2006 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 2000 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.Ask in Person: You're Less Persuasive Than You Think over EmailPaper · 2017Roghanizad and Bohns's 2017 field studies on where a favour gets granted. The same request made face-to-face was 34 times more likely to be agreed to than by email, and the people making the requests could not tell the two apart in advance.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.Bad Is Stronger Than GoodPaper · 2001Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs's 2001 review of whether bad events have more psychological impact than comparable good events across many domains. It finds that bad events tend to have greater effects.Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social NetworksPaper · 2001McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook's 2001 review of homophily, the finding that contact between similar people happens at a higher rate than between dissimilar people. Its consequence for anyone gathering opinions is stated in the abstract: your personal network limits what information reaches you at all.Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to DisagreePaper · 2009Kahneman and Klein's 2009 paper, an adversarial collaboration on when an expert's intuition can be trusted: judging it means assessing how predictable the environment is and whether the person has had the chance to learn its regularities — prolonged practice with feedback that is rapid and unequivocal. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of accuracy, so the test is the environment, not the confidence.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.Expert Blind Spot: When Content Knowledge Eclipses Pedagogical Content KnowledgePaper · 2001Nathan, Koedinger, and Alibali's 2001 paper that named the expert blind spot: the tendency of people who know a subject well to assume beginners find easy what the expert finds fundamental. Its sharpest evidence is a gradient — the most mathematically trained teachers' predictions of student difficulty bore no relation to how students actually performed, while less-trained teachers predicted it accurately.Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service FirmsPaper · 2012Lauren Rivera's 2012 paper on cultural matching in hiring: how shared tastes and experiences shape choices at elite professional service firms.If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance with Direct Requests for HelpPaper · 2008Flynn and Lake's 2008 paper: six studies of how often people agree to a direct request for help. In the first three, people underestimated compliance by up to 50%, because of a lopsided view of the cost: the person asking counts what it costs to say yes, and discounts what it costs to say no.Intuitions About Combining Opinions: Misappreciation of the Averaging PrinciplePaper · 2003Larrick and Soll's 2003 demonstration that people hold the wrong theory about combining opinions: most expect the average of two judges to be no better than the average judge, when in fact it beats the average judge whenever their errors fall on opposite sides of the truth.Intuitive Evaluation of Likelihood Judgment Producers: Evidence for a Confidence HeuristicPaper · 2004Price and Stone's 2004 paper reports three experiments in which students chose between two fictional financial advisors built to get the same number of calls right — one well calibrated, one overconfident. In all three the overconfident advisor won.Kurt Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed LearningPaper · 1996Edgar Schein's 1996 elaboration of Kurt Lewin's unfreeze-change-refreeze model into what Schein calls managed learning, written as MIT Sloan's professor of management emeritus. Change starts with information that disconfirms what someone expected — and stalls right there unless enough psychological safety exists for them to accept it rather than deny it.Patterns of Mean-Level Change in Personality Traits Across the Life Course: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal StudiesPaper · 2006Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer's 2006 meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples, which found that people increase in social dominance (a facet of extraversion), conscientiousness, and emotional stability, especially in young adulthood between ages 20 and 40.Rethinking Management Education as Craft EducationPaper · 2026Pedersen and Hartmann's 2026 Business Horizons paper argues that management is a technical craft, the family that includes surgery, engineering, and mechanical watchmaking, and proposes four modes of teaching it that way: technical foundations, learning from the masters, simulation, and the craft of research. It is a conceptual argument, not an empirical study, published online in Business Horizons in May 2026.Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection for Restriction of RangePaper · 2022Sackett, Zhang, Berry, and Lievens' 2022 reanalysis of the field's personnel-selection meta-analyses, which argues decades of range-restriction corrections overstated validity and revises the estimate for structured interviews to .42 and for cognitive-ability tests to .31, leaving structured interviews the strongest predictor of job performance.Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee SelectionPaper · 2008Highhouse's 2008 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's 2014 chapter — from the 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.Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental ProcessesPaper · 1977Nisbett and Wilson's 1977 review paper on the limits of introspection: why our explanations can miss what caused our choices.Testing for Competence Rather Than for "Intelligence"Paper · 1973Harvard psychologist David McClelland's 1973 attack on aptitude testing, which found the evidence that such tests predict job performance far weaker than psychologists assumed. His replacement, criterion sampling, is the idea the whole competency movement descends from: go watch the job, list what the work actually involves, and test for that.The Curse of Expertise: The Effects of Expertise and Debiasing Methods on Predictions of Novice PerformancePaper · 1999Pamela Hinds's two 1999 studies showing that the better someone knows a task, the worse they predict how long a beginner will take at it — and that telling them so does not help. Experts guessed 12.9 minutes for a task novices took 31.5 minutes to finish, and the middling users beat them.The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental AnalysisPaper · 1989Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber's 1989 paper that put the curse of knowledge into the literature: once you know something, you cannot reliably predict the judgment of someone who does not. Its contribution is showing the bias survives money, feedback and market discipline, which are the three things economists expected would remove it.The Double-Edged Sword of Consecutive and Snowball Sampling: Practical Utility Versus Methodological CompromisePaper · 2026Tripathy, Singh, and Tripathy's 2026 methods commentary on snowball sampling, the practice of finding your next subject by asking your last one for a referral. Its warning: the chain narrows, because the first people you reach share a background, so each round of referrals makes the sample more like itself, not more representative.The Rank-Order Consistency of Personality Traits From Childhood to Old Age: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal StudiesPaper · 2000Roberts and DelVecchio's 2000 meta-analysis of 3,217 test-retest correlations from 152 longitudinal studies, showing that, at a fixed 6.7-year retest interval, rank-order consistency of personality traits runs about .31 in childhood and .54 in the college years before reaching a plateau near .74 between ages 50 and 70. The authors are explicit that even that plateau is too low to infer personality has stopped changing.The Role of Tutoring in Problem SolvingPaper · 1976Wood, Bruner, and Ross's 1976 paper introducing 'scaffolding': the tutor controls the parts of a task that are beyond the learner's capacity so the learner can complete the parts within it, and that support shrinks as competence grows.The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research FindingsPaper · 1998Schmidt and Hunter's 1998 meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research, ranking 19 selection methods by validity, with general mental ability the most valid predictor for hiring people without previous experience in the job.The Value of Hiring Through Employee ReferralsPaper · 2015Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman, and Housman's 2015 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 2026 Wharton preprint names 'cognitive surrender' — deferring judgment, effort, and responsibility to an AI's output: across three preregistered experiments (N = 1,372) people consulted an AI on a majority of trials; in Study 1, against a no-AI baseline, their accuracy rose 25 percentage points when it was right and fell 15 when it was wrong.Top Performers Are Not the Most Impressive When Extreme Performance Indicates UnreliabilityPaper · 2012Denrell and Liu's 2012 PNAS paper showing that where luck moves outcomes a lot, the very best result in a field is weak evidence of the best ability, because an extreme number says more about how noisy the setting is than about the person who posted it. Their conclusion is that the top performers should not automatically be the ones you imitate.Using advice from multiple sources to revise and improve judgmentsPaper · 2007Yaniv and Milyavsky's 2007 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 Keith Rabois's lecture on how to operate a company, framing the executive's job through the metaphor of an editor — simplify relentlessly, ask clarifying questions, allocate resources. Drawn from his operating experience at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square.Macintosh IntroductionTalk · 1984 Steve Jobs's introduction of the original Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholders meeting, held January 24, 1984, where he told the audience that after more than two years of work the machine had 'turned out insanely great.'
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' (hospitality performance worth 51 points against technical's 49) and the four quadrants of performance — can and will, can't and won't.From Kickoffs to Retros and Slack Channels: Stripe's Documentation Best Practices with Brie WolfsonPodcast · 2023 Brie Wolfson's In Depth interview on Stripe's writing culture, project updates, kickoff documents, and shared retrospective channels.Steven Spielberg on What It Takes (Academy of Achievement)Podcast · 2017 Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski's What It Takes podcast episode on filmmaking, creative instincts, and the craft behind their images.Tobi Lutke on The Knowledge ProjectPodcast · 2018 The Knowledge Project episode 41, 'The Trust Battery,' in which Shopify founder Tobi Lütke elaborates the trust battery — a mental model for how to think about the relationship between people.