Social Sciences
Building and running organisations — where most advice is survivorship bias and a minority is genuinely load-bearing.
12 fields · 128 topics · 67 curated works
Deciding what to do and, more importantly, what not to.
Foundations & Overviews · Competitive Advantage · Five Forces Analysis · Economic Moats · Positioning & Differentiation
Company formation under maximum uncertainty.
Foundations & Overviews · Idea Validation · Product-Market Fit · Founding Teams · Minimum Viable Product
Getting attention and converting it, honestly or otherwise.
Foundations & Overviews · Market Segmentation · Brand Strategy · Positioning · Consumer Behaviour
The function that turns interest into revenue.
Foundations & Overviews · Sales Process · Consultative Selling · Enterprise Sales · Pipeline Management
Deciding what gets built — discovery, prioritisation, metrics and experimentation, judged by what shipped.
Foundations & Overviews · Product Discovery · Roadmapping · Prioritisation Frameworks · User Research for Product
Making the machine run — process design, capacity, inventory and supply chains, where constraints set the rate.
Foundations & Overviews · Process Design · Capacity Planning · Inventory Management · Supply Chain Management
Why groups of competent people produce incompetent outcomes.
Foundations & Overviews · Organisational Design · Team Dynamics · Organisational Culture · Motivation at Work
The craft of running people and priorities.
Foundations & Overviews · Management Fundamentals · Delegation · Performance Management · Giving & Receiving Feedback
Getting to agreement without leaving value on the table.
Foundations & Overviews · Principled Negotiation · BATNA · Anchoring in Negotiation · Distributive vs Integrative Bargaining
Who watches the people running the company.
Foundations & Overviews · Board Structure & Function · Fiduciary Duty · Executive Compensation · Shareholder vs Stakeholder Models
How organisations produce genuinely new things.
Foundations & Overviews · R&D Management · Innovator's Dilemma · Open Innovation · Technology Adoption Curves
Concrete records of what worked and what did not.
Foundations & Overviews · Founding Stories · Corporate Turnarounds · Business Failures & Post-Mortems · Monopolies in History
No prior grounding assumed.
The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor · 1911
Argues a single best method for any manual task can be discovered by systematic time-and-motion study, and that management's job is to find it and…
+19 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Psychology of Advertising
Walter Dill Scott · 1908
Argues that advertising should be built on experimental psychology — attention, association and suggestion — rather than on the writer's intuition,…
+30 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Frontiers in Group Dynamics
Kurt Lewin · 1947
Proposes that lasting organisational change requires three stages, unfreezing existing behaviour, moving to a new state and refreezing it, arguing…
+15 more at this level
12 of 67 works
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Argues a single best method for any manual task can be discovered by systematic time-and-motion study, and that management's job is to find it and enforce it rather than leave method to the worker's judgement.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew Carnegie
Recounts building Carnegie Steel from a telegraph messenger's wage through vertical integration and ruthless cost control, framed by Carnegie's own claim that accumulated wealth is a trust to be given away, not kept.
about 70 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Ford & Samuel Crowther
Presents the moving assembly line and the five-dollar day as one connected idea, that paying workers enough to buy what they make and paring the job down to something anyone can learn in a day are the same strategy.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ben Horowitz
Contrasts product managers by what they actually do day to day, arguing the good ones take responsibility for a product's success without the authority to order anyone to do anything.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jakob Nielsen
Argues usability problems surface with diminishing returns after about five test participants, so teams should run many small rounds of testing rather than one large study — a claim since qualified for problems that are rare or unevenly distributed across users.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson & Matthew Linderman
Argues a small self-funded team building less software, faster, and shipping to real customers early beats a larger funded team building a fuller spec.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Reed Hastings & Patty McCord
Argues a company should deliberately avoid process and control as it grows, instead hiring only fully-formed adults, paying top of market, and being candid about performance, trading control for freedom on the bet that responsible people repay it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Talya Bauer & Berrin Erdogan
Surveys how individual differences, group processes and organisational structure jointly shape behaviour at work, treating organisational behaviour as an applied science rather than a set of management maxims.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Geoff Ralston
Sets out the mechanics of an early seed round — instruments, valuation caps, who to approach and in what order — arguing most first-time founders lose leverage by misunderstanding the process rather than the pitch.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Deepak Malhotra
Argues that negotiating power comes from making the other side want to advocate for you, so what you ask for matters less than whether they can justify granting it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Steve Blank
Defines the MVP not as a smaller product but as the smallest experiment that tests a specific hypothesis about customers, arguing most teams build far more than the hypothesis requires because they treat 'minimum' as the goal rather than the learning.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Giff Constable
Argues founders should validate a problem through structured, open-ended customer conversations before building anything, and gives a script for interviews that avoid leading the witness.
link checked 17 Sept 2026