Social Sciences
Business & Management
Building and running organisations — where most advice is survivorship bias and a minority is genuinely load-bearing.
12 fields · 116 topics · 13 curated works
Fields within Business & Management
Strategy
11Deciding what to do and, more importantly, what not to.
Competitive Advantage · Five Forces Analysis · Economic Moats · Positioning & Differentiation · Scale & Network Effects
Entrepreneurship & Startups
11Company formation under maximum uncertainty.
Idea Validation · Product-Market Fit · Founding Teams · Minimum Viable Product · Customer Discovery
Marketing
11Getting attention and converting it, honestly or otherwise.
Market Segmentation · Brand Strategy · Positioning · Consumer Behaviour · Marketing Analytics
Sales & Business Development
9The function that turns interest into revenue.
Sales Process · Consultative Selling · Enterprise Sales · Pipeline Management · Sales Compensation
Product Management
10Deciding what gets built.
Product Discovery · Roadmapping · Prioritisation Frameworks · User Research for Product · Product Metrics
Operations Management
10Making the machine run.
Process Design · Capacity Planning · Inventory Management · Supply Chain Management · Logistics & Distribution
Organisational Behaviour & Culture
10Why groups of competent people produce incompetent outcomes.
Organisational Design · Team Dynamics · Organisational Culture · Motivation at Work · Change Management
Leadership & Management Practice
11The craft of running people and priorities.
Management Fundamentals · Delegation · Performance Management · Giving & Receiving Feedback · Hiring & Interviewing
Negotiation
8Getting to agreement without leaving value on the table.
Principled Negotiation · BATNA · Anchoring in Negotiation · Distributive vs Integrative Bargaining · Multi-Party Negotiation
Corporate Governance & Ethics
9Who watches the people running the company.
Board Structure & Function · Fiduciary Duty · Executive Compensation · Shareholder vs Stakeholder Models · Corporate Fraud
Innovation Management
8How organisations produce genuinely new things.
R&D Management · Innovator's Dilemma · Open Innovation · Technology Adoption Curves · Corporate Venturing
Business History & Case Studies
8Concrete records of what worked and what did not.
Founding Stories · Corporate Turnarounds · Business Failures & Post-Mortems · Monopolies in History · Conglomerates
Reading in Business & Management
13Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
- BookGetting to YesRoger Fisher & William Ury, 1981
Negotiate on interests rather than positions, and measure any deal against your best alternative to agreement.
- BookPositioning: The Battle for Your MindAl Ries & Jack Trout, 1981
Marketing happens in the customer's head, not the product: you compete for a category position, and the first one there usually keeps it.
- BookThe GoalEliyahu M. Goldratt, 1984
Throughput is set by the system's single binding constraint, so improving anything else is measurement theatre.
- BookBarbarians at the GateBryan Burrough & John Helyar, 1989
The RJR Nabisco buyout reported in full, and still the clearest case study in what happens when incentives at the top go unchecked.
- BookThe Lean StartupEric Ries, 2011
Treats a startup as a series of experiments to find a viable business — widely adopted, and widely criticised for encouraging incrementalism.
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
- BookCompetitive StrategyMichael Porter, 1980
Industry structure — five forces — determines average profitability more than firm-level execution does.
- BookHigh Output ManagementAndrew Grove, 1983
Treats management as a production process with measurable leverage, indicators and quality control at each step.
- BookSPIN SellingNeil Rackham, 1988
Built from twelve years of observed sales calls: in large sales the closing techniques that work on small ones actively reduce success.
- BookThe Innovator's DilemmaClayton Christensen, 1997
Well-managed firms fail precisely by listening to their best customers while cheaper, worse technologies improve underneath them.
- BookGood Strategy / Bad StrategyRichard Rumelt, 2011
Strategy is a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent action — not a list of goals with aspirational adjectives.
- BookThe Fifth DisciplinePeter M. Senge, 1990
Organisational failures are usually structural rather than personal — the same people in the same system produce the same result.
- BookInspiredMarty Cagan, 2008
Product teams should be given problems rather than roadmaps, because most of what customers ask for is not what they will use.
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
- BookThe Visible HandAlfred D. Chandler Jr., 1977
Managerial coordination replaced market coordination because it was more efficient — the origin of the large firm as an institution.