Brian Armstrong

What eleven companies did to turn fifteen ordinary years into fifteen great ones.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

Employment as an honest alliance: set tours of duty between firm and employee.

When to push through a hard stretch and when to quit a dead end.

Eight CEOs who beat the market by allocating capital, not by running operations.

Fifteen commitments for leading from curiosity instead of defensiveness.

A fable of two rival firms showing why organisational health beats clever strategy.

Marquet's account of transforming the USS Santa Fe from the worst-performing submarine in the Navy to the best. The specific mechanism — moving from leader-follower to leader-leader by pushing control down while moving competence and clarity up — is one of the most rigorously documented leadership case studies in print.

How the NeXT and Pixar years changed Steve Jobs into the leader who rebuilt Apple.

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

From a Dayton bicycle shop to the first powered flights and the 1908 demonstrations.

Fictional sexual scenes, each read by an evolutionary biologist for its instincts.

A collection of Richard Feynman's best short works.

Selection acts on genes; bodies are vehicles that genes build to copy themselves.

A novel in which industrialists vanish from an economy run by government directives.

A novel of an amnesiac astronaut sent to stop a microbe that is dimming the sun.

A novel of a teenager hunting 1980s-themed puzzles in a virtual world for a fortune.

Krug's web usability primer has stayed relevant for over two decades because its core argument — that good interfaces require no instruction — is timeless. The chapters on navigation conventions and usability testing with five users are still the most practical introduction to the discipline.

How machine learning and robots will displace work faster than institutions adapt.

Kurzweil's optimistic counterpoint to the safety literature. His law of accelerating returns and the vision of intelligence explosion as fundamentally benign is the premise that alignment researchers are most directly arguing against. Reading it gives the other side of the debate its strongest formulation.

The case for free markets and limited government, policy area by policy area.

The theory behind microfinance methods such as group lending, and their effects.

Operating manual for scaling a company from fifty to thousands

Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

Twenty-two rules of marketing, such as being first is better than being better.

Six traits of memorable ideas, from simple and unexpected to emotional stories.