A small private canon, made public
These are not shortcuts around the original. They are compact critical companions: the argument, the evidence, the resistance it deserves, and a few ways to put the ideas under pressure.
Browse the first threeWhat these notes keep
Original judgment. The prose is ours; every book gets both its strongest case and its limits.
Visible sources. Quotations and other readers are named and linked, never disguised as consensus.
Useful friction. The final section turns a reading into decisions, counterfactuals, and better questions.
Volume one
Three stories about power, institutional memory, and the cost of being certain.
Company-building memoir 2009
A candid, unusually useful founder memoir whose hard-won heuristics deserve application, not worship.
Separate risks that reward improvisation from risks that demand preparation, then keep revising the distinction as the company grows.
Strategy and organizational change 1996
Still the sharpest field guide to strategic discontinuity, provided “paranoia” means disciplined dissent and experiments rather than permanent alarm.
When the forces around a business change by an order of magnitude, leaders must test the old identity from an outsider’s perspective before the evidence becomes comfortable.
Business biography 2003
A vivid, archive-rich study of institution building that earns its admiration by keeping Watson’s coercion, vanity, and moral failures in frame.
A founder’s personality can become an institution’s operating system—amplifying resilience and ambition while preserving the founder’s pathologies.