References
The reading canon
The books behind the method, with the chapters each one sits under and what to take from it. In the manuscript’s own words: these influenced the cooking, they are not the meal. Read them if a chapter left you hungry, and do not try to run all of them at once, because that is how you get a forty-seven-slide methodology.
If you read only these
- The Pyramid Principle
- Bulletproof Problem Solving
- Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
- Thinking in Systems
If you read the first hundred pages of Minto and nothing else on this page, you will have most of what the method borrows.
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Structure
How a written argument holds its shape, and where the pyramid in Part III comes from.
The Pyramid Principle●
Behind Chapter 13
Answer-first communication, and the source of nearly everything structural in the chapter on writing the decision. This book takes the pyramid and points it at a decision rather than at a deck, which is the only liberty taken with it.
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Framing and problem-solving
The first question is usually the wrong question, and cutting a question into parts is a skill rather than a temperament.
Bulletproof Problem Solving●
Behind Chapter 7
The first question is usually the wrong question, and cutting a question into parts is a skill rather than a temperament. The trees here are a narrowed version of theirs, aimed only at pruning.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy●
Behind Chapter 12
Diagnosis, then a guiding policy, then coherent action. Two operative tests: if your recommendation could be titled "leverage AI", it is not a recommendation, and if the operating facts point in different directions, it is not a rule either.
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Judgment and persuasion
Being right is one term in a product that also includes trust, interests, and what the other person is actually optimizing.
Smart Choices
Behind Chapters 4, 6 and 9
Decision analysis written for the person who makes the call, where you are usually the person who has to produce the call. Their method for trading across objectives sits behind the economics chapter, their catalogue of traps behind the chapter on working backward, and their insistence that alternatives are invented rather than received behind the chapter on the menu.
The Trusted Advisor
Behind Chapters 14 and 16
Being right is one term in a product that also includes trust. This is where that lands, and it is the answer to technical people who believe the merits should be sufficient.
Getting to Yes
Behind Chapters 4, 14 and 15
Three ideas, used on purpose. Interests rather than positions, which is what a stated number is usually standing in for. Inventing a menu that can serve more than one interest. And what each party will do if there is no agreement at all, which turns a walk-away into an alternative you have to rank against.
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Systems and policies
Why a locally sensible change bites somewhere else, and what a rule can know at the moment it fires.
Thinking in Systems●
Behind Chapter 11
Locally optimal, globally stupid. Delay, accumulation, and the question of where in a system a change actually bites. The whole chapter on local scoreboards is downstream of her.
Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization
Behind Chapters 17 and 18
A repeating decision is a state, a decision, incoming information, a transition, and an objective. The chapter on what a rule is made of is the prose version of that, and the chapter on installing one is what it takes to run it. If you want the mathematics of repeating decisions, go here rather than back through this book.
The Fifth Column essays in Interfaces
The obvious answer, the hard way, without worshipping the model. A temperament more than a method, and the closest thing this list has to an ethic.
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Companion volumes
Where to go for the mathematics this book deliberately does not teach.
The Decision Factory
A companion novel about policies, uncertainty, and why a static optimal plan so often perishes on contact with ordinary operations. That book is about what a decision system is. This one is about what you do when the email arrives. They are companions, not substitutes.
What is deliberately not here
The omissions are part of the argument
The manuscript leaves out visualization books, culture-of-McKinsey books, and anything that would have turned the chapter on complexity into a textbook. The stated reason is that you already have those, and that reading all of them at once is how you end up with a forty-seven-slide methodology.
It is worth taking that seriously rather than treating it as modesty. A reading list is a claim about what a practitioner needs, and a longer list is not a better one. Most of these books are also longer than the idea they carry: read the part that does the work, take the technique, and put the book down.
The one genuine exception is Powell, whose argument is cumulative and whose value is in the treatment of what a policy can know at the moment it runs.
Synthesis
The method is what survives when these are pointed at a decision rather than at a deck
Eighteen entries, free and complete, with worked examples from replenishment rules, expedite calls, and allocation decisions rather than from generic corporate case studies.