Going deeper

Everything on this site comes from a small number of sources. They are listed from the most readable to the most demanding, with a line on what each one contributes.

Start here

• Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores, Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life (Oxford University Press, 2001). Trust as something people do rather than feel, built by making and keeping commitments. The most readable book on the list and the best first one.
• Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen and Steve Zaffron, "Integrity: A Positive Model that Incorporates the Normative Phenomena of Morality, Ethics and Legality." The abridged edition (SSRN, about forty pages) is the one to read; a six-page interview-format overview introduces it, and the full paper is there for the committed. Honoring your word as a factor of production. Its central claim is argued more than demonstrated, and this site presents it as a well-reasoned position rather than a proven result.
• Michael C. Jensen, "Paying People to Lie: The Truth About the Budgeting Process," European Financial Management (2003). How targets teach people to sandbag and hide bad news; short and pointed.

The loop and where it came from

• Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (1986). Where conversations for action entered computing. The second half is the practical part; the first half, on Heidegger and the limits of the rationalist tradition, rewards patience.
• J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962). The lectures in which Austin noticed that some sentences do things rather than describe them. Short, dry and funny.
• John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969). The categories under this site's glossary. Demanding; the first and last chapters carry most of what a practitioner needs.

Why a company is a network of promises

• Ronald Coase, "The Nature of the Firm," Economica (1937). Why firms exist, in fourteen pages: because coordinating by direction is sometimes cheaper than coordinating by contract. The whole executive argument on this site rests on it.
• Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure," Journal of Financial Economics (1976). The agency problem: why people who run a company they do not own will tend to serve themselves. Jensen's starting point, before the integrity work.
• Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963). The firm as a coalition of groups that bargain and never fully agree, which is why a tool that makes commitments visible will meet politics.
• Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran, "Bad for Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost Theory," Academy of Management Review (1996). Assuming people are opportunistic produces organizations that make them so; the argument for invitation over enforcement.

Cautions

• Stephen A. Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do?," Review of Radical Political Economics (1974). Hierarchy exists partly for control, not only efficiency. A reminder that executives may welcome coordination savings and still resist losing control, and that a commitment record used to monitor rather than to coach slides into exactly what Marglin describes.
• The Coordinator, the software Flores built around the loop in the 1980s, is the cautionary precedent. Its model was sound and it was widely resented, because it asked people to label their own speech. A language model can do the labeling in the background, which is the single change that makes this site possible now.

Publication details are given as they appear on the works themselves; where a link is given it goes to the publisher or to SSRN. Page numbers and quotations are left to the reader, who should check them against the originals rather than against this page.