Further reading for product people
From Coase to AI: Technology, Organizations, and the Frontier Between Compacting and Decentralizing
Why firms exist, why they grew, and how each technological wave redraws their boundaries — from Coase to AI.
The Nature of the Firm
The founding question: if the market is so efficient, why do firms exist? Coase answers that organising activities in the open market has costs — searching for suppliers, negotiating contracts, monitoring quality. Firms…
The Use of Knowledge in Society
The knowledge relevant for economic decisions is dispersed across society — never concentrated in a single mind. No central planner can aggregate it well. Markets work because they are a decentralised mechanism for proce…
Il Gattopardo
Not a technology book, but the opening conceptual frame for how technology waves actually play out. "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi." — if we want everything to stay as it is, everything mu…
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Every new medium transforms society not through its content but through how it reorganises relationships, time and perception. The telegraph matters not for what it carries but because it compresses distance. Television…
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
The large American corporations of the twentieth century grew because professional management — the "visible hand" of the manager — was more efficient than the market at coordinating complex activities at scale. Layers o…
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The original hacker ethic: do it, try it, share it. Levy documents how a culture that started in an MIT model-railroad club at night turned into the way the software industry actually works — by building in the open, by…
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
Williamson takes Coase's intuition and turns it into a complete theory. Contracts are incomplete, people act with opportunism, and some assets are specific enough that you cannot acquire them on the open market without r…
Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies
The paper that connects Coase to the digital era. Information technology reduces transaction costs, and that pushes activity toward markets and away from hierarchies. When coordinating outside is cheap, firms shrink. It…
Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning
The classic paper on the tension between exploring (trying new things, experimenting, searching for alternatives) and exploiting (optimising what already works, refining, executing). Organisations need to do both but ten…
Being Digital
The shift from atoms to bits as the fundamental decentralising force. When information becomes digital, the costs of copying, distributing and transforming it fall to zero. Industries built on the scarcity of physical ca…
The Rise of the Network Society
The network as an organisational form that replaces industrial hierarchy. Castells argues that the informational technology revolution is building a new social structure where power and productivity depend on the ability…
The Innovator's Dilemma
Disruption from below: initially inferior technologies that serve ignored markets and end up displacing incumbents. Established firms fail not from incompetence but because their processes, values and metrics are optimis…
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The founding essay of the open-source movement. The thesis: the decentralised, seemingly chaotic model (the bazaar) produces better software than the planned, controlled one (the cathedral). Raymond codifies what Linux p…
Weaving the Web
The story of the World Wide Web told by its creator. The most relevant thing is not the technology but Berners-Lee's insistence that there was no grand plan — only a problem to solve (sharing information between CERN res…
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
The story of Linux told by its creator. Torvalds started building an operating system as a personal project — no business plan, no ambition to change the world. What began "just for fun" ended up as critical infrastructu…
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
Technological revolutions follow a four-phase pattern: irruption, frenzy, turning point, deployment. Each phase comes with its specific financial dynamic — bubbles in the frenzy, institutional consolidation in the deploy…
The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
Malone extends his 1987 paper with Yates and Benjamin to argue that technology is pushing organisations toward radical decentralisation — not as an ideology but as the inevitable economic consequence of falling communica…
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
How the "do-it-yourself" culture of the 1960s — the counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalogs, the communes — transformed into the culture of Silicon Valley. The connection between a playful, experimental spirit and real…
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The internet lowers transaction costs to the point that a third mode of production appears — neither firm nor market — commons-based peer production. Wikipedia, Linux, free software. You do not need Chandler's hierarchy…
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
The cost of organising people falls to zero on the internet, and that wipes out intermediaries and layers of management that used to be necessary. Shirky documents how informal groups achieve results that once demanded f…
The Craftsman
Not a technology book, but its central thesis resonates deeply: good work is born from making, not from planning. The craftsman learns by doing, develops judgement through practice, and their knowledge is inseparable fro…
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
Technologies are not invented from scratch; they evolve by combining with one another. Every technology is an assemblage of earlier technologies, and innovations arise from recombinations, not isolated inspirations. Arth…
What Technology Wants
Technology as a force with tendencies of its own: toward decentralisation, accessibility, complexity, diversity. Kelly argues that the technium — the total system of technologies — has a direction, and that organisations…
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Every communications medium follows a cycle: it is born open and decentralised, matures, and ends up concentrating into monopolies or oligopolies. The telephone, radio, television, cinema — all followed the same pattern.…
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
The first machine age augmented physical force; the second augments cognitive capacity. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that we are at an inflection point where digital technologies begin doing for mental work what the ste…
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Three simultaneous rebalancings: from the human mind to the machine, from the product to the platform, and from the core (the organisation) to the crowd (external networks). Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that firms have…
The Race Between Machine and Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment
A rigorous theoretical framework on the competition between automation (which displaces labour) and the creation of new tasks (which generates employment). Acemoglu and Restrepo offer the analytical counterweight to Bryn…
The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence
Brynjolfsson draws a clean distinction between AI that substitutes (automation) and AI that augments (augmentation). When AI imitates the human and replaces them, workers lose bargaining power and value concentrates. Whe…
Generative AI at Work
Empirical study with more than 5,000 customer-support agents. AI increases productivity 15% on average, but the effect is uneven: less experienced workers improve 30% in speed and also in quality, while the most experien…
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
AI not as a tool but as a cognitive companion that transforms how you work, decide and organise. Mollick, from Wharton, argues that AI changes the nature of work not because it performs tasks for you, but because it alte…
Context Engineering
Anthropic's framing of context engineering as the discipline of designing, preparing and maintaining the information a model sees, beyond the narrow craft of prompt writing. The piece reframes the relationship between or…
AI's Use of Knowledge in Society
The title is a direct nod to Hayek (1945). Brynjolfsson and Hitzig argue that AI can shift the optimal locus of control in organisations through two channels: by codifying local knowledge that used to be tacit, and by ex…
The Rise of Industrial AI in America: Microfoundations of the Productivity J-curve(s)
Firm-level empirical evidence for the productivity J-curve associated with AI adoption. Companies that adopt AI initially see no productivity gains — they can even get worse — because they need complementary investments…
Context Engineering: Why Hayek's Knowledge Problem Survives AI
Walker responds directly to Brynjolfsson and Hitzig: AI does not automatically codify knowledge — someone has to prepare, structure and maintain the context that makes knowledge usable by the model. What is missing from…