The Thinkers Behind the Tools

Works

• Making Strategy: The Journey of Strategic Management, 1998

Known for

With Colin Eden she wrote Making Strategy, a guide to strategy making that stresses political feasibility, participation, and stakeholder management. The book sets out the power and interest grid that sorts stakeholders into players, subjects, context setters, and the crowd.

Caveat: The grid is older than the book: Aubrey Mendelow's 1981 conference paper is its usual origin, and Eden and Ackermann gave it the four named quadrants.

Works

• Management Misinformation Systems, Management Science 14(4), 1967

Known for

A pioneer of operations research in the United States who later turned to systems thinking about organizations. His 1967 paper argued that managers suffer less from a lack of relevant information than from an overload of irrelevant information, and that a management information system fails when it is built without a model of the decisions it is meant to serve.

Works

• The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, Morgan Kaufmann; with John Pruitt, 2006

Known for

A user experience consultant who, with John Pruitt of Microsoft, wrote the standard practitioner's guide to creating personas and keeping them in use across a product's design, from planning through retirement.

Works

• Scanning the Business Environment, 1967

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor of general management and strategic planning. His study of how executives gather information about the world outside their companies is one of the earliest treatments of environmental scanning and is commonly credited as the origin of PEST analysis and its later variants.

Works

• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking, self-published; second edition 2022, 2017

Known for

Wrote a popular guide to the Zettelkasten, the slip-box method of linked notes the sociologist Niklas Luhmann used. It is a practitioner's guide, not a research study.

Works

• Hoshin Kanri: Policy Deployment for Successful TQM, Productivity Press (English edition, translated by Glenn H. Mazur), 1991

Known for

A Japanese planning specialist recognized as the developer of hoshin kanri, the policy deployment method that cascades a few strategic goals through every level of an organization. With Shigeru Mizuno he also developed quality function deployment.

Works

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, 2001

Known for

A management consultant whose Getting Things Done method has people capture every open commitment in a trusted external system and decide the next physical action for each. It is a practitioner's method from a popular book, revised in 2015, not a research finding.

Works

• Principles of Corporate Finance, McGraw-Hill, with Richard A. Brealey and Stewart C. Myers, from the eighth edition

Known for

A financial economist who has worked on financial crises, asset price bubbles, and the comparison of financial systems, at the Wharton School and then Imperial College London. He joined Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers as co-author of later editions of their corporate finance textbook.

Works

• Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, Code as Craft (Etsy engineering blog), 2012

Known for

As head of operations and later chief technology officer at Etsy, he wrote the post that carried the just culture idea from safety science into software incident reviews: a postmortem that asks what happened and why, without blaming the person, so engineers report mistakes fully. He later earned a master's degree in human factors and systems safety at Lund University and co-founded Adaptive Capacity Labs.

Works

• On the Psychology of Inventive Creativity, Voprosy Psikhologii, no. 6, with Rafael Shapiro, 1956
• Algorithm of Invention, second edition 1973, 1969
• Creativity as an Exact Science, Russian original; English translation by Anthony Williams, Gordon and Breach, 1984, 1979

Known for

The creator of TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving, which he built from the study of thousands of patents. TRIZ holds that technical systems evolve by knowable patterns and that inventive problems turn on contradictions, which can be resolved by a small set of principles (the 40 inventive principles, set in 1971), separation of the conflicting requirements, and ARIZ, his step-by-step algorithm.

Works

• The Futures Field: Searching for Definitions and Boundaries, The Futurist, 1981

Known for

President of the Institute for the Future, known for Amara's law: people tend to overestimate a technology's effect in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. His 1981 articles in The Futurist set out the field's premises and its distinction among possible, probable, and preferable futures.

Caveat: Some futures scholars trace the possible, probable, and preferable taxonomy to Norman Henchey (1978); Amara's 1981 articles are an early and widely cited statement of it.

Works

• Client Commitment Language During Motivational Interviewing Predicts Drug Use Outcomes, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 71(5), with William R. Miller, Carolina E. Yahne, Michael Palmer, and Laura Fulcher, 2003

Known for

A psychologist at Montclair State University who, with William R. Miller and colleagues, coded what 84 drug users said during motivational interviews. The strength of commitment language when clients reviewed a change plan predicted later abstinence, and statements of desire, ability, need, and reasons predicted commitment, the categories of change talk that motivational interviewing teaches clinicians to hear.

Caveat: A later study of marijuana treatment found that commitment language did not predict outcomes, while desire and reasons statements did.

Works

• Teamwork in Group Model Building, System Dynamics Review, 1995

Known for

A University at Albany scholar of system dynamics who, with George P. Richardson, developed group model building, in which a client group helps formulate a simulation model. Their 1995 paper sets out the roles a model-building team needs: facilitator, modeler and reflector, process coach, recorder, and gatekeeper.

Works

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, Blue Hole Press, 2010

Known for

Known for the Kanban method for knowledge work: visualize the work, limit work in progress, and improve the process in small steps. His 2010 book traces it from a 2004 Microsoft team to a 2006 to 2007 project at Corbis. A practitioner's book, not research.

Works

• A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Longman (edited with David R. Krathwohl), 2001

Known for

A student of Benjamin Bloom who, with David Krathwohl, led the 2001 revision of Bloom's taxonomy, which renamed and reordered the cognitive levels as Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create.

Works

• Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, 1998

Known for

Co-wrote, with Daniel H. Kim, a Pegasus Communications workbook that teaches the systems archetypes of Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline through worked stories and causal loop diagrams. It is a practitioner's guide, not original research.

Works

• Business Policy: Text and Cases, 1965
• The Concept of Corporate Strategy, 1971

Known for

Harvard Business School professor who wrote the text portion of Business Policy: Text and Cases (with Edmund P. Learned, C. Roland Christensen, and William D. Guth) and is credited, with Igor Ansoff and Alfred Chandler, with founding the modern concept of business strategy. His matching of a firm's internal strengths and weaknesses to external opportunities and threats is one claimed origin of SWOT.

Caveat: The 1965 textbook contains neither a two-by-two SWOT matrix nor a SWOT procedure, and a 1965 Stanford Research Institute report (Stewart, Benepe, and Mitchell) is the other claimed origin.

Works

• Mostly Harmless Econometrics, 2009

Known for

An MIT labor economist and econometrician who shared the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for methods of drawing causal conclusions from natural experiments. Mostly Harmless Econometrics, written with Jorn-Steffen Pischke, is the standard practitioner's guide to research designs such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference in differences.

Works

• Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy, 1958

Known for

An analytic philosopher who wrote on intention, action, logic, and ethics. Modern Moral Philosophy coined the word consequentialism for theories that judge acts by their outcomes, and it is credited with reviving virtue ethics.

Works

• Strategies for Diversification, Harvard Business Review 35(5), 1957

Known for

An applied mathematician who became a planning executive at Lockheed and later a professor, often called the father of strategic management. His 1957 article set out four growth paths from crossing existing and new products with existing and new markets, the grid now called the Ansoff matrix.

Works

• Real Options: A Practitioner's Guide, Texere (with Thomas E. Copeland), 2001

Known for

Coauthor, with Thomas E. Copeland, of a standard practitioner's guide to valuing managerial flexibility in investment projects as real options.

Works

• Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (with Donald Schön), 1974
• Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (with Donald Schön), 1978
• Overcoming Organizational Defenses, 1990

Known for

A Harvard scholar of organizational learning who, with Donald Schön, distinguished espoused theories from theories in use and single-loop from double-loop learning, in which people question the governing assumptions behind their actions. He is also credited with the ladder of inference, a model of how people climb from selected data to conclusions and beliefs.

Works

• Posterior Analytics, 4th century BCE
• Nicomachean Ethics, Book III (the elements of circumstance), 4th century BCE
• Rhetoric, c. 350 BCE

Known for

In the Posterior Analytics he held that demonstration must start from first principles that cannot themselves be demonstrated and are known by induction from perception. In the Nicomachean Ethics he listed the circumstances of an act (who, what, where, when, why, how) to judge whether it was voluntary, and in the Rhetoric he set out the three means of persuasion: the speaker's character, the audience's emotions, and the argument itself.

Works

• The Psychology of Sunk Cost, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 35(1), with Catherine Blumer, 1985

Known for

With Catherine Blumer he documented the sunk cost effect: a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once money, effort, or time has been invested in it. Theater patrons who paid full price for a season subscription attended more plays than those given discounts, and the authors traced the behavior partly to a wish not to appear wasteful.

Works

• The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, with Judson Mills, 1959

Known for

Known for experimental work on cognitive dissonance. With Judson Mills he found that people who went through a severe initiation to join a discussion group rated the group more favorably than those who went through a mild initiation or none, the effect now called effort justification.

Works

• Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care, American Economic Review, 1963

Known for

One of the founders of modern economic theory, known for general equilibrium, social choice, and the economics of information. His 1963 paper on medical care is the usual starting point of the modern literature on moral hazard: insurance changes the behavior of the insured, which limits what can be insured.

Works

• Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events, Economic Journal, 1989
• Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, 1994

Known for

An economist known for work on increasing returns and complexity economics. His 1989 paper showed how small chance events early in the adoption of competing technologies can lock a market into one of them, even an inferior one, which is the core case of path dependence.

Works

• Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs, Review of Economics and Statistics 67(4), with David Card, 1985

Known for

A Princeton labor economist and econometrician whose studies of job training programs compared earnings of trainees and nontrainees before and after training, an early use of the comparison now called difference in differences. With David Card he showed how sensitive such estimates are to how people come to enter a program.

Works

• The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives, 1981

Known for

Co-wrote, with Richard Pascale, a comparison of Japanese and American management built on the 7-S framework, which the two worked out with McKinsey consultants Robert Waterman and Tom Peters in 1980.

Works

• The Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions, Silverback Publishing, 2014

Known for

Co-author, with Susan Michie and Robert West, of the practical guide to designing behavior change interventions with the Behaviour Change Wheel and the COM-B model.

Works

• Acceptable Points in General Cooperative n-Person Games, Contributions to the Theory of Games IV (Annals of Mathematics Studies 40), 1959

Known for

An Israeli American game theorist who shared the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on conflict and cooperation through game theory. His 1959 paper gave an early formal statement of how cooperation can be sustained in infinitely repeated games, a result of the family later called folk theorems.

Works

• The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984

Known for

A political scientist who ran two computer tournaments of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma around 1980 and reported in The Evolution of Cooperation that tit for tat, a strategy that cooperates first and then copies the other player's last move, did best.

Works

• Novum Organum, 1620

Known for

In the Novum Organum he argued that knowledge should be built by induction from observation, rising step by step to general laws. His tables of presence, absence, and degree were a method for ruling out candidate causes by comparison, an early program for the experimental method.

Works

• Who Built Maslow's Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies' Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education (with Todd Bridgman and Stephen Cummings), 2019

Known for

Coauthor of the history showing that Abraham Maslow never drew his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid; the authors trace the pyramid to management writers of the late 1950s and 1960s, Charles McDermid among them, and ask educators to teach Maslow from his own texts.

Works

• Anomaly Detection: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, 2009

Known for

A machine learning researcher who co-wrote, with Varun Chandola and Vipin Kumar, the standard survey of anomaly detection, which sorts the methods by the kind of anomaly and the kind of data they handle.

Works

• The Red Queen in Organizational Evolution, Strategic Management Journal, 1996

Known for

Stanford Graduate School of Business professor who, with Morten Hansen, carried the biologists' Red Queen idea into organization theory: competition prompts a firm to learn, its learning raises the bar for rivals, and their learning in turn raises it again. He extended the argument in The Red Queen among Organizations (2008).

Works

• Simplex: A Flight to Creativity, Creative Education Foundation

Known for

A creativity researcher who began at Procter and Gamble, where he found that problem statements phrased as "How might we" worked best with industry teams, and later taught organizational behavior and innovation at McMaster University. His Simplex process carries the Osborn and Parnes creative problem solving cycle into organizations.

Works

• Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen), 1850

Known for

A French economist and pamphleteer of the liberal school. In his best-known essay, the parable of the broken window, he argued that a good economist counts both the visible effect of an act and the effects that are not seen, such as what the money spent on the repair would otherwise have bought.

Works

• Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972

Known for

An anthropologist and cyberneticist who carried Alfred Korzybski's distinction between map and territory into his account of mind and communication. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind he argued that what we know of a territory reaches us only through the channels by which we perceive it, so that the mental world is a series of maps and the territory never gets in at all.

Works

• A Mathematical Model for Group Structures, Applied Anthropology (now Human Organization), 1948

Known for

Ran the small-group communication experiments at MIT in the late 1940s. Linton Freeman credits his 1948 paper with introducing centrality to the study of human communication, the idea that a person's position in a network shapes their influence.

Works

• An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1763

Known for

An English Presbyterian minister whose essay, published two years after his death by Richard Price, solved a special case of what is now called Bayes' theorem: how to infer the probability of a cause from the events observed.

Works

• The Basics of FMEA, Quality Resources (with Robin E. McDermott and Raymond J. Mikulak; second edition, Productivity Press, 2009), 1996

Known for

Coauthor of a short practitioner's handbook on failure mode and effects analysis that walks through the ten steps of an FMEA; the second edition was aligned with the automotive industry's 2008 AIAG guidelines.

Works

• Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change, 1977

Known for

A founder of organization development who taught at MIT Sloan. With Reuben T. Harris he set out how to manage an organization through a planned change, including the commitment chart, and he popularized David Gleicher's formula that dissatisfaction, vision, and first steps must together outweigh resistance.

Works

• gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 6(4), with Jeff Conklin, 1988

Known for

Built gIBIS with Jeff Conklin, a graphical hypertext tool that put the issue-based information system, devised by Werner Kunz and Horst Rittel in the 1960s, on the computer screen as a map of issues, positions, and arguments.

Works

• The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, 1972

Known for

One of the four authors, with Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, of The Limits to Growth, the report to the Club of Rome built on the MIT World3 system dynamics model of population, industry, food, resources, and pollution.

Works

• An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789

Known for

An English philosopher and legal reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. He held that actions and laws should be judged by their consequences for the greatest happiness, understood as the balance of pleasure over pain.

Works

• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, 1997

Known for

A science writer who coined the term biomimicry for design that deliberately borrows nature's solutions, and a cofounder of the Biomimicry Institute. Her book is a popular synthesis that set an agenda for the field, not a research study.

Works

• Interviewing for Solutions (with Peter De Jong), 1998

Known for

With Steve de Shazer she co-founded the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee in 1978 and developed solution-focused brief therapy there in the 1980s, the approach that asks clients to describe a preferred future, including through the miracle question. Interviewing for Solutions is her textbook account of the method.

Works

• The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932

Known for

A Columbia law professor and diplomat whose book with Gardiner Means showed that ownership and control had separated in large American corporations: dispersed shareholders could not oversee the managers who ran the firm. The book is a foundation of corporate governance and of the agency theory that followed.

Works

• Quaestiones nonnullae de usuris, Acta Eruditorum, 1690
• Ars Conjectandi, Basel, published after his death, 1713

Known for

A Swiss mathematician whose Ars Conjectandi founded the mathematical theory of probability, with its treatment of permutations and combinations and the first proof of a law of large numbers. In working out a compound-interest question in 1683, published in 1690, he found the limit now written as the constant e.

Works

• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, O'Reilly Media; chapter 15, Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure, written by John Lunney and Sue Lueder, 2016

Known for

Coeditor, with Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, of Google's book on site reliability engineering (2016), whose chapter on postmortem culture, written by John Lunney and Sue Lueder, sets out the blameless postmortem: a written record of an incident, its impact, its causes, and the follow-up actions, written on the assumption that everyone involved acted in good faith on the information they had.

Works

• Possible Futures, Preferable Futures, Healthcare Forum Journal, with Trevor Hancock, 1994

Known for

A political scientist and futurist who founded the Institute for Alternative Futures in 1977. With Trevor Hancock he drew the futures cone, which widens out from the present to show possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures.

Works

• 2015 Letter to Shareholders, Amazon.com, Inc., Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, April 2016, 2016

Known for

Founder of Amazon. His 2015 shareholder letter splits decisions into Type 1, consequential and irreversible one-way doors that deserve slow care, and Type 2, reversible two-way doors that small groups should make fast. A practitioner's statement of how he runs a company, not research.

Works

• The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities, Journal of Political Economy, 1973

Known for

With Myron Scholes he derived a formula for the price of an option, which Robert C. Merton extended; real options analysis applies the same pricing logic to choices inside a business. Black died in 1995, before the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize went to Scholes and Merton.

Works

• The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, 1999

Known for

A British psychologist and writer whose book The Meme Machine worked out Richard Dawkins's idea of the meme, a unit of culture copied by imitation, into a fuller theory of how imitation shaped the human mind.

Caveat: Memetics remains contested: critics argue that memes cannot be specified as units and that the field has produced little empirical evidence for memetic mechanisms.

Works

• Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem, NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1 (with Lawrence H. Summers), 1986

Known for

A French macroeconomist at MIT and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. With Lawrence Summers he set out the hysteresis hypothesis: that temporary shocks can permanently raise unemployment, through insider wage setting and the loss of skills during long spells out of work.

Works

• The Four Steps to the Epiphany, 2005

Known for

A serial entrepreneur and teacher of entrepreneurship who set out customer development, in which a new venture treats its business model as untested hypotheses and tests them with customers outside the building; customer discovery is its first step. The book was first self-published and grew out of his practice and teaching.

Works

• Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction, 2009

Known for

His essay made design fiction a working method: building objects, films, and documents from a possible future so people can handle and argue about that future before it exists. He founded the Near Future Laboratory. The term itself was coined by Bruce Sterling in 2005.

Works

• Social Meaning in Linguistic Structure: Code-Switching in Norway, Directions in Sociolinguistics, 1972

Known for

A Norwegian social anthropologist at the University of Bergen. His study with John J. Gumperz of how speakers in a northern Norwegian community moved between the local dialect and standard Norwegian is a founding work on code-switching.

Works

• Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, editor, 1956

Known for

He chaired the committee of college examiners whose handbook classified learning objectives into a hierarchy running from knowledge through comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis to evaluation. The scheme, known as Bloom's taxonomy, became a standard tool for writing objectives and test questions.

Works

• Fighting for Your Marriage, Jossey-Bass, 1994

Known for

Co-author, with Howard Markman and Scott Stanley, of the Denver couples research program's book, which teaches the Speaker-Listener Technique and the ground rule of separating problem discussion from problem solution.

Works

• The Psychology of Sunk Cost, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, with Hal R. Arkes, 1985

Known for

With Hal R. Arkes she documented the sunk cost effect, a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once money, effort, or time has been invested in it. In their field study, theater patrons who had paid full price for season tickets attended more plays than patrons who had been given discounts.

Works

• Dialogue: A Proposal, 1991
• On Dialogue, 1996

Known for

A theoretical physicist who late in life proposed a form of group conversation, now called Bohm dialogue, in which participants suspend judgment, make no decisions, and examine the assumptions behind their own thinking. Dialogue: A Proposal was written with Donald Factor and Peter Garrett; On Dialogue, edited by Lee Nichol, collects his talks on the practice.

Works

• Factoring and Weighting Approaches to Status Scores and Clique Identification, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1972

Known for

A UCLA sociologist who worked on mathematical sociology and social networks. His 1972 paper proposed scoring each member of a network by the scores of those they are tied to, the eigenvector measure that network centrality analysis still uses.

Works

• Chinese Values and the Search for Culture-Free Dimensions of Culture, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 18(2), published under the group name The Chinese Culture Connection, 1987

Known for

Led the researchers who published as the Chinese Culture Connection. Their survey, built from Chinese values instead of Western ones, found a dimension that Geert Hofstede added to his model as long-term orientation, first called Confucian dynamism.

Works

• The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 1847
• An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, 1854

Known for

An English mathematician who recast logic as an algebra of classes and propositions. The algebra that carries his name underlies propositional logic and digital circuit design.

Works

• A Leader's Framework for Decision Making, Harvard Business Review (with David J. Snowden), 2007

Known for

President of Boone Associates and coauthor, with David Snowden, of the Harvard Business Review article that brought the Cynefin framework to managers: it sorts situations into simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder, each calling for a different way of deciding.

Works

• The Concept of the Marketing Mix, Journal of Advertising Research, 1964

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor of advertising credited with coining the term marketing mix, which he used from the late 1940s and in his 1953 presidential address to the American Marketing Association, borrowing James Culliton's description of marketers as mixers of ingredients.

Caveat: Borden's mix listed twelve elements; the four Ps condensation is E. Jerome McCarthy's (1960), not his.

Works

• Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Science, 2009

Known for

A management professor at the University of Kentucky who works on social network analysis. With Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca he wrote a short review of how network ideas such as centrality developed in the social sciences.

Works

• Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert (with Liz Lerman), 2003
• Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (with Liz Lerman), 2022

Known for

Liz Lerman's long-term collaborator, he co-wrote both books on her Critical Response Process, the 2003 primer published by the Dance Exchange and the 2022 study from Wesleyan University Press.

Works

• Statistics for Experimenters, Wiley, 1978

Known for

British statistician who worked on quality control, time series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. Statistics for Experimenters, written with William G. Hunter and J. Stuart Hunter, is a standard text on designing experiments and analyzing their results; he is also known for the remark that all models are wrong but some are useful.

Works

• Patterns of Conflict, briefing slides, final version December 1986, 1986
• The Essence of Winning and Losing, briefing slides, revised through January 1996, 1995

Known for

A United States Air Force fighter pilot and strategist who set out his ideas in briefings, not books. The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) describes competition as a contest of decision cycles, in which the side that orients and acts faster than its opponent can disrupt the opponent's picture of the situation; his last briefing gives the loop's fullest drawing.

Works

• Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, 1990

Known for

Cofounder, with Geary A. Rummler, of the Rummler-Brache Group, a process management consultancy. Their book Improving Performance views an organization as a system of processes and maps the handoffs between functions, the white space on the organization chart, where performance is often lost.

Works

• Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Science (with Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, and Giuseppe Labianca), 2009

Known for

A scholar of social networks in organizations and coauthor of a widely cited review in Science of network analysis, the study of the ties between people and of how a person's position among those ties shapes what happens to them.

Works

• La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II), 1949

Known for

A historian of the Annales school. His study of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean sorts historical time into three speeds: the near-motionless time of geography, the slow cycles of economies and societies, and the fast surface of events and individuals.

Works

• Principles of Corporate Finance, McGraw-Hill, with Stewart C. Myers, 1981

Known for

An emeritus professor of finance at London Business School. With Stewart C. Myers he wrote Principles of Corporate Finance, the standard graduate textbook on valuation, capital budgeting, and financing decisions, later joined by Franklin Allen.

Works

• Who Built Maslow's Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies' Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019

Known for

Co-author, with Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, of the study showing that Abraham Maslow never drew his hierarchy as a pyramid. They trace the pyramid to management writers: Keith Davis's 1957 staircase and Charles McDermid's 1960 Business Horizons article.

Works

• Verification of Forecasts Expressed in Terms of Probability, Monthly Weather Review, 1950

Known for

A meteorologist and statistician who proposed scoring probability forecasts by the mean squared difference between the probabilities given and what happened. The measure, now called the Brier score, rewards forecasters who are both confident and right.

Works

• Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics, Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser, 1989
• Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator, 1991

Known for

A researcher of learning and organizations who directed Xerox PARC and served as Xerox's chief scientist. With Allan Collins and Susan Newman he proposed cognitive apprenticeship, which adapts craft apprenticeship to school subjects through modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and fading, so that an expert's thinking becomes visible to the learner.

Works

• The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (with David Isaacs), Berrett-Koehler, 2005

Known for

Cofounded the World Café with David Isaacs, a format for large-group conversation in rounds at small tables, which began at a 1995 gathering at their home in Mill Valley, California.

Works

• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, 2010

Known for

A writer and consultant who promotes doodling and drawing as thinking tools. She co-wrote Gamestorming with Dave Gray and James Macanufo, a practitioner's collection of workshop games that first published the empathy map from Gray's firm, XPLANE.

Works

• The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1976

Known for

American psychologist who made major contributions to cognitive psychology and to learning theory in education. With David Wood and Gail Ross he introduced the term scaffolding for the support a tutor gives a learner and withdraws as the learner gains control of the task.

Works

• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, St. Martin's Press (with Bill Carr), 2021

Known for

A longtime Amazon executive who, with Bill Carr, described the company's management practices, among them separating controllable input metrics from the output metrics they are meant to move. The book is a practitioner's account, not research.

Works

• Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter, 1996, 1997
• Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters, 1977 onward

Known for

The longtime chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, whose annual letters to shareholders are a practitioner's classic on investing and on allocating capital. The 1996 letter states that an investor needs only to be able to evaluate companies within a circle of competence.

Works

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

Known for

In the Reflections he defended inherited custom against the revolutionaries' abstract reason, and in doing so used the phrase the wardrobe of a moral imagination: the ideas, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, that cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature. It is usually cited as the first use of the phrase moral imagination.

Works

• The Promise of Mediation, 1994

Known for

Coauthor, with Joseph P. Folger, of The Promise of Mediation, which set out transformative mediation. In that model the mediator's aim is a change in how the parties interact, through empowerment, a party's growing capacity to decide for themselves, and recognition, a party's growing ability to see the other's view.

Works

• On Conflict and Consensus: A Handbook on Formal Consensus Decisionmaking, Food Not Bombs Publishing (second edition, with Amy Rothstein, 1991), 1987

Known for

A cofounder of Food Not Bombs who wrote a handbook on formal consensus (revised with Amy Rothstein for its second edition), a structured process in which a group works through every concern until it reaches a decision all members can accept, and who trains groups in the method.

Works

• Use Your Head, BBC Books, with the BBC television series of the same name, 1974
• The Mind Map Book, with Barry Buzan, 1993

Known for

A British author and television presenter who popularized mind mapping: a radial diagram with the central topic in the middle and branches of key words and images. His books are popular guides to study and memory, not research.

Works

• Targeted Selection (behavioral interviewing system), 1975
• Applying the Assessment Center Method to Selection Interviewing (with Richard A. Dapra), Training and Development Journal, 1978

Known for

An industrial and organizational psychologist who co-founded Development Dimensions International in 1970. DDI's Targeted Selection put behavioral interviewing, asking candidates what they actually did in past situations, into a packaged hiring system.

Caveat: The STAR (situation, task, action, result) answer format is widely credited to Targeted Selection, but that credit rests on DDI's own account, which says only that the firm brought the method to market in the 1970s.

Works

• Differential Diagnosis: Presented through an Analysis of 383 Cases, W. B. Saunders; a second volume followed in 1915, 1911

Known for

A Harvard physician who taught diagnosis through cases. His Differential Diagnosis is organized around presenting complaints such as pain, fever, and cough, not around diseases, and he started the Massachusetts General Hospital case conferences that became the Case Records feature of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Works

• Rapid Decision Making on the Fire Ground, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 30th Annual Meeting, 1986

Known for

Co-author, with Gary Klein and Anne Clinton-Cirocco, of the fireground study that first stated the recognition-primed decision model: experienced commanders rarely compare options; they recognize the situation as typical and mentally simulate the first workable course of action.

Works

• Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix, Psychological Bulletin; with Donald W. Fiske, 1959
• Blind Variation and Selective Retentions in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes, Psychological Review, 1960

Known for

A methodologist and philosopher of social science. With Donald Fiske he argued that a measure is valid only if it agrees with other measures of the same trait and disagrees with measures of different traits; he also cast creative and scientific discovery as variation followed by selective retention, the core of his evolutionary epistemology.

Caveat: Blind variation and selective retention as a theory of creativity has been debated for decades, and critics argue its key term, blindness, was never precisely defined.

Works

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949

Known for

A professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who wrote on comparative mythology and religion. The Hero with a Thousand Faces set out the monomyth, a word he took from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as one pattern beneath many myths: the hero's call to adventure, trials, and return.

Works

• The Polak Game, Or: Where Do You Stand?, Journal of Futures Studies 22(2), with Peter Hayward, 2017

Known for

A futurist known for experiential futures, which stage possible futures as objects and scenes people can encounter. With Peter Hayward, who devised the game, he described the Polak Game, in which players place themselves on a grid of optimism and pessimism drawn from Fred Polak's The Image of the Future.

Works

• Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs, Review of Economics and Statistics 67, no. 4 (with Orley Ashenfelter), 1985

Known for

A Canadian American labor economist at Berkeley who shared the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for empirical contributions to labor economics. His work with Orley Ashenfelter on training programs and with Alan Krueger on the minimum wage made the difference-in-differences comparison a standard tool of policy evaluation.

Works

• Working Backwards (with Colin Bryar), 2021

Known for

A longtime senior Amazon executive who, with Colin Bryar, described Amazon's management mechanisms in Working Backwards, among them tracking the controllable input metrics a team can move directly, not only the lagging output metrics such as revenue. It is an insiders' account of company practice, not research.

Works

• The banquet story of the method of loci, as told in Cicero's De Oratore, 55 BCE

Known for

A Greek lyric poet to whom tradition credits the method of loci. In Cicero's telling, Simonides left a banquet hall moments before its roof fell and then identified the crushed guests by recalling where each had sat, which led him to an art of memory built on ordered places.

Caveat: The story is a legend recorded centuries later; Quintilian, retelling it, doubted it, noting that the poet himself nowhere mentions the event.

Works

• Anomaly Detection: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys (with Arindam Banerjee and Vipin Kumar), 2009

Known for

First author of the standard survey of anomaly detection, which organizes the field's techniques (classification, nearest neighbor, clustering, statistical, and others) by the kind of anomaly and data they handle.

Works

• Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind, 2016

Known for

A journalist who teaches at New York University's Clive Davis Institute, he studied how professional cooks organize their stations and their time and set it out in Work Clean as a method for any kind of work. It is a popular book, not research.

Works

• Management Models and Industrial Applications of Linear Programming, 1961

Known for

A mathematician and operations researcher who, with William W. Cooper, developed chance-constrained programming and data envelopment analysis. Their two-volume 1961 book set out how to apply linear programming to management problems, including how far a solution holds as its inputs change.

Works

• Perception in Chess, Cognitive Psychology, 1973

Known for

Carnegie Mellon psychologist whose work with Herbert Simon showed that chess masters recall real game positions far better than novices but lose the advantage on random positions, evidence that expertise rests on large stores of familiar patterns, or chunks. He later showed that exceptional memory is an acquired skill.

Works

• Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response (NIST Special Publication 800-86), 2006

Known for

A Booz Allen Hamilton coauthor, with Karen Kent, Tim Grance, and Hung Dang of NIST, of Special Publication 800-86, the federal guide to collecting, examining, analyzing, and reporting digital evidence during incident response.

Works

• Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards, self-published, 2015

Known for

A consultant who published the Octalysis framework on his blog in 2012. Octalysis sorts the motives that games draw on into eight core drives, set on an octagon, and is used to analyze and design engagement in products. It is a practitioner's framework, not research.

Works

• Recurrent Personality Factors Based on Trait Ratings, US Air Force technical report ASD-TR-61-97 (with Ernest C. Tupes; reprinted in Journal of Personality, 1992), 1961

Known for

With Ernest Tupes, found the same five broad personality factors recurring across Air Force trait-rating samples, an early statement of the model that became the Big Five.

Works

• Exploring the Limits of the Technology S-Curve, Production and Operations Management 1, no. 4 (in two parts), 1992
• The Innovator's Dilemma, 1997
• The Innovator's Solution, with Michael E. Raynor, 2003
• Competing Against Luck, with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, 2016

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor known for the theory of disruptive innovation, which explains how well-run incumbents lose to simpler, cheaper technologies that start in markets the incumbents' best customers do not value. With coauthors he later developed the jobs-to-be-done view, that customers hire a product to make progress in a particular circumstance. In 1992, testing the technology S-curve against the history of disk drives, he found that its flattening is particular to each firm rather than uniform across an industry.

Works

• Business Policy: Text and Cases, 1965

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor and co-author, with Edmund P. Learned, Kenneth R. Andrews, and William D. Guth, of Business Policy, whose text asks a firm to appraise its strengths and weaknesses against the opportunities and threats around it.

Caveat: Harvard's claim to have originated SWOT is contested: recent histories credit Stanford Research Institute's long-range planning group, and the 1965 book has no SWOT matrix.

Works

• Stoic propositional logic (the connectives and the five indemonstrable argument forms), 3rd century BCE

Known for

The third head of the Stoic school, who built logic on propositions where Aristotle had built it on terms. He separated simple from compound propositions, defined the connectives, and set out five basic argument forms, among them the ones now called modus ponens and modus tollens.

Caveat: None of his works survive whole; his logic is known from fragments and later reports, chiefly Diogenes Laertius.

Works

• An Approximate Measure of Value, Journal of the Operations Research Society of America, 1954

Known for

Philosopher and systems scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, a pioneer of operations research, systems analysis, and ethics in management. With Russell Ackoff he proposed an approximate way to measure the value of alternatives by combining weighted scores on several objectives, an early form of the weighted decision matrix.

Works

• Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things, 1984

Known for

A social psychologist who studied compliance in experiments and by training undercover as a salesperson, fundraiser, and telemarketer. Influence groups what he found into six principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity; he proposed a seventh, unity, in 2016. Later editions carry the subtitle The Psychology of Persuasion.

Works

• De Inventione, c. 84 BCE

Known for

The Roman orator and statesman whose early handbook De Inventione set out, in Latin, how a speaker finds arguments, including the circumstances of an act: who did it, what, where, when, why, how, and by what means.

Caveat: The date of De Inventione is not known precisely; it was written when Cicero was a young man, probably in the mid-80s BCE.

Works

• Case Method Fast-Track: A RAD Approach, Addison-Wesley (with Richard Barker), 1994

Known for

Developed the MoSCoW prioritization method (must have, should have, could have, will not have this time) in 1994 for rapid application development; it was later adopted by the dynamic systems development method, DSDM.

Works

• Rapid Decision Making on the Fire Ground, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 30th Annual Meeting, 1986

Known for

Coauthor, with Gary Klein and Roberta Calderwood, of the study of fireground commanders that first set out the recognition-primed decision model: experienced commanders recognized a situation as typical and acted on the first workable option, without comparing alternatives.

Works

• Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics, Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser (Lawrence Erlbaum), 1989

Known for

Northwestern University learning scientist whose work spans cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and education. With John Seely Brown and Susan Newman he described cognitive apprenticeship, which makes an expert's thinking visible through modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration.

Works

• gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion (with Michael L. Begeman), ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1988
• Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, Wiley, 2006

Known for

He and Michael Begeman built gIBIS, a graphical hypertext version of the Issue-Based Information System that Werner Kunz and Horst Rittel had proposed in 1970, for recording the questions, positions, and arguments behind a design. He later turned IBIS into dialogue mapping, a way of facilitating meetings by mapping the discussion live.

Works

• Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique, O'Reilly, with Aaron Irizarry, 2015

Known for

A design director at the consultancy Mad*Pow who, with Aaron Irizarry, wrote the standard practitioner's guide to design critique. They treat critique as analysis of a design against its objectives, distinct from a gut reaction or a directive, and set out how to give, receive, and facilitate it.

Works

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams, 1999

Known for

A software designer, often called the father of Visual Basic, who introduced personas to interaction design: specific archetypal users, built from interviews with real ones, for whom a product is designed. He began using them in 1983, and this book made the method widely known.

Works

• Winning at New Products, Addison-Wesley, 1986
• Stage-Gate Systems: A New Tool for Managing New Products, Business Horizons, 1990
• Optimizing the Stage-Gate Process: What Best-Practice Companies Do, Part II, Research-Technology Management; with Scott J. Edgett and Elko J. Kleinschmidt, 2002

Known for

Professor emeritus at McMaster University, known for the Stage-Gate process for new products: work runs in stages, and at each gate a team decides go, kill, hold, or recycle against set criteria, which best-practice firms score on a gate scorecard.

Works

• Management Models and Industrial Applications of Linear Programming, 1961

Known for

A pioneer of management science, known as "Mr. Linear Programming," who taught at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and the University of Texas at Austin. With Abraham Charnes he wrote the two-volume work that carried linear programming into industry, and the two later developed chance-constrained programming and, with Edwardo Rhodes, data envelopment analysis.

Works

• Real Options: A Practitioner's Guide, 2001

Known for

A finance professor at UCLA and later MIT Sloan, and a McKinsey partner from 1987 to 1998, who co-wrote Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies. Real Options, written with Vladimir Antikarov, is a practitioner's guide to valuing a project's flexibility with option-pricing methods.

Works

• The Effects of Three Potential Aids for Making Strategic Decisions on Prediction Accuracy, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1978
• Agreement and Thinking Alike: Ingredients for Poor Decisions, Academy of Management Executive (with Charles R. Schwenk), 1990

Known for

A researcher of structured conflict in strategic decisions who compared aids such as devil's advocacy and dialectical inquiry for strategic predictions and, with Charles Schwenk, argued that managers should build disagreement into their decisions.

Works

• Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual, 1992

Known for

A personality psychologist at the National Institutes of Health who, with Robert R. McCrae, built the NEO inventories, the most widely used measures of the five-factor model: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Works

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989

Known for

Author of a best-selling self-help book on personal effectiveness. In it he sorted tasks into four quadrants by urgency and importance and distinguished a Circle of Concern from a smaller Circle of Influence, where effort can change things. It is a popular synthesis, not research.

Caveat: The urgent and important distinction is older: it is usually traced to a remark attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is why the grid is also called the Eisenhower matrix.

Works

• The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1, 2001

Known for

A working memory researcher at the University of Missouri. He argued that when rehearsal and chunking are controlled, people hold about four chunks in mind at once, well below George Miller's seven.

Works

• The Techniques of Creative Thinking, 1954

Known for

A University of Nebraska journalism professor who taught creative thinking there and is credited with attribute listing: list the attributes of an object or problem, then change each one in turn to generate new ideas.

Caveat: One author database lists an earlier book under a similar title dated 1950; library catalogs give The Techniques of Creative Thinking as Hawthorn Books, 1954.

Works

• Construct Validity in Psychological Tests (with Paul E. Meehl), Psychological Bulletin, 1955

Known for

With Paul Meehl he defined construct validity: when a test measures a trait that has no single criterion, its validity rests on a network of predicted relations between the construct and other measures, and each confirmed prediction supports both the test and the theory behind it.

Works

• The Importance of Cognitive Errors in Diagnosis and Strategies to Minimize Them, Academic Medicine 78(8), 2003

Known for

A physician and researcher who cataloged the cognitive dispositions to respond, such as anchoring, premature closure, and overconfidence, that lead clinicians to wrong diagnoses. He argued that clinicians can learn to debias their own reasoning, with metacognition, stepping back to examine one's own thinking, as the central strategy.

Works

• The Hidden Power of Social Networks, Harvard Business School Press, with Andrew Parker, 2004

Known for

Known for applying social network analysis to management. With Andrew Parker he drew on a study of more than sixty informal networks to show managers how to map the relationships through which work actually gets done and find the people at their centers and edges.

Works

• Breaking the Impasse: Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes, Basic Books; with Lawrence Susskind, 1987

Known for

Co-author, with Lawrence Susskind of MIT, of the book that set out consensual, all-gain approaches to public disputes, the basis of what Susskind and his colleagues later called the Mutual Gains Approach.

Works

• The Management of Marketing Costs, Division of Research, Harvard Business School, 1948

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor whose 1948 study of manufacturers' marketing costs described the executive as a mixer of ingredients. His colleague Neil Borden took up the image and named the combination the marketing mix.

Works

• Who Built Maslow's Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies' Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019

Known for

Management scholar who studies how textbooks present the field's founding ideas, co-author of A New History of Management, and, with Todd Bridgman and John Ballard, of the study tracing the Maslow pyramid to management writers rather than Maslow.

Works

• Seeing in Multiple Horizons: Connecting Futures to Strategy, Journal of Futures Studies 13(1), with Anthony Hodgson, 2008

Known for

One of the futures practitioners, with Anthony Hodgson, Bill Sharpe, Graham Leicester, and others, who developed the Three Horizons framework, which reads change as a dominant system declining, an emerging one rising, and a contested zone of transition between them.

Works

• An Experimental Application of the Delphi Method to the Use of Experts, Management Science, 1963

Known for

A RAND Corporation researcher who, with Olaf Helmer and Nicholas Rescher, developed the Delphi method, which polls experts anonymously in rounds and feeds back the group's answers between rounds. The 1963 paper with Helmer was the first public account of the method.

Works

• Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response, NIST Special Publication 800-86 (with Karen Kent, Suzanne Chevalier, and Tim Grance), 2006

Known for

A Booz Allen Hamilton coauthor of the NIST guide to digital forensics in incident response, which sets out collection, examination, analysis, and reporting, and the handling of evidence so that its chain of custody holds.

Works

• Maximization of a Linear Function of Variables Subject to Linear Inequalities, Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation, edited by Tjalling C. Koopmans, Wiley, 1951
• Linear Programming and Extensions, Princeton University Press, 1963

Known for

An American mathematical scientist who devised the simplex method for solving linear programming problems in 1947 while working on Air Force planning. He is counted, with Leonid Kantorovich and John von Neumann, among the founders of linear programming.

Works

• On the Origin of Species, 1859

Known for

The English naturalist who set out evolution by natural selection: heritable variation, a struggle for existence, and the differential survival and reproduction of better-fitted variants, which together change populations over generations.

Works

• How to Design Smart Business Experiments, Harvard Business Review, 2009

Known for

A Babson College professor known for work on business process reengineering and on competing with analytics, he argued in this article that companies should test new ideas on a small scale against a control before rolling them out, and described the capabilities that make such testing routine.

Works

• Clio and the Economics of QWERTY, American Economic Review 75(2), 1985

Known for

An economist of technical change who made path dependence a working idea in economics. His account of the QWERTY keyboard argued that small historical events, technical interrelatedness, and increasing returns can lock an industry into a standard that persists after better alternatives appear.

Works

• The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976
• Universal Darwinism, in Evolution from Molecules to Men, edited by D. S. Bendall (Cambridge University Press), 1983

Known for

An evolutionary biologist known for the gene's-eye view of natural selection. In The Selfish Gene he coined the word meme for a unit of cultural transmission and compared replicators by their longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity; in Universal Darwinism he argued that Darwinian selection is the only known process able to produce adapted complexity, wherever life arises.

Caveat: Memetics has not become an established science; critics question whether ideas replicate with the stability and discreteness the gene analogy needs.

Works

• The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1967
• CoRT Thinking, 1973
• Six Thinking Hats, 1985
• Serious Creativity, 1992

Known for

A Maltese physician and writer who coined the term lateral thinking. His CoRT lessons (among them PMI, plus, minus, interesting, and OPV, other people's views) and Six Thinking Hats are popular structured-thinking tools for schools and business, more concerned with usefulness than with tests of their effect.

Caveat: A review of 42 thinking frameworks (Moseley and colleagues, Frameworks for Thinking) found sparse research evidence that CoRT or Six Thinking Hats training improves thinking in general.

Works

• Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy, W. W. Norton, 1988

Known for

Developed solution-focused brief therapy with Insoo Kim Berg and their team at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. The approach builds on what the client wants and on exceptions to the problem, using tools such as the miracle question and scaling questions.

Works

• Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, 1985

Known for

A psychologist at the University of Rochester who, with Richard M. Ryan, founded self-determination theory, which distinguishes motivation a person endorses from motivation imposed by rewards or pressure and ties the first to the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Works

• Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability, Ashgate, 2007

Known for

A safety scientist at Griffith University known for his work on human factors and safety. He argues that organizations learn more when they treat error as a symptom of the system than when they blame individuals, and he later developed restorative just culture.

Works

• Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation, Meriwether (with Charna Halpern and Kim Howard Johnson), 1994

Known for

An American actor and teacher who coached many of the best-known comedians of the late twentieth century and, with Charna Halpern, developed long-form improvisation at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago. Their manual sets out the practice of accepting and building on a partner's offer.

Works

• A Group Process Model for Problem Identification and Program Planning, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1971
• Group Techniques for Program Planning: A Guide to Nominal Group and Delphi Processes, Scott, Foresman, 1975

Known for

Organization scholar, later dean of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, who with Andrew Van de Ven developed the nominal group technique: silent idea generation, round-robin recording, discussion, and independent voting.

Works

• Turtles All the Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius, with John Grinder, 1987

Known for

An early developer of neuro-linguistic programming. With John Grinder she set out the perceptual positions: seeing a situation from your own place, from the other person's, and from a detached observer's.

Caveat: Neuro-linguistic programming is widely regarded as pseudoscience; reviews have found no empirical support for its core claims, and perceptual positions is a practitioner exercise, not a tested finding.

Works

• Out of the Crisis, 1986
• The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, 1993

Known for

An American statistician and quality consultant who taught Japanese managers from 1950 to see production as one system linking suppliers, producers, and customers, and who carried Walter Shewhart's cycle of improvement into management practice, restating it as Plan, Do, Study, Act in 1993.

Caveat: Deming called the cycle the Shewhart cycle; the Plan, Do, Check, Act wording is often attributed to him, but he preferred Study to Check. Out of the Crisis first appeared in 1982 as Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position.

Works

• Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 1995
• Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 2013

Known for

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea he argued that natural selection is a general algorithm that applies wherever there is variation, selection, and heredity, including in culture, where he extended Richard Dawkins's idea of the meme. In Intuition Pumps he presented Anatol Rapoport's rules for criticism: restate the other view so well that its holder would accept it, say where you agree and what you learned, and only then rebut.

Works

• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, Pragmatic Bookshelf, with Diana Larsen, 2006

Known for

With Diana Larsen she wrote the standard practitioner's guide to retrospectives for software teams. Their five-stage structure (set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, close the retrospective) and their catalog of activities made the retrospective a regular, facilitated meeting held during a project, not only at its end.

Works

• Discourse on the Method, 1637

Known for

A French philosopher and mathematician who set out four rules of method: accept as true only what is clearly and distinctly known, divide each difficulty into as many parts as needed, order thoughts from the simplest objects to the most complex, and make enumerations so complete that nothing is left out.

Works

• The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving, ASQ Quality Press, 2007

Known for

Known for restating Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints thinking processes, the current reality tree, the evaporating cloud, and the trees that follow, as a general method for complex problems. A practitioner's manual.

Works

• The Rise of Hermeneutics (Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik), 1900

Known for

A German philosopher who sought the methodological foundations of the human sciences, including history and psychology. He held that they rest on understanding, interpreting the expressions of human life in their historical context, and his 1900 essay traces the art of interpretation back to Hellenistic Greece.

Works

• The Big Five Inventory: Versions 4a and 54, 1991

Known for

Coauthor, with Oliver P. John and R. L. Kentle, of the Big Five Inventory, the 44-item questionnaire from the University of California, Berkeley that measures extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness, and remains one of the most used short measures of the five factors.

Works

• How to Make Meetings Work: The New Interaction Method, 1976

Known for

Co-wrote, with David Straus, a practical guide to running meetings by the Interaction Method, which gives the meeting a neutral facilitator and a recorder and keeps a visible group memory of what the meeting decides.

Works

• The Practice of Management, 1954
• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973

Known for

An Austrian American consultant, educator, and author whose books helped found management as a discipline. He popularized management by objectives and self-control, in which managers and their superiors agree on measurable objectives.

Works

• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, 2018

Known for

A former professional poker player who writes on decision making under uncertainty. Thinking in Bets, a popular book, argues for judging decisions by their quality and not by their outcomes, which she calls resulting, and for treating beliefs as bets held with degrees of confidence.

Works

• Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (with Fiona Raby), 2013

Known for

With Fiona Raby, his partner in the studio Dunne and Raby, he developed critical and speculative design: making objects from possible futures to provoke debate about what futures people want, not to sell products. He taught at the Royal College of Art and The New School.

Works

• SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development, D.O.K. Publishers, 1971

Known for

An American educator who arranged Alex Osborn's idea-spurring questions into the mnemonic SCAMPER (substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, reverse) as games for developing children's imagination. The checklist is now used widely for generating variations on an existing product or idea.

Works

• Making Strategy: The Journey of Strategic Management, Sage, with Fran Ackermann, 1998

Known for

A management scientist at the University of Strathclyde known for cognitive mapping and problem structuring methods. With Fran Ackermann he wrote Making Strategy, which treats political feasibility and stakeholder management as part of strategy and is often cited as a source of the power and interest grid for sorting stakeholders.

Works

• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999

Known for

Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Her 1999 study of 51 manufacturing teams defined team psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and found it associated with learning behavior.

Works

• 360 Degree Feedback: The Powerful New Model for Employee Assessment and Performance Improvement, AMACOM, 1996

Known for

Co-author, with Ann J. Ewen, of an early practitioner's book on multi-source, or 360-degree, feedback, in which an employee is assessed by supervisors, peers, direct reports, and others.

Works

• Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois, 1954

Known for

The thirty-fourth president of the United States. In a 1954 address he quoted an unnamed former college president: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." He did not claim the idea, and the urgent and important grid named for him was drawn by later writers.

Works

• The Thinker's Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning (with Richard Paul), Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2006

Known for

President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, who with Richard Paul wrote a long series of short guides that turn critical thinking concepts into questions and checklists, among them a guide to Socratic questioning.

Works

• The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review (with Ralf T. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer), 1993

Known for

A Florida State University psychologist of expertise who argued that expert performance comes chiefly from deliberate practice: effortful work on specific weaknesses, with feedback, sustained over years.

Caveat: Later meta-analyses found that accumulated practice explains a smaller share of differences in skill than the 1993 paper implied, and how large its role is remains debated.

Works

• The Theory of Probabilities and Telephone Conversations, Nyt Tidsskrift for Matematik B 20 (in Danish, Sandsynlighedsregning og Telefonsamtaler), 1909

Known for

A Danish mathematician at the Copenhagen Telephone Company who founded teletraffic engineering and queueing theory. His 1909 paper showed that random telephone calls follow a Poisson distribution, and the unit of traffic load is named after him.

Works

• Le Guide culinaire, 1903

Known for

The French chef who codified classical French restaurant cooking in Le Guide culinaire, written with Philéas Gilbert, E. Fétu, and others, and who organized the professional kitchen into the brigade system, in which mise en place is the working discipline.

Caveat: Mise en place is kitchen vocabulary that no one person coined; Escoffier systematized the kitchen it belongs to.

Works

• Introductio in analysin infinitorum, 1748

Known for

Chapter 16 of the Introductio treats the partition of numbers: Euler counted the ways a number can be written as a sum by expanding a product of factors as a power series, so that the coefficients do the counting. This is the method of generating functions that combinatorics still uses.

Works

• 360 Degree Feedback: The Powerful New Model for Employee Assessment and Performance Improvement, AMACOM, 1996

Known for

Co-author, with Mark R. Edwards, of an early practitioner's book on multi-source, or 360-degree, feedback, in which an employee is assessed by supervisors, peers, direct reports, and others.

Works

• On the Production of Transient Electric Currents in Iron and Steel Conductors by Twisting Them When Magnetised or by Magnetising Them When Twisted, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 33, 1881

Known for

A Scottish physicist and engineer who, while teaching in Tokyo, studied how the magnetization of iron lags behind the force applied to it, and coined the word hysteresis for that lag. The term later passed into other fields, among them economics, for any system whose present state depends on its history.

Works

• Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge University Press, with Stanley Wasserman, 1994

Known for

With Stanley Wasserman she wrote Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, the field's most comprehensive reference on method, which sets out the measures of centrality used to find who sits at the center of a network.

Works

• When to Leap on the Hype Cycle, Gartner Group report, 1995
• Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time, Harvard Business Press; with Mark Raskino, 2008

Known for

The Gartner analyst who introduced the hype cycle in 1995: a new technology rises to a peak of inflated expectations, falls into a trough of disillusionment, and only then climbs to steady productive use.

Caveat: The hype cycle is a judgment chart, not a measured law; analyses of Gartner's charts have found that few technologies pass through the full cycle.

Works

• My Observations During the Explosion at Trinity on July 16, 1945, 1945

Known for

An Italian-American physicist known for quick, approximate calculations from little data. At the Trinity test he dropped scraps of paper into the blast wave and, from how far they moved, estimated a yield of about ten thousand tons of TNT, roughly half the measured figure and within an order of magnitude. Estimation problems of this kind are now named after him.

Works

• Dealing with an Angry Public: The Mutual Gains Approach to Resolving Disputes (with Lawrence Susskind), Free Press, 1996

Known for

Coauthor with Lawrence Susskind of a book arguing that companies and public agencies facing angry publics should negotiate with them for mutual gains, acknowledging concerns, sharing information, and building trust, instead of trying to manage them.

Works

• Leading on the Creative Edge, Piñon Press, 1996

Known for

A teacher and facilitator of Creative Problem Solving who has presented programs to more than 600 organizations, and author of Leading on the Creative Edge (1996) and other books on the method for managers. With Diane Foucar-Szocki and Bill Shepard he devised PPCO (pluses, potentials, concerns, and overcoming concerns), a tool for developing an idea before judging it.

Works

• Training for Calibration, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 26, no. 2 (with Sarah Lichtenstein, first author), 1980

Known for

A Carnegie Mellon decision researcher known for work on hindsight bias, risk perception, and the calibration of probability judgments. With Sarah Lichtenstein he showed that feedback training can reduce overconfidence in probability estimates.

Works

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (with William Ury), 1981

Known for

A Harvard Law School professor and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project who, with William Ury, set out principled negotiation: separate the people from the problem, focus on interests, invent options for mutual gain, and use objective criteria. The book also defined the BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

Caveat: Bruce Patton edited the first edition and is credited as coauthor from the second edition (1991).

Works

• Statistical Methods for Research Workers, 1925
• The Design of Experiments, 1935

Known for

Statistical Methods for Research Workers gave working scientists tests of significance and the analysis of variance. The Design of Experiments set out the principles of experimental design, including randomization, replication, and blocking, and the null hypothesis, illustrated by the lady tasting tea.

Works

• Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix, Psychological Bulletin 56(2), with Donald T. Campbell, 1959

Known for

With Donald T. Campbell he proposed the multitrait-multimethod matrix for testing construct validity. A measure should correlate with other measures of the same trait taken by different methods (convergent validity) and should not correlate too highly with measures of different traits (discriminant validity), so that shared method is not mistaken for shared substance.

Works

• The Mom Test, 2013

Known for

A founder who wrote The Mom Test, a short practitioner's guide to customer interviews. Its premise is that even your mother will give a kind answer about your idea, so the questions should be about the customer's life and past behavior, never about the idea. It is a practitioner's guide, not research.

Works

• From Nobel Prize to Project Management: Getting Risks Right, Project Management Journal, 2006

Known for

A scholar of megaprojects at Oxford and Copenhagen. He turned Kahneman and Tversky's outside view into reference class forecasting for large projects, tracing cost and schedule overruns to optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation and correcting forecasts with the record of similar past projects.

Works

• A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive '09), 2009

Known for

Founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, formerly the Persuasive Technology Lab. His model holds that a behavior is the product of motivation, ability, and a trigger, and that all three must occur at the same moment or the behavior does not happen.

Works

• The Promise of Mediation, 1994

Known for

Coauthor, with Robert A. Baruch Bush, of The Promise of Mediation, which set out transformative mediation. In that model the mediator's aim is a change in how the parties interact, through empowerment and recognition.

Works

• Creative Experience, Longmans, Green, 1924
• Constructive Conflict, a lecture, collected in Dynamic Administration
• Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, edited by Henry C. Metcalf and Lyndall Urwick, 1940

Known for

A social thinker and early management theorist who argued that conflict, handled well, can be constructive. She distinguished domination and compromise from integration, in which the parties find a solution that meets both sides' real desires, the idea later called win-win.

Works

• Industrial Dynamics, MIT Press, 1961
• Market Growth as Influenced by Capital Investment, Industrial Management Review 9, no. 2, 1968

Known for

An MIT engineer and management theorist who founded system dynamics, the modeling of organizations as stocks, flows, and feedback loops with delays. Industrial Dynamics drew on a study of Sprague Electric and gave the first account of what is now called the bullwhip effect.

Works

• Anatomy of an Experimental Political Stock Market, American Economic Review, 1992

Known for

A University of Iowa economist and a founder of the Iowa Electronic Markets, real-money markets on election outcomes run for teaching and research; the 1992 paper found that the forerunner market forecast the vote better than the opinion polls.

Works

• Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean, Forte Labs, 2021

Known for

A productivity writer and teacher, the founder of Forte Labs, who adapts the kitchen discipline of mise en place to knowledge work in a 2021 essay. His writing is practitioner advice, not research.

Works

• Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage, 1986

Known for

A McKinsey director, he argued that a technology's performance improves along an S-curve, slowly, then quickly, then slowly again as it nears its limits, and that incumbents lose to attackers who move early to the next curve. The book is a practitioner's synthesis drawn from McKinsey's client work.

Works

• PPCO (Pluses, Potentials, Concerns, Overcoming concerns), 1982

Known for

Developed PPCO with Bill Shepard and Roger Firestien in 1982, the Creative Problem Solving tool that strengthens an idea by listing its pluses and potentials before turning each concern into a problem to solve.

Works

• Letter to Joseph Priestley, September 19, 1772, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, volume 19 (Yale University Press, 1975), 1772

Known for

Asked by Joseph Priestley for advice on a hard choice, Franklin described what he called moral or prudential algebra: list the reasons for and against in two columns over several days, estimate the weight of each, strike out reasons on opposite sides that balance, and see where the balance lies. It is the oldest well-known statement of the weighted pros-and-cons list.

Works

• Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Pitman, 1984

Known for

A professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School who set out stakeholder theory: a firm should identify the groups that affect it or are affected by it and manage with their interests in view, not only the shareholders'.

Works

• Centrality in Social Networks: Conceptual Clarification, Social Networks, 1979

Known for

A founder of social network analysis. His 1979 paper sorted the many centrality measures into three conceptions, degree, betweenness, and closeness, and gave each a standard formula, still the field's reference.

Works

• Begriffsschrift, 1879

Known for

A German logician, philosopher, and mathematician. Begriffsschrift, a formula language for pure thought modeled on arithmetic, set out the first formal system with quantified variables and is the starting point of modern symbolic logic.

Works

• A Non-cooperative Equilibrium for Supergames, Review of Economic Studies 38(1), 1971

Known for

An economist and game theorist who proved an early folk theorem for infinitely repeated games: any outcome better for every player than a one-shot Nash equilibrium can be sustained when players are patient enough and threaten to revert to that equilibrium after a deviation.

Works

• The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information, Econometrica 54, no. 3 (with Eric Maskin), 1986

Known for

An MIT game theorist who works on repeated games, reputation, and learning in games. With Eric Maskin he proved the folk theorem for repeated games with discounting, showing that patient players can sustain almost any individually rational outcome.

Works

• Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode), 1960

Known for

A German philosopher of hermeneutics who held that understanding a text is shaped by the interpreter's own historical tradition and prejudgments, and that understanding happens in a fusion of horizons between interpreter and text.

Works

• The Trusted Advisor, 2000

Known for

Coauthor, with David H. Maister and Charles H. Green, of The Trusted Advisor, the professional services book that introduced the trust equation: credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-orientation. It is a practitioner's model, not a measured scale.

Works

• Regression Towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1886
• Vox Populi, Nature, 1907

Known for

From the heights of parents and children he found that children of unusually tall or short parents are, on average, closer to the mean, which he called regression towards mediocrity, now regression to the mean. In Vox Populi he reported that the median of some eight hundred guesses at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox at a Plymouth fair fell within one percent of the true weight.

Works

• Apollo Root Cause Analysis, Apollonian Publications, 1999

Known for

The developer of the Apollo root cause analysis method, a practitioner's method used in industry. It charts a problem as a branching set of cause-and-effect relationships supported by evidence, in place of a single linear chain.

Works

• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Crown, with Philip E. Tetlock, 2015

Known for

A Canadian journalist and author who wrote Superforecasting with Philip Tetlock, a popular account of the Good Judgment Project's findings on the volunteers who forecast world events most accurately and the habits that set them apart. The research is Tetlock's; Gardner is the coauthor of its popular telling.

Works

• The Threats to Our Products, Microsoft internal paper, with Loren Kohnfelder, 1999

Known for

With Loren Kohnfelder at Microsoft, wrote the April 1999 internal paper that introduced STRIDE, a mnemonic for six kinds of threat to software: spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege.

Works

• Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law, arXiv preprint, 2018

Known for

A researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He first named four ways a proxy measure can come apart from the goal it stands for once it is optimized: regressional, extremal, causal, and adversarial. The 2018 paper with David Manheim develops that taxonomy.

Works

• What You Don't Know About Making Decisions, Harvard Business Review (with Michael A. Roberto), 2001

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor who, with Michael Roberto, described decision making as a process to be managed, not a single event, and recommended structured debate such as devil's advocacy to test proposals.

Works

• Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973

Known for

An American anthropologist who treated culture as a web of meanings to be interpreted. He took the term thick description from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and made it the aim of ethnography: describing an action together with the context that gives it meaning.

Works

• Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases, Garland; later Routledge, 2000

Known for

A Yale philosopher who works on thought experiments, imagination, and moral psychology, and who coined the term alief. Her book examines how imagined cases can teach us something new and where they mislead.

Works

• Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy, Cognitive Science, 1983

Known for

A Northwestern University cognitive psychologist whose structure-mapping theory holds that an analogy maps a system of relations from a base domain to a target, and that people prefer mappings that preserve connected higher-order relations over shared surface features.

Works

• Methoden und Organisation der Ideenfindung: Gruppenuntersuchung am Battelle-Institut, Battelle-Institut, Frankfurt, 1972
• Modern Techniques for Solving Problems (with Götz Schaude and Helmut Schlicksupp), Chemical Engineering, 1973

Known for

German innovation researcher who led the Battelle Institute's 1971 to 1972 study of creativity techniques in Frankfurt, with colleagues including Götz Schaude and Helmut Schlicksupp; the study produced card-passing brainwriting methods and the scenario technique.

Works

• The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach, 2009

Known for

A founder of the Duquesne school of phenomenological psychology, he adapted the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty into a research method for describing the structure of lived experience from participants' own accounts.

Works

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Little, Brown, 2000

Known for

A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996 whose first book popularized the idea that social trends spread like epidemics and change suddenly once they pass a threshold. It is a popular synthesis that borrows the term tipping point from earlier work in sociology and epidemiology, not original research.

Works

• The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Aldine, with Anselm Strauss, 1967

Known for

A sociologist who, with Anselm Strauss, founded grounded theory, in which theory is generated from data by constant comparison and theoretical sampling. Sampling for a category stops at theoretical saturation, the point at which new data no longer add new properties to it.

Works

• Futurizing Teaching vs Futures Course, Social Science Record, 1972

Known for

Co-founder and longtime head of the Millennium Project. He devised the futures wheel as a graduate student at Antioch in the early 1970s: put a change at the center, then ring it with its direct consequences and the consequences of those.

Works

• Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 1974

Known for

A sociologist of face-to-face interaction. Frame Analysis asks how people answer the question of what is going on here: through frames, organizing principles that give events their meaning, whether natural happenings or social acts guided by someone's intent.

Works

• Language and Individual Differences: The Search for Universals in Personality Lexicons, Review of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 2, ed. L. Wheeler, 1981
• An Alternative "Description of Personality": The Big-Five Factor Structure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59(6), 1990

Known for

A personality psychologist at the University of Oregon and the Oregon Research Institute, associated with the lexical hypothesis that important personality traits are encoded in everyday language. He coined the term Big Five and showed the five factors recurring across large sets of trait words.

Works

• Lindy's Law, The New Republic, June 13, 1964, 1964

Known for

An American academic and writer on popular culture. His 1964 essay reported the folklore at Lindy's delicatessen in New York that a comedian's future run can be predicted from his exposure so far, the idea later reworked by Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Nicholas Taleb into the Lindy effect.

Works

• The Goal (with Jeff Cox), 1984
• It's Not Luck, 1994
• Critical Chain, 1997

Known for

An Israeli physicist turned management thinker who created the theory of constraints, which holds that a system's output is limited by its constraint and that improvement means finding, exploiting, and elevating it. He taught it through business novels, adding the thinking processes in It's Not Luck and applying it to project scheduling in Critical Chain.

Works

• Goal Achievement: The Role of Intentions, European Review of Social Psychology, 1993
• Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans, American Psychologist, 1999

Known for

He distinguished goal intentions (I intend to reach X) from implementation intentions, if-then plans that tie a specific action to a specific situation (when situation Y arises, I will do Z). His studies found that forming such plans makes people more likely to act on their goals.

Works

• Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience, Papers in Monetary Economics, volume I, Reserve Bank of Australia, 1975

Known for

A monetary economist at the Bank of England and later the London School of Economics. Goodhart's law, in his original wording, says that any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes; the common phrasing, that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure, is a later paraphrase associated with Keith Hoskin and Marilyn Strathern.

Works

• Systems Thinking: What, Why, When, Where, and How?, The Systems Thinker 8(2), 1997

Known for

A systems thinking practitioner at Innovation Associates Organizational Learning. His article taught the iceberg: events at the surface, patterns of behavior over time beneath them, and the structures, including mental models, that produce both, so that lasting fixes come from changing the structure.

Works

• Long-range forecasting study with Olaf Helmer (RAND paper P-2982), 1964
• Initial Experiments with the Cross Impact Matrix Method of Forecasting, Futures, 1968
• Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0, 2009

Known for

A futurist who worked with Olaf Helmer at RAND on early Delphi forecasting, developed cross-impact analysis with Helmer in 1966 to model how events change one another's likelihood, and was among the founders of the Institute for the Future. With Jerome C. Glenn he edited the Millennium Project's Futures Research Methodology, writing its chapters on Delphi and cross-impact analysis.

Works

• Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity, Harper, 1961

Known for

Co-creator, with George M. Prince, of synectics, developed in the 1950s in Arthur D. Little's invention design group. The method uses analogy to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

Works

• Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln, 1854

Known for

A Prussian civil servant whose 1854 book stated the law of diminishing marginal utility, that the satisfaction from each further unit of a good declines, and drew rules for human conduct from it. The book went almost unread until a copy was found in 1878 by a colleague of William Stanley Jevons.

Works

• Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response (NIST Special Publication 800-86), National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2006

Known for

A computer security specialist at NIST and co-author, with Karen Kent, Suzanne Chevalier, and Hung Dang, of the federal guide to collecting, examining, and preserving digital evidence during incident response.

Works

• Threshold Models of Collective Behavior, American Journal of Sociology 83(6), 1978

Known for

A Stanford sociologist best known for the strength of weak ties. His threshold model holds that each person joins a collective action once enough others have, so small differences in the spread of thresholds can decide whether a riot, fad, or movement takes off.

Works

• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, O'Reilly Media (with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo), 2010
• Empathy Map Canvas (updated version), XPLANE, 2017

Known for

A designer and coauthor of Gamestorming, a practitioner's collection of workshop games that includes the empathy map, a canvas for recording what a person says, thinks, does, and feels. He published an updated version of the canvas in 2017.

Works

• Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't, BMJ, 1996

Known for

British public health physician who held senior posts in screening, knowledge management, and value in healthcare and supported the UK Cochrane Centre. He co-authored, with David Sackett and others, the editorial defining evidence-based medicine as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in decisions about the care of individual patients.

Works

• The Trusted Advisor, 2000

Known for

Founder of Trusted Advisor Associates and coauthor, with David H. Maister and Robert M. Galford, of The Trusted Advisor, where the trust equation first appeared: credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-orientation. It is a practitioner's model, not a measured scale.

Works

• Pain-Cost and Opportunity-Cost, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1894

Known for

An economist whose 1894 article is credited as the first appearance of the term opportunity cost. He argued that what people insist on being paid for is in general the sacrifice of an opportunity, not the pain of labor.

Works

• Better Brainstorming, Harvard Business Review, 2018
• Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life, 2018

Known for

Executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, he devised the question burst: a person states a challenge, and for about four minutes others ask only questions, which the person writes down word for word without answering, before choosing the questions that open a new line of attack.

Works

• Catalyzing Decisions: How a Coin Flip Strengthens Affective Reactions, PLOS ONE, 2019

Known for

A University of Basel social psychologist who, with Mariela Jaffé and Leonie Reutner, showed that flipping a coin over an undecided choice strengthens the feelings each option stirs, so the flip works as a catalyst for the decision more than as its decider.

Works

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, 2002

Known for

One of the four co-founders of the training firm VitalSmarts and co-author, with Kerry Patterson and the other two, of Crucial Conversations, a popular guide to talking through high-stakes disagreements. It is a practitioner's book, not research.

Works

• Sun Tzu: The Art of War, Oxford University Press, translation with an introduction, 1963

Known for

A United States Marine Corps brigadier general who studied Chinese military history at Oxford. His translation of The Art of War, a revision of his doctoral work, became one of the standard English versions.

Works

• Turtles All the Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius, Grinder and Associates, with Judith DeLozier, 1987

Known for

A linguist who, with Richard Bandler, created neuro-linguistic programming. With Judith DeLozier he described three perceptual positions for viewing an interaction: from your own point of view, from the other person's, and from that of a detached observer.

Caveat: Neuro-linguistic programming is widely regarded as pseudoscience; perceptual positions are a perspective-taking exercise, not a tested finding.

Works

• Metropolitan Segregation, Scientific American, 1957

Known for

A University of Chicago political scientist credited with coining the tipping point, in his studies of white flight: the share of Black residents at which white residents of a neighborhood begin to leave en masse.

Works

• Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions, Foris Publications, 1984

Known for

Dutch speech communication scholar at the University of Amsterdam who, with Frans van Eemeren, founded pragma-dialectics, which models argument as a critical discussion aimed at resolving a difference of opinion and states rules that a reasonable discussion follows.

Works

• High Output Management, 1983

Known for

Intel's third employee and later its chief executive. High Output Management is a manager's handbook drawn from his practice at Intel, including the objectives and key results system; John Doerr, who learned it in a course Grove taught at Intel in 1975, carried it to Google and called Grove the father of OKRs in Measure What Matters (2018).

Works

• Discourse Strategies, Cambridge University Press, 1982

Known for

A Berkeley sociolinguist and founder of interactional sociolinguistics. With Jan-Petter Blom he described situational and metaphorical code-switching, and he showed how contextualization cues in speech signal how an utterance is to be taken.

Works

• Group Techniques for Program Planning: A Guide to Nominal Group and Delphi Processes, 1975

Known for

Coauthor, with Andre L. Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven, of the 1975 guide to the nominal group technique and Delphi, and of a 1973 experiment comparing estimates made by individuals, interacting groups, Delphi groups, and nominal groups.

Works

• Business Policy: Text and Cases, with Edmund P. Learned, C. Roland Christensen, and Kenneth R. Andrews, 1965

Known for

One of the four Harvard authors of the business policy textbook that set out the matching of a company's internal strengths and weaknesses to its external opportunities and threats, the frame later called SWOT.

Works

• The Silent Language, 1959
• The Hidden Dimension, 1966

Known for

An American anthropologist who studied how cultures communicate without words. He named proxemics, the study of how people use space, and described zones of intimate, personal, social, and public distance in The Hidden Dimension.

Works

• The Effects of a Normative Intervention on Group Decision-Making Performance, Human Relations, 1970
• Decisions, Decisions, Decisions, 1971

Known for

With W. H. Watson, tested whether giving groups a short set of guidelines for reaching consensus improved the quality of their decisions, and reported that it did.

Works

• Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation (with Del Close and Kim Howard Johnson), 1994

Known for

She co-founded the ImprovOlympic (iO) theater in Chicago with Del Close and, with him, adapted and taught the Harold, the long-form improvisation Close developed. Truth in Comedy, written with Close and Kim Howard Johnson, is the manual of that approach.

Works

• Possible Futures, Preferable Futures, Healthcare Forum Journal 37(2), with Clement Bezold, 1994

Known for

With Clement Bezold he drew the futures cone: a widening cone from the present that nests the possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. The drawing separates what may happen from what is likely and from what people want, and it is a standard teaching figure in futures studies.

Works

• Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!, edited by Arthur Bloch, 1980

Known for

The name attached to the adage "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," which appeared under the title Hanlon's razor in Arthur Bloch's 1980 collection.

Caveat: Who Hanlon was is uncertain, and the thought is older: Robert A. Heinlein's story Logic of Empire (1941) has a character say it in other words.

Works

• The Red Queen in Organizational Evolution, Strategic Management Journal, 1996

Known for

Norwegian-American management professor and author who, with William Barnett, applied the Red Queen idea to firms: competition drives learning, and each firm's learning intensifies the competition its rivals face.

Works

• Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart, Harvard Business Review, 1993

Known for

Coauthor, with David Krackhardt, of a Harvard Business Review article showing managers how to map the advice, trust, and communication networks that do much of an organization's work outside the formal chart, and to design structure around them.

Works

• Could Gambling Save Science? Encouraging an Honest Consensus, Eighth International Conference on Risk and Gambling, London; printed in Social Epistemology, 1995, 1990
• Combinatorial Information Market Design, Information Systems Frontiers, 2003

Known for

An economist at George Mason University who proposed idea futures, markets in which people bet on disputed claims so that prices aggregate what they know, and later designed the logarithmic market scoring rule that many prediction markets use.

Works

• The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 1968

Known for

An ecologist whose essay argued that when a resource is open to all, each user gains the full benefit of taking more while the cost is shared by everyone, so the resource is overused. He took the grazing example from William Forster Lloyd.

Caveat: Elinor Ostrom's field studies found many communities that manage common resources well, critics note that the essay does not distinguish common property from open access, and Hardin later said it should have been called The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.

Works

• The Inference to the Best Explanation, Philosophical Review 74(1), 1965

Known for

A Princeton philosopher whose 1965 paper named inference to the best explanation: inferring that a hypothesis is true because it would explain the evidence better than its rivals. The paper made the term standard in discussions of abductive reasoning.

Works

• Hope Is Not a Method: What Business Leaders Can Learn from America's Army, Times Business, 1996

Known for

Coauthor, with General Gordon R. Sullivan, of an account written for business leaders of how the US Army changed and learned as it shrank after the Cold War.

Works

• Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change, 1977

Known for

Co-author, with Richard Beckhard, of Organizational Transitions, which set out how to plan an organization's move from its present state to a desired one, including the commitment chart for mapping who must support the change and how much.

Works

• The Nature of Six Sigma Quality, Motorola University Press, 1988

Known for

A Motorola engineer credited, with Bill Smith, with developing Six Sigma, and often called its father. He explained the 1.5 sigma shift behind the 3.4 defects per million target and wrote widely on the method.

Caveat: The 1.5 sigma shift built into the 3.4 defects per million figure rests on his tolerancing argument about a stack of discs, not on measured process data.

Works

• Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-Taking, Journal of Political Economy, 1953

Known for

A Hungarian-American economist and 1994 Nobel laureate in economics who argued that a person choosing a social arrangement without knowing which position they would occupy would choose by expected utility, an early form of the thought experiment later called the veil of ignorance.

Caveat: John Rawls coined the phrase veil of ignorance (A Theory of Justice, 1971) and drew the opposite conclusion; William Vickrey had described a similar thought experiment in 1945.

Works

• Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't, BMJ, 1996

Known for

McMaster University clinical epidemiologist and co-author, with David Sackett and others, of the editorial defining evidence-based medicine as integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external evidence from systematic research.

Works

• Initial Experiments with the Cross Impact Matrix Method of Forecasting, Futures, 1968

Known for

Coauthor, with Theodore J. Gordon, of the first journal report on cross-impact analysis, which sets forecast events in a matrix and adjusts each event's probability for the occurrence of the others.

Works

• The Polak Game, Or: Where Do You Stand? (with Stuart Candy), Journal of Futures Studies, 2017

Known for

A teacher in Swinburne University's strategic foresight program, he devised the Polak Game, also called Where Do You Stand?, a classroom and workshop exercise in which people take a physical position that shows their image of the future, after Fred Polak's The Image of the Future. He and Stuart Candy described the game in a 2017 article.

Works

• Economics in One Lesson, 1946

Known for

An American journalist and writer on economics. His best-known book restates Bastiat's point as a single lesson: the art of economics lies in looking at the longer as well as the immediate effects of a policy, and at its consequences for all groups, not only one. It is a popular work of free-market argument, not research.

Works

• How Organizations Learn and Unlearn, in Handbook of Organizational Design, vol. 1, edited by Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (Oxford University Press), 1981

Known for

A Swedish management scholar at Stockholm University whose 1981 chapter brought unlearning into organization studies: the process by which an organization discards obsolete and misleading knowledge so that new knowledge can take its place.

Caveat: Only a small part of the chapter deals with unlearning, and scholars still disagree whether unlearning is a distinct process or a part of learning.

Works

• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Viking (with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton), 1999

Known for

A Harvard Law School professor of practice and member of the Harvard Negotiation Project whose book with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton breaks a hard conversation into three: what happened, the feelings involved, and what it says about each person's identity. A practitioner's guide built on the project's negotiation work.

Works

• Science of Logic, 1812

Known for

A German idealist philosopher whose logic is a dialectic: each concept, pressed to its limits, turns into its opposite, and the tension is overcome in a richer concept that keeps both. The Science of Logic appeared in three volumes from 1812 to 1816.

Caveat: The thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad is a later simplification; Hegel rarely used those terms and warned against reducing dialectic to a lifeless schema.

Works

• A Psychological Tip, Grooks (MIT Press), 1966

Known for

A Danish mathematician, inventor, designer, and poet who wrote thousands of short verses he called grooks, beginning in the newspaper Politiken in 1940 under the German occupation. A Psychological Tip advises tossing a coin when you cannot decide, because while it is in the air you find out which side you are hoping for.

Works

• Logic of Empire, Astounding Science Fiction, 1941

Known for

A leading American science fiction writer. In his 1941 novella Logic of Empire a character warns against attributing to villainy conditions that result from stupidity, an early form of the adage now called Hanlon's razor.

Caveat: The adage takes its name from Robert J. Hanlon, who submitted it to a 1980 joke book; Heinlein's line is a precursor, not the source of the name.

Works

• Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach, McGraw-Hill, 1931

Known for

An American safety pioneer at Travelers Insurance whose 1931 book set out the domino sequence of accident causation and the ratio of 300 no-injury accidents to 29 minor and one major injury, known as Heinrich's law.

Caveat: His accident ratios have been criticized for the values given to each category and for steering prevention toward minor injuries.

Works

• An Experimental Application of the Delphi Method to the Use of Experts, Management Science, 1963
• Cross-impact analysis (with Theodore J. Gordon), 1966

Known for

A logician who worked at the RAND Corporation from 1946 to 1968, where with Norman Dalkey and Nicholas Rescher he developed the Delphi method of anonymous, iterated expert forecasting. With Theodore J. Gordon he devised cross-impact analysis, first played as a card game called Future, and in 1968 he co-founded the Institute for the Future.

Works

• The Product Portfolio, BCG Perspectives, 1970

Known for

The founder of the Boston Consulting Group (1963), whose 1970 essay laid out the reasoning behind the growth-share matrix, which sorts a company's businesses by market growth and relative market share. The matrix was developed by BCG staff between 1968 and 1970.

Works

• Risk Analysis in Capital Investment, Harvard Business Review, 1964

Known for

He showed managers how to replace the single best estimate in a capital budgeting decision with ranges for each uncertain input, simulated many times, so the result is a distribution of returns with its odds. The article brought Monte Carlo simulation into corporate finance.

Works

• Breakthrough Thinking: Why We Must Change the Way We Solve Problems, and the Seven Principles to Achieve This, Prima, with Gerald Nadler, 1990
• Creative Solution Finding, Prima, with Gerald Nadler, 1994

Known for

A Japanese scholar who, with the industrial engineer Gerald Nadler, set out Breakthrough Thinking, seven principles for solving problems. The best known is the purposes principle: before seeking solutions, expand the purpose of the task into a hierarchy of ever larger purposes and choose the level at which to work.

Works

• On the Rate of Gain of Information, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1952

Known for

A British experimental psychologist at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge. He found that the time needed to choose among alternatives rises with the logarithm of their number; with Ray Hyman's work of 1953 this became the Hick-Hyman law.

Works

• The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1965

Known for

A medical statistician who helped establish the randomized clinical trial and, with Richard Doll, the link between smoking and lung cancer. His 1965 address set out nine considerations, such as strength, consistency, and temporality, for judging whether an observed association is causal.

Works

• Introduction to Operations Research, Holden-Day (with Gerald J. Lieberman), 1967

Known for

Coauthor, with Gerald Lieberman, of a standard textbook of operations research, revised through many editions since 1967, which covers queueing theory among the field's core models.

Works

• Deepening Futures with System Structure, chapter 5 of Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights into Action, Wiley, with Bill Sharpe, 2007
• Seeing in Multiple Horizons: Connecting Futures to Strategy, Journal of Futures Studies, 2008

Known for

A founder member of the International Futures Forum with a doctorate in systems science, who spent four decades facilitating leadership teams. With Andrew Curry he set out the Three Horizons framework, created in 2006 by adapting McKinsey's three horizons of growth, which sets the dominant system that is losing its fit beside the desired future and the transition between them.

Works

• Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything, 2017

Known for

A former Detroit News journalist who completed the US Army's Red Team Leader course and wrote a popular book adapting military red teaming, structured methods for challenging a plan before it is carried out, for businesses.

Works

• Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Basic Books (with Emmanuel Sander; first published in French, 2013), 2013

Known for

An American cognitive scientist, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. With Emmanuel Sander he argues that analogy making, the mapping of one situation onto another, is the core of concepts and of all thought.

Works

• Culture's Consequences, 1980

Known for

A Dutch social psychologist who, from surveys of IBM employees in many countries, described national cultures along dimensions such as power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance.

Caveat: Critics argue the dimensions are national averages that explain little of individual behavior and should not be applied to individuals, and question the method behind them.

Works

• Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, Yale Law Journal, 1913

Known for

He showed that the word right covers four distinct legal relations, claim, privilege, power, and immunity, each with its own correlative (duty, no-right, liability, and disability) and opposite. His scheme is still the standard tool for taking apart what a legal right actually entails.

Works

• Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, Addison-Wesley, 2006

Known for

A consultant who set out a dozen serious games for learning what customers need. One of them, Speed Boat, has players draw the anchors that hold a product back; teams later adapted it into the sailboat retrospective.

Works

• Backcasting from Non-Overlapping Sustainability Principles: A Framework for Strategic Planning, International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, 2000

Known for

Researcher who, with Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, described backcasting from sustainability principles: define success as a set of principles, then plan backward from that end state to present steps.

Works

• Moral Hazard and Observability, Bell Journal of Economics 10(1), 1979

Known for

An economist known for principal-agent and contract theory. His 1979 paper showed that when an agent's effort cannot be observed, the contract should reward any measure that carries additional information about that effort. He shared the 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Hart.

Works

• Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator, 1991

Known for

Coauthor, with Allan Collins and John Seely Brown, of the American Educator article that brought cognitive apprenticeship to teachers: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and fading, used to make expert thinking in reading, writing, and mathematics visible to students.

Works

• Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, MIT Press; with Paul Thagard, 1995

Known for

A UCLA cognitive scientist who studies analogy in reasoning. With Paul Thagard he holds that analogy is guided by three constraints at once: similarity, structure, and purpose.

Works

• Writing Secure Code, second edition, 2002

Known for

A software security specialist at Microsoft and a member of its Security Development Lifecycle team. Writing Secure Code, written with David LeBlanc, was required reading in the 2002 Windows security push, and its second edition sets out the STRIDE threat categories that Loren Kohnfelder and Praerit Garg devised at Microsoft.

Works

• Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Operational Research, 1966

Known for

A Stanford professor who coined the term decision analysis in his 1966 paper and helped found the field, which models a decision with alternatives, probabilities, and values. He also helped develop the influence diagram.

Works

• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, Wiley, 2007

Known for

A consultant in decision analysis who argues that anything that matters can be measured in the sense of reducing uncertainty about it. His book teaches calibration drills that train estimators to give intervals that contain the truth as often as they claim.

Works

• SOFT analysis, Stanford Research Institute long-range planning work, 1960s

Known for

An American management consultant who said he worked at the Stanford Research Institute on the team, led by Robert Stewart, that produced the SOFT framework, a forerunner of SWOT analysis.

Caveat: The account of his role is his own; SOFT was published by Robert F. Stewart, Otis J. Benepe, and Arnold Mitchell at SRI in 1965, and historians still dispute whether SWOT began at SRI or at Harvard Business School.

Works

• For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (with Kevin Werbach), 2012

Known for

With Kevin Werbach he taught an early course on gamification at the Wharton School and wrote For the Win, a six-step guide to using game elements in business. He later became executive dean of law at Queensland University of Technology.

Works

• Statistics for Experimenters, Wiley (with George E. P. Box and William G. Hunter), 1978

Known for

A statistician whose textbook with George Box and William Hunter taught generations of engineers and scientists to design experiments: factorial designs, blocking, randomization, and response surfaces.

Works

• Statistics for Experimenters, 1978

Known for

A statistician who wrote, with George E. P. Box and J. Stuart Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, the standard practical text on designing experiments and analyzing their results, including factorial designs.

Works

• Optimality and Informational Efficiency in Resource Allocation Processes, in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Karlin, and Patrick Suppes, eds., Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, 1959, Stanford University Press, 1960

Known for

The founder of mechanism design, which treats the rules of an economic institution as the unknown to be designed for a desired outcome. He framed institutions as systems for communicating and processing information and introduced incentive compatibility, the requirement that participants do best by acting as the rules intend. He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson.

Works

• Logical Investigations, Logische Untersuchungen, 1900 to 1901, 1900
• Ideas I, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1913

Known for

The founder of phenomenology, the description of experience as it is lived. His method, the epoché or bracketing, suspends the natural attitude that takes the world's existence for granted, without doubting or denying it, so that the world can be studied as it appears to consciousness.

Works

• A Mechanism for Selecting Public Goods When Preferences Must Be Elicited, working paper, 1980

Known for

A Norwegian economist, professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, who took his doctorate at Harvard's Kennedy School in 1980. His paper with Richard Zeckhauser gave each voter a budget of influence points whose votes grow with the square root of the points spent, an early form of the pricing Glen Weyl later developed and named quadratic voting.

Works

• Stimulus Information as a Determinant of Reaction Time, Journal of Experimental Psychology 45(3), 1953

Known for

A University of Oregon psychologist whose 1953 experiments, following William Edmund Hick's of 1952, showed that choice reaction time rises with the information in the stimulus, roughly the logarithm of the number of equally likely choices. The result is known as the Hick-Hyman law.

Works

• The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability, Harvard Business School Press (with Roy Levien), 2004

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor of technology and operations management. With Roy Levien he described business networks as ecosystems in which keystone firms create platforms that keep the whole network healthy.

Works

• Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success, 1986

Known for

A Japanese management consultant who introduced kaizen, continuous improvement through many small changes involving everyone, to Western managers, and who founded the Kaizen Institute in 1985. His book is a practitioner's synthesis of Japanese practice, not research.

Works

• Causal Layered Analysis: Poststructuralism as Method, Futures, 1998
• Six Pillars: Futures Thinking for Transforming, Foresight, 2008

Known for

He devised causal layered analysis, which reads an issue at four layers: the litany of headline facts, the social and structural causes, the worldview that frames them, and the underlying myth or metaphor. His Six Pillars article sets out a futures method built around six concepts and includes his futures triangle.

Works

• The Johari Window, a Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness, Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development, UCLA, with Joseph Luft, 1955

Known for

With Joseph Luft he drew the Johari window, named from their first names: a four-pane grid of what is known or unknown to oneself and known or unknown to others (open, blind, hidden, and unknown). It is a teaching model for group training and feedback, not a measured instrument.

Works

• Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique, O'Reilly, with Adam Connor, 2015

Known for

With Adam Connor he wrote Discussing Design, a practitioner's guide to design critique: analysis of a design against its objectives, meant to strengthen the work, with practices for its timing, facilitation, and culture.

Works

• The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter, Berrett-Koehler; with Juanita Brown and the World Café Community, 2005

Known for

Co-originator, with Juanita Brown, of the World Café, in which small tables hold rounds of conversation on questions that matter and people move between tables to cross-pollinate ideas before the whole room harvests them.

Works

• Taking Flight: Dialogue, Collective Thinking, and Organizational Learning, Organizational Dynamics, 1993
• Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, 1999

Known for

Founder of the consulting firm Dialogos, a co-founder of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan. His work treats dialogue as a discipline for organizations, a way for a group to think together.

Works

• Creative Problem Solving: The Basic Course, 1985

Known for

A researcher and trainer in the Buffalo tradition of Creative Problem Solving. With Donald J. Treffinger he wrote a course book on the Osborn and Parnes process that includes tools for strengthening a promising idea before it is adopted.

Works

• Guide to Quality Control, JUSE; English edition from the Asian Productivity Organization, 1968

Known for

A University of Tokyo engineering professor and leader of the Japanese quality movement, known for quality circles and for the cause-and-effect diagram that bears his name, also called the fishbone diagram, which he used in quality work at Kawasaki.

Caveat: The basic idea of a cause-and-effect diagram predates his publications; he popularized it from the 1960s.

Works

• Catalyzing decisions: How a coin flip strengthens affective reactions, PLOS ONE, 2019

Known for

University of Basel social psychologist whose experiments with Leonie Reutner and Rainer Greifeneder found that a coin flip used as a nonbinding catalyst strengthens people's feelings about the option it suggests and helps them see what they prefer.

Works

• Victims of Groupthink, 1972
• Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 1982

Known for

A Yale research psychologist who named groupthink, the pressure for agreement in a cohesive group that overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives, from case studies of foreign policy fiascoes such as the Bay of Pigs. He recommended remedies including an assigned devil's advocate.

Caveat: Empirical tests have given the full groupthink model only partial support, and later historical work has questioned some of his case readings.

Works

• Sur les fonctions convexes et les inégalités entre les valeurs moyennes, Acta Mathematica, 1906

Known for

A Danish telephone engineer who did mathematics in his spare time, he proved what is now Jensen's inequality: for a convex function, the function of an average is at most the average of the function. It is the formal basis for saying that variability helps a convex payoff and hurts a concave one.

Works

• Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, Journal of Financial Economics, 1976

Known for

A financial economist at Rochester and Harvard whose paper with William H. Meckling founded agency theory as used in corporate finance: the firm is a set of contracts, and agency costs arise because a manager who owns only part of the firm bears only part of the cost of acting in their own interest.

Works

• The Theory of Political Economy, 1871

Known for

One of the three founders of marginal analysis in economics, alongside Carl Menger and Léon Walras, who reached the idea independently in the early 1870s. Jevons argued that value depends on final degree of utility, the utility of the last increment of a good, and stated economic choice in mathematical terms.

Works

• The Big Five Inventory, Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley, 1991

Known for

A University of California, Berkeley psychologist of personality and lead author of the Big Five Inventory, a short questionnaire of 44 items that measures the five broad trait dimensions.

Works

• Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, HRD Press, 1992

Known for

A consultant who developed polarity management for problems that cannot be solved, only managed: pairs of interdependent opposites such as stability and change, where choosing one pole for good fails and a group does better by moving between them over time.

Works

• Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Morgan & Claypool, 2011

Known for

Intel's futurist when he introduced science fiction prototyping in 2010: write short fiction grounded in real research to explore what a technology could mean for people before it is built.

Works

• Exploring Corporate Strategy, Prentice-Hall, with Kevan Scholes, 1984

Known for

Emeritus professor of strategic management at Lancaster University Management School, who studies how strategy develops and changes in organizations. Exploring Corporate Strategy, written with Kevan Scholes and revised through many editions, is described by his university as Europe's best-selling strategic management text.

Works

• Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation (with Charna Halpern and Del Close), Meriwether, 1994

Known for

An author and actor who studied improvisation under Del Close and wrote, with Close and Charna Halpern, the manual of long-form improvisation that set out its principles, among them accepting and building on what a scene partner offers.

Works

• Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press (with George Lakoff), 1980
• Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, University of Chicago Press, 1993

Known for

A University of Oregon philosopher of embodied mind. With George Lakoff he argued that ordinary thought is structured by conceptual metaphors, and in Moral Imagination he argued that moral reasoning works through metaphor, narrative, and imagined cases more than fixed rules.

Works

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, 1979

Known for

An English theater teacher and director, later based in Calgary, whose Impro shaped modern improvisation. It teaches status work, in which every interaction plays out as small raises and lowerings of status, and accepting an offer instead of blocking it; he also created Theatresports.

Works

• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, 2016

Known for

One of the four editors, with Betsy Beyer, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, of the book that described Google's site reliability practice. Its chapter on blameless postmortems is by John Lunney and Sue Lueder.

Works

• The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, University of California Press, 1988

Known for

One of the founders of bioethics. With Stephen Toulmin he argued that casuistry, reasoning from paradigm cases to new ones by analogy, is a sound method of moral reasoning and that only its abuse earned it a bad name.

Works

• Quality Control Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1951
• The Quality Trilogy, Quality Progress 19, no. 8, 1986

Known for

A pioneer of quality management whose handbook became the field's reference. He generalized Vilfredo Pareto's observation about income into the principle of the vital few and the trivial many (later the useful many): a small share of causes accounts for most of the defects. He later framed quality management as a trilogy of planning, control, and improvement.

Works

• The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, with Anthony J. Wiener, 1967

Known for

A RAND Corporation strategist who cofounded the Hudson Institute in 1961 and is often named, with Pierre Wack, as a father of scenario planning. The Year 2000, written with Anthony J. Wiener, built alternative futures for the rest of the century.

Works

• On the Psychology of Prediction, Psychological Review; with Amos Tversky, 1973
• Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures, TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences 12 (Forecasting, edited by Spyros Makridakis and Steven C. Wheelwright); with Amos Tversky, 1979
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011
• The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision, Harvard Business Review; with Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, 2011

Known for

A psychologist who, with Amos Tversky, showed that intuitive predictions follow representativeness and neglect base rates and regression to the mean, and proposed correcting them by starting from the record of similar cases, the outside view. Thinking, Fast and Slow is his popular synthesis of that work, and it also carries Gary Klein's premortem. With Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony he later turned the bias research into a checklist of questions for reviewing a team's recommendation.

Works

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785

Known for

A German Enlightenment philosopher whose Groundwork states the categorical imperative, including the test of acting only on a maxim one could will to become a universal law. It is a founding text of deontological ethics.

Works

• Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production, Leningrad State University (English translation in Management Science 6, no. 4, 1960), 1939

Known for

A Soviet mathematician regarded as a founder of linear programming, which he developed in 1939 for planning production. He shared the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for contributions to the theory of the optimal allocation of resources.

Works

• The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance, Harvard Business Review (with David P. Norton), 1992

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor who, with David Norton, created the balanced scorecard, which pairs financial measures with customer, internal process, and learning and growth measures.

Works

• Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis, Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 1968

Known for

A San Francisco psychiatrist in the transactional analysis tradition who described the drama triangle, in which people in conflict move among the roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim.

Works

• Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility, American Economic Review, 1985

Known for

An economist who, with Carl Shapiro, modeled markets in which a product grows more valuable as more people use it, and showed how such network externalities shape firms' choices about compatibility.

Works

• Hassōhō: Sōzōsei kaihatsu no tame ni (Abduction: for the development of creativity), 1967

Known for

A geographer and ethnographer, he devised the KJ method, named from his initials, to organize field notes: observations go on separate cards, which are grouped by affinity from the bottom up and then labeled and related. In English it is usually called the affinity diagram.

Works

• Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling, Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, 1959

Known for

Remington Rand researcher who developed the critical path method in the late 1950s with Morgan R. Walker of DuPont: model a project as a network of activities and find the longest chain of dependent tasks, which sets the shortest possible duration.

Works

• Accidental Adversaries: When Friends Become Foes, The Systems Thinker 5(1), 1994
• The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Doubleday Currency, Peter M. Senge and others, eds., 1994

Known for

A consultant with Innovation Associates who described the Accidental Adversaries archetype, first recognized in the alliance between Procter and Gamble and Walmart. Two parties who could gain from cooperating each take actions to fix their own problems that unintentionally hurt the other, and the alliance turns hostile.

Works

• Stochastic Processes Occurring in the Theory of Queues and their Analysis by the Method of the Imbedded Markov Chain, Annals of Mathematical Statistics 24(3), 1953

Known for

A British probabilist and statistician. His 1953 paper analyzed queues through an imbedded Markov chain and proposed the A/S/c notation for arrival process, service distribution, and number of servers, still used to name queueing models such as M/M/1.

Works

• Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response (NIST Special Publication 800-86), 2006

Known for

A NIST coauthor, with Suzanne Chevalier, Tim Grance, and Hung Dang, of Special Publication 800-86, the federal guide to collecting, examining, analyzing, and reporting digital evidence during incident response.

Works

• Words of Estimative Probability, Studies in Intelligence, 1964

Known for

A Yale historian who led the CIA's Office of National Estimates from 1952 to 1967 and is called the father of intelligence analysis. He proposed tying words such as probable and almost certain to fixed ranges of odds, after finding that readers took the same phrase to mean very different chances.

Caveat: His scheme was not adopted in his time; estimative lexicons spread through the intelligence community only after 2005.

Works

• The Big Five Inventory, Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley, 1991

Known for

Coauthor, with Oliver P. John and E. M. Donahue, of the Big Five Inventory, a short questionnaire of 44 items that measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Works

• The Rational Manager, 1965
• The New Rational Manager, 1981

Known for

Co-founder with Benjamin Tregoe of the consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe, started in 1958. The Rational Manager set out step-by-step methods for problem analysis, which starts by stating a problem as a deviation from what should be happening, and for decision analysis against weighted criteria; The New Rational Manager added Situation Appraisal for sorting and ranking concerns.

Works

• Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, Dorset House, 2001

Known for

A consultant who facilitated project retrospectives for software teams and wrote the handbook that gave the practice its name and structure, including his prime directive that everyone did the best job they could with what they knew at the time.

Works

• Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth, Harvard Business Review, 1997
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, 2005

Known for

A professor of strategy at INSEAD who, with Renée Mauborgne, introduced value innovation and the value curve in 1997 and later the strategy canvas and blue ocean strategy, the argument that firms grow by creating uncontested market space.

Works

• Systems Archetypes I: Diagnosing Systemic Issues and Designing High-Leverage Interventions, Pegasus Communications (Toolbox Reprint Series), 1992
• Systems Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure, Pegasus Communications, with Virginia Anderson, 1998

Known for

A writer and teacher in organizational learning whose Pegasus guides and The Systems Thinker articles turned the systems archetypes, such as shifting the burden, into practical diagnostic templates.

Works

• Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric, in Rhetoric and Praxis (Jean Dietz Moss, ed.), 1986
• Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry, 1987

Known for

A University of Texas scholar of rhetoric and composition, author of A Theory of Discourse (1971), whose 1986 essay is credited with reviving kairos, the right or opportune moment and the fitness of speech to the situation, as a concept in modern rhetorical study.

Works

• Just So Stories (the poem I Keep Six Honest Serving-Men, after The Elephant's Child), 1902

Known for

His verse naming What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who as six honest serving-men is the best-known statement of the questions journalists call the Five Ws and H. He popularized the list; the questions go back to Aristotle's elements of circumstance and classical rhetoric.

Works

• Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1998
• Performing a Project Premortem, Harvard Business Review, 2007
• Rapid Decision Making on the Fire Ground, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 30th Annual Meeting, with Roberta Calderwood and Anne Clinton-Cirocco, 1986

Known for

A pioneer of naturalistic decision making who studied how fireground commanders and other experts decide under time pressure. His recognition-primed decision model holds that experienced people recognize a situation as typical, take the first workable option it suggests, and test it by imagining it played out, instead of comparing options side by side. He also devised the premortem, in which a team imagines that a project has failed and explains why.

Works

• The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Currency Doubleday, 1994

Known for

Writer and editor, editor-in-chief of strategy+business from 2005 to 2020 and author of The Age of Heretics, and a co-author, with Peter Senge, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, and Bryan Smith, of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, the practitioner's companion to The Fifth Discipline.

Works

• Queueing Systems, Volume 1: Theory, Wiley-Interscience, 1975

Known for

A computer scientist known for applying queueing theory to computer networks and for his part in the development of the ARPANET. His Queueing Systems is a standard text on the theory.

Works

• Auctions: Theory and Practice, Princeton University Press, 2004

Known for

Edgeworth Professor of Economics at Oxford, who with Ken Binmore designed the UK's 2000 auction of third-generation mobile licenses and later invented the Product Mix Auction used by the Bank of England. His book is a nontechnical introduction to auction theory and its use.

Works

• Hazop and Hazan: Notes on the Identification and Assessment of Hazards, 1983

Known for

ICI's first technical safety adviser, from 1968 to 1982, and a leading writer on process safety. He described the hazard and operability study that grew inside ICI from 1963, and his paper What You Don't Have, Can't Leak began the idea of inherently safer design. The fourth edition (1999) is titled Hazop and Hazan: Identifying and Assessing Process Industry Hazards.

Works

• Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing, 2020

Known for

A computer scientist who led online experimentation at Microsoft and elsewhere. With Diane Tang and Ya Xu he wrote the standard practitioner's guide to running A/B tests at scale: choosing metrics, checking that randomization worked, and avoiding the pitfalls that make results untrustworthy.

Works

• The Threats to Our Products, Microsoft internal paper, with Praerit Garg, 1999

Known for

A security engineer who, with Praerit Garg at Microsoft, devised STRIDE, a mnemonic for six kinds of threat: spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege. He later worked on security and privacy at Google.

Works

• A Non-Aristotelian System and Its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics, paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, New Orleans, 1931
• Science and Sanity, International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1933

Known for

A Polish American scholar who founded general semantics. His dictum that the map is not the territory holds that our words and models are abstractions from reality and must not be mistaken for it.

Works

• Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control, 1967

Known for

A marketing professor whose textbook Marketing Management made the marketing mix, organized as the four Ps of product, price, place, and promotion, the standard frame of marketing teaching.

Caveat: Kotler popularized the four Ps; E. Jerome McCarthy proposed them in 1960, and Neil Borden coined marketing mix.

Works

• Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review, 1995
• Leading Change, 1996

Known for

From watching more than a hundred companies attempt major change, he listed the errors that sink transformations and the eight steps that avoid them, among them establishing urgency and forming a powerful guiding coalition of people with enough position, expertise, and credibility to lead the change.

Works

• Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart, Harvard Business Review (with Jeffrey R. Hanson), 1993

Known for

A Carnegie Mellon professor of organizations who showed managers how to map the advice, trust, and communication networks behind the formal chart, and wrote the KrackPlot network software.

Works

• The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, 1993

Known for

A psychologist who, with K. Anders Ericsson and Clemens Tesch-Römer, argued from studies of violinists and pianists that expert performance comes from years of deliberate practice: effortful activity designed to improve specific aspects of performance.

Caveat: A 2014 meta-analysis by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald found that deliberate practice explains a modest share of the differences in performance, and a 2019 replication of the violinist study found a smaller effect than the original.

Works

• A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Longman, 2001

Known for

Michigan State University educational psychologist and co-author of the original 1956 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. With Lorin Anderson he edited the 2001 revision, which recast the levels as verbs (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) and added a knowledge dimension.

Works

• Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, American Economic Review (with David Card), 1994

Known for

A Princeton labor economist whose study with David Card compared fast-food employment in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage, with neighboring Pennsylvania, which did not, a landmark use of the difference-in-differences design.

Caveat: The study's finding that the higher minimum wage did not reduce employment was disputed, notably by David Neumark and William Wascher using payroll records; the design itself is widely taught.

Works

• Extensive Games and the Problem of Information, in Harold W. Kuhn and Albert W. Tucker, eds., Contributions to the Theory of Games II, Princeton University Press, 1953

Known for

A mathematician who shaped game theory and optimization. His 1953 paper gave the general form of games played in sequence, the extensive form with information sets, and proved that every finite game of perfect information has an equilibrium in pure strategies, which backward induction finds.

Works

• Anomaly Detection: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, 2009

Known for

A data mining researcher who co-wrote, with Varun Chandola and Arindam Banerjee, the standard survey of anomaly detection methods.

Works

• Issues as Elements of Information Systems, Working Paper 131, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley; with Horst W. J. Rittel, 1970

Known for

With Horst Rittel he created IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System, which records a deliberation as issues phrased as questions, the positions that answer them, and the arguments for and against each position. It was meant to support coordination and planning of political decision processes.

Works

• The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World, IBM Systems Journal, 2003

Known for

Researcher and software designer who worked with Dave Snowden at the IBM Cynefin Center and co-wrote the first full published statement of the Cynefin framework. She later developed participatory narrative inquiry and wrote Working with Stories.

Works

• Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Science, 2009

Known for

Coauthor, with Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, and Daniel J. Brass, of the Science review that surveys social network analysis, its centrality measures and its explanations of how a person's position in a network shapes outcomes.

Works

• Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press; with Mark Johnson, 1980
• Moral Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1996

Known for

A Berkeley linguist who, with Mark Johnson, argued that everyday thought is structured by conceptual metaphors, such as argument is war, mapped from bodily and social experience. He later applied framing to politics, contrasting a strict father and a nurturant parent model of morality.

Caveat: His political framing work is contested; critics such as Steven Pinker argued its central claims lack support.

Works

• Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy, AEA Papers and Proceedings (with E. Glen Weyl), 2018

Known for

A statistician and probabilist who, with Glen Weyl, analyzed quadratic voting, in which each voter buys votes at a cost equal to the square of their number, so that people can show how strongly they care about an issue.

Works

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, 1996

Known for

Lead author, with Kevin Nolan, Thomas Nolan, Clifford Norman, and Lloyd Provost, of The Improvement Guide, which set out the Model for Improvement: three questions about aim, measure, and change, followed by Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles.

Works

• Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements, 1774

Known for

A French mathematician and astronomer. His 1774 memoir on the probability of causes given events gave a general method for reasoning from observed effects back to their causes, and the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by him.

Works

• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (with Esther Derby), Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006

Known for

Coauthor with Esther Derby of the standard guide to agile retrospectives, which set out a five-stage structure: set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, and close the retrospective.

Works

• Operability Studies and Hazard Analysis, Chemical Engineering Progress 70, no. 4, 1974

Known for

Author of the first open-literature paper on the hazard and operability study, HAZOP, the guideword method for finding hazards in process plants that had grown up inside Imperial Chemical Industries.

Works

• Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), co-founded with Raymond Queneau, 1960

Known for

French chemical engineer and writer who co-founded the Oulipo with Raymond Queneau in 1960, a workshop of writers and mathematicians who invent formal constraints, such as lipograms and permutations, as engines for new writing.

Works

• Business Policy: Text and Cases, 1965

Known for

Lead author, with C. Roland Christensen, Kenneth R. Andrews, and William D. Guth, of the Harvard Business School text that framed strategy as matching a company's strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities and threats in its environment, the four elements later drawn as SWOT.

Caveat: The Harvard origin of SWOT is contested: the book contains no SWOT matrix, a 1965 Stanford Research Institute report used a similar scheme, and a 2023 history calls the Harvard claim an academic urban legend.

Works

• Writing Secure Code, second edition (with Michael Howard), 2002

Known for

A Microsoft security specialist who, with Michael Howard, wrote Writing Secure Code (Microsoft Press, first edition 2001), which carried Microsoft's STRIDE threat categories (spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege) to a wide public.

Caveat: STRIDE was devised by Loren Kohnfelder and Praerit Garg at Microsoft in 1999; LeBlanc and Howard popularized it. Catalogs date the second edition 2002, though some copies carry a 2003 copyright.

Works

• The Time Trap, Alec Mackenzie's time-management book, one of the retellings of the advice Lee is said to have given Charles M. Schwab, 1972

Known for

A founder of modern public relations, remembered in productivity writing for the Ivy Lee method: list the six most important tasks for tomorrow, in order, and work them one at a time.

Caveat: The method is known only from a story, retold in time-management books, that Charles M. Schwab paid Lee for the advice at Bethlehem Steel; Lee left no written account of it and the date usually given is not documented.

Works

• Toward a Process for Critical Response, Alternate Roots, Fall 1993, 1993
• Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert (with John Borstel), 2003
• Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (with John Borstel), 2022

Known for

She founded the Dance Exchange in 1976 and devised the Critical Response Process in the early 1990s, a four-step method for giving and receiving useful feedback on creative work in progress. She set it out with John Borstel in a 2003 primer and a 2022 study.

Works

• An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, University of Chicago Press, 1949

Known for

A law professor, president of the University of Chicago, and United States Attorney General. His short book describes legal reasoning as reasoning by example: a court finds a similarity between the present case and earlier ones, announces the rule the earlier cases imply, and applies it, so the rule changes as new cases are compared.

Works

• The Keystone Advantage, Harvard Business School Press, with Marco Iansiti, 2004

Known for

With Marco Iansiti he applied the ecologist's keystone species to business ecosystems: firms play keystone, dominator, or niche roles, and a keystone prospers by keeping the network it depends on healthy.

Works

• The Marketing Mode: Pathways to Corporate Growth, 1969

Known for

A Harvard Business School professor and editor of the Harvard Business Review, known for Marketing Myopia (1960). The Marketing Mode carries the line that people do not want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole, which he credited to Leo McGivena.

Caveat: The drill and hole line is not his: he credited Leo McGivena, and Percy H. Whiting printed it in 1947.

Works

• Frontiers in Group Dynamics, Human Relations, 1947

Known for

A German-American psychologist and a founder of social, organizational, and applied psychology. His field theory treats a situation as held in balance by forces driving toward a change and forces restraining it, the basis of force field analysis.

Works

• Counterfactuals, 1973

Known for

A Princeton philosopher whose Counterfactuals analyzed 'if it had been, it would have been' statements in terms of possible worlds: a counterfactual is true when the consequent holds in the worlds most similar to ours where the antecedent holds. With Robert Stalnaker's account it forms the Stalnaker-Lewis theory.

Works

• Side Talks about Advertising, The Western Druggist, 1899

Known for

An American advertising advocate commonly credited with the sequence attention, interest, desire, and action that became the AIDA model.

Caveat: The attribution rests largely on E. K. Strong's 1925 account, and a three-step version of the formula appeared anonymously in Printers' Ink in 1898.

Works

• Training for Calibration (with Baruch Fischhoff), Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1980

Known for

A decision researcher who, with Baruch Fischhoff, showed that people given scored practice and feedback on the confidence of their answers became better calibrated, so that their stated probabilities came closer to how often they were right.

Caveat: Later reviews find that training improves calibration only to a limited extent.

Works

• Introduction to Operations Research, Holden-Day, 1967

Known for

Stanford statistician and operations researcher, first chair of its Department of Operations Research and later provost, and co-author with Frederick Hillier of Introduction to Operations Research, a standard textbook whose chapters include queueing theory.

Works

• The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer, 2004

Known for

A University of Michigan professor of industrial engineering, he described Toyota's management system in fourteen principles, including building a culture of stopping to fix problems (jidoka) and solving problems at their root. The book is a scholar's synthesis of Toyota practice; the methods themselves are Toyota's.

Works

• Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, Guilford Press, 1993

Known for

The creator of dialectical behavior therapy, which joins change-oriented behavioral methods with acceptance and mindfulness. Her skills manual includes DEAR MAN, an interpersonal effectiveness script for asking for what one wants or saying no: describe, express, assert, reinforce, stay mindful, appear confident, and negotiate.

Works

• The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications, 1975

Known for

A systems scientist at Portland State University and founding editor of Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The Delphi Method, which he edited with Murray Turoff, became the standard reference on how to design and run Delphi studies.

Works

• Inference to the Best Explanation, Routledge; second edition 2004, 1991

Known for

A Cambridge philosopher of science who gave the standard book-length treatment of inference to the best explanation, the inference from the evidence to the hypothesis that would best explain it. He distinguished the likeliest explanation from the loveliest, the one that would give the most understanding, and gave a contrastive account of explanation.

Works

• The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals, Little, Brown, 1960

Known for

A leading figure of American legal realism, at Columbia and then Chicago, and chief drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code. His last major book studies how appellate courts actually reason from precedent, and why their results are more predictable than the realists' critics feared.

Works

• Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, 1833

Known for

Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford from 1832 to 1837. His lectures described how a shared pasture invites overgrazing, because each commoner gains from adding an animal while the cost is spread across all users, the example Garrett Hardin later built on.

Works

• Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts: A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking, Management Science 39(1), with Daniel Kahneman, 1993
• Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives' Decisions, Harvard Business Review, with Daniel Kahneman, 2003
• Before You Make That Big Decision, Harvard Business Review, with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, 2011

Known for

A professor of business strategy at the University of Sydney who, with Daniel Kahneman, named the inside view and the outside view of forecasting and argued that planners should anchor estimates on the outcomes of a reference class of similar past projects.

Works

• The Johari Window, a Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness (with Harrington Ingham), Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development, UCLA, 1955

Known for

An American psychologist who, with Harrington Ingham, devised the Johari window, a four-pane model of what is known and unknown about a person to the self and to others, used in group development training.

Works

• Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht, 1981

Known for

A systems theorist at Bielefeld University, he kept a slip box of numbered, cross-referenced notes for decades and described it in this essay as a partner in communication: notes are filed by number, linked to related notes, and found through an index, so new connections surface as the collection grows.

Works

• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, O'Reilly Media (with Dave Gray and Sunni Brown), 2010

Known for

Coauthor, with Dave Gray and Sunni Brown, of Gamestorming, a collection of structured games for meetings and design work, among them the empathy map.

Works

• Critical Decision Method for Eliciting Knowledge, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1989

Known for

Coauthor, with Gary A. Klein and Roberta Calderwood, of the critical decision method, a structured interview that walks an expert back through a real incident in timed passes to draw out the cues, goals, and options behind each decision.

Works

• Erkenntnis und Irrtum (Knowledge and Error), 1905

Known for

An Austrian physicist and philosopher of science. He made the thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment) an object of study, arguing that it draws on the experience stored in memory: the experimenter varies the conditions of an imagined case to see what follows, as a preparation for, and sometimes a substitute for, a physical experiment.

Works

• Consistency in Networks of Relations, Artificial Intelligence 8(1), 1977

Known for

An artificial intelligence researcher at the University of British Columbia. His 1977 paper showed that backtracking search for a constraint satisfaction problem thrashes, and proposed local consistency algorithms that remove node, arc, and path inconsistencies before a full solution is attempted.

Works

• The Trusted Advisor, 2000

Known for

A former Harvard Business School professor who wrote on managing professional service firms. The Trusted Advisor, with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford, gave the trust equation: credibility, reliability, and intimacy divided by self-orientation. It is a practitioner's book; the equation is usually credited to Green.

Works

• The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices, Journal of Business, 1963
• The Fractal Geometry of Nature, 1982

Known for

The founder of fractal geometry. His 1963 study of cotton prices showed that price changes follow heavy-tailed distributions, with far more extreme moves than the normal curve allows; in The Fractal Geometry of Nature he also gave the Lindy name to the rule that some things' expected future life grows with their past life.

Caveat: His Lindy rule applied to things bounded by a producer's life; the broader Lindy effect, for anything without a natural limit, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's extension.

Works

• Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law, arXiv preprint, 2018

Known for

Lead author, with Scott Garrabrant, of the 2018 paper that sets out four mechanisms by which optimizing a metric breaks its link to the goal it was chosen for: regressional, extremal, causal, and adversarial Goodhart effects.

Works

• Hands-On Systematic Innovation, CREAX Press, 2002

Known for

An engineer and TRIZ practitioner associated with Systematic Innovation whose handbook updates Genrich Altshuller's theory of inventive problem solving with function analysis, trimming, the ideal final result, and the separation principles. It is a practitioner's manual.

Works

• Fighting for Your Marriage, Jossey-Bass, 1994

Known for

University of Denver psychologist who has studied how couples handle conflict for decades; with Scott Stanley and Susan Blumberg he wrote the book that teaches the Speaker-Listener Technique and separating problem discussion from problem solution.

Works

• The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor, Columbia University Press, 2011

Known for

Cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, known for his investor memos. His book opens with second-level thinking: asking not only what will happen, but what others expect and what follows from the gap. It is a practitioner's book, not research.

Works

• Principles of Economics, 1890

Known for

A Cambridge economist and a central figure of neoclassical economics whose Principles of Economics made marginal reasoning, comparing the cost and benefit of one more unit, the standard method of the textbook, with supply and demand as its frame.

Works

• The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes, American Scientist, 1963

Known for

Where the first cybernetics studied feedback that corrects deviations and keeps a system stable, he described mutual causal processes that amplify a small initial deviation, which explain how growth, differentiation, and divergence arise.

Works

• Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality, Review of Economic Studies 66(1); circulated as an MIT working paper in 1977, 1999
• The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information, Econometrica 54(3), with Drew Fudenberg, 1986

Known for

An economic theorist who shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for mechanism design. He showed which social goals can be implemented by a mechanism whose equilibria give exactly the desired outcomes (the condition now called Maskin monotonicity), and with Drew Fudenberg proved the folk theorem for repeated games with discounting: if players are patient enough, any feasible outcome that gives everyone more than their minimum can be sustained.

Works

• A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50(4), 1943
• Motivation and Personality, Harper, 1954

Known for

A psychologist who proposed a hierarchy of needs, physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, in which lower needs generally take priority until they are largely met. He described the shift as gradual, and the familiar pyramid is a later drawing, not his.

Caveat: Reviews of the research, beginning with Wahba and Bridwell in 1976, found little support for a fixed ranking of needs, and the ordering has been criticized as culturally specific.

Works

• A Dialectical Approach to Strategic Planning, Management Science, 1969
• Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions, 1981

Known for

A management scientist who proposed dialectical planning, in which a plan is tested against a deliberately opposed counterplan built on contrary assumptions. With Ian Mitroff he developed strategic assumption surfacing and testing, which brings to light and debates the assumptions beneath competing strategies.

Works

• Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth, Harvard Business Review, 1997
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, 2005

Known for

A professor of strategy at INSEAD who, with W. Chan Kim, introduced value innovation and the value curve in 1997 and later the strategy canvas and blue ocean strategy.

Works

• Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, Richard D. Irwin, 1960

Known for

A marketing professor whose textbook reduced the marketing mix to four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. The mix itself goes back to James Culliton and Neil Borden at Harvard.

Works

• Handbook of the Law of Evidence, 1954

Known for

A law professor and authority on evidence, damages, and federal procedure. His Handbook of the Law of Evidence, kept in print under later editors, is a standard American treatise on evidence, including the burdens of proof.

Works

• Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual, Psychological Assessment Resources, 1992

Known for

Personality psychologist at the National Institute on Aging, associated with the five-factor model and five-factor theory of personality. With Paul Costa he built the NEO inventories, which measure the five domains and thirty facets, and studied the stability of personality across age and culture.

Works

• The Basics of FMEA, 1996

Known for

Lead author, with Raymond J. Mikulak and Michael R. Beauregard, of The Basics of FMEA, a short practitioner's guide to failure mode and effects analysis: listing how a product or process can fail, scoring each failure's severity, occurrence, and detection, and acting on the highest risks.

Works

• Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Penguin Press, 2011

Known for

A game designer and director of game research at the Institute for the Future whose popular book argues that games satisfy needs everyday life often leaves unmet, such as satisfying work, social connection, and meaning, and that game design can be applied to real problems.

Works

• A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, McGraw-Hill (with Richard E. Walton), 1965

Known for

Coauthor, with Richard Walton, of the theory that splits bargaining into distributive bargaining over a fixed sum and integrative bargaining that enlarges what both sides can gain, the basis of interest-based bargaining.

Works

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, 2002

Known for

One of the four co-founders of the training firm VitalSmarts and co-author, with Kerry Patterson and the other two, of Crucial Conversations, a popular guide to talking through high-stakes disagreements. It is a practitioner's book, not research.

Works

• Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers, Oxford University Press, 1996

Known for

A business writer who adapted Sun Tzu's Art of War into strategic principles for managers. It is a popular synthesis, not research.

Works

• The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, 1972

Known for

Emeritus professor of systems management at the University of New Hampshire who directed the MIT team behind The Limits to Growth, the system dynamics study of how exponential growth in population and industry meets finite resources.

Works

• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Sustainability Institute, 1999
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008
• The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, with Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, 1972

Known for

An environmental and systems scientist, lead author of The Limits to Growth (1972), who explained stocks, flows, feedback loops, and delays for general readers and ranked twelve places to intervene in a system, from changing numbers up to changing paradigms. Thinking in Systems was published after her death, edited by Diana Wright.

Works

• The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932

Known for

An institutional economist whose book with Adolf A. Berle showed that ownership and control had separated in large American corporations, leaving dispersed shareholders unable to oversee managers. He also coined the term administered prices.

Works

• Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, Journal of Financial Economics (with Michael C. Jensen), 1976

Known for

A University of Rochester economist and coauthor, with Michael Jensen, of the founding paper of agency theory, which treats the firm as a set of contracts and accounts for the costs that arise when managers act as agents for owners.

Works

• Construct Validity in Psychological Tests (with Lee J. Cronbach), Psychological Bulletin, 1955

Known for

With Lee Cronbach he defined construct validity, the idea that a test of an unobservable trait is validated through a network of predicted relations with other measures. He is also known for Clinical versus Statistical Prediction (1954), which found that simple formulas usually predict as well as or better than expert judgment.

Works

• Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Science, 2009

Known for

A management scholar who studies social networks in organizations, and co-author with Stephen Borgatti, Daniel Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca of a review of network analysis in the social sciences.

Works

• Environmental Scanning: The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information Systems, 1981

Known for

A Penn State researcher whose 1981 conference paper is the usual source for the stakeholder power and interest grid, which sorts stakeholders by their power over an organization and their interest in its decisions to decide how closely to manage each. The paper is often cited with the date 1991, which is a miscitation.

Works

• Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), 1871

Known for

The founder of the Austrian school of economics. His Principles challenged cost-based theories of value with a subjective theory in which value, and so price, is set at the margin.

Works

• Ethical Analysis of Food Biotechnologies: An Evaluative Framework, in Food Ethics, edited by Ben Mepham, Routledge, 1996

Known for

A bioethicist at the University of Nottingham who devised the ethical matrix: a table that crosses the parties affected by a decision with three principles, wellbeing, autonomy, and fairness, so each party's stake is weighed in turn.

Works

• Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception), 1945

Known for

A French phenomenologist. Phenomenology of Perception holds that perception is the ground of experience and that the lived body, not a detached mind, is where knowing begins, so the perceiving body and the perceived world cannot be separated.

Works

• First Things First, Simon and Schuster, 1994

Known for

Co-author, with Stephen Covey and A. Roger Merrill, of First Things First, a self-help book on time management that sorts tasks by urgency and importance into four quadrants and asks readers to put the important first.

Works

• First Things First, 1994

Known for

Coauthor, with Stephen R. Covey and Rebecca R. Merrill, of First Things First, which popularized the time management matrix that sorts tasks by urgency and importance and urges time for important tasks that are not urgent. It is a popular self-help synthesis, not research.

Works

• Cultural Evolution, University of Chicago Press, 2011

Known for

A researcher who argues that culture changes by a Darwinian process of variation, selection, and transmission, and that this framework can tie together the social sciences.

Works

• Metcalfe's Law after 40 Years of Ethernet, Computer 46, no. 12 (IEEE), 2013

Known for

Coinventor of Ethernet and cofounder of 3Com. In sales presentations in the early 1980s he argued that a network's value grows with the square of the number of compatible devices it connects, a claim George Gilder named Metcalfe's law in Forbes in 1993.

Caveat: The square law is a rough heuristic; Andrew Odlyzko and others have argued that real networks gain value more slowly, closer to n log n, since not every connection is worth the same.

Works

• The Monte Carlo Method (with Stanislaw Ulam), Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1949

Known for

A Los Alamos physicist who, with Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann, developed the Monte Carlo method of estimating outcomes by repeated random sampling, and who gave his name to the Metropolis algorithm (1953).

Caveat: Ulam conceived the method in 1946; the 1949 paper is its first public description, and sensitivity analysis itself has no single originator.

Works

• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, 2014

Known for

An INSEAD professor of organizational behavior, she maps national business cultures on eight scales of difference, such as how people communicate, give negative feedback, decide, and disagree. The book is a practitioner's framework drawn from her teaching and research across more than thirty countries.