Reading
A starting point.
For anyone who wants to think more seriously about the intersection of historical reasoning and business decision-making. These are the books I return to most often.
- Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy
The book that started this site. Building on Neustadt and May, it argues that historical thinking is a discipline statecraft neglects — then reduces it to a twelve-question checklist for decisions made under genuine uncertainty.
- Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm
Why judgment grounded in the humanities — “thick”, contextual understanding — is precisely what algorithms cannot supply. The closest ally to the argument made here, though its method has drawn fair criticism.
- Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers
The field manual. Two Harvard teachers offer plain routines — ask “what’s the story?”, separate the known from the presumed, place people and institutions in their own histories — for using the past on the job.
- The Uses and Abuses of History
An elegant warning that history is used as often as it is abused — for comfort, for identity, for the convenient analogy. A case for scepticism toward anyone who says “history teaches us.”
- The Historian’s Craft
Written in the Resistance and never finished, Bloch’s defence of history as “the science of men in time” still teaches the essentials: interrogate your evidence, resist the idol of origins, understand before you judge.
- Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
How the values the modern West takes as self-evident — dignity, conscience, the impulse to reform — are a contingent inheritance, most powerful where least noticed. A bracing lesson in seeing one’s own assumptions.
- Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
On the limits of technique: the rationalist mistakes the crib for the competence, forgetting that real knowledge lives only in practice. A direct challenge to management by framework.
- Lectures in the History of Political Thought
Three thousand years of political thought read as circumstance, not cause, and refusing any story of progress. His “dry stone wall” of history is a quiet rebuke to single-cause explanation.
- The Halo Effect
A dismantling of the business bestseller’s central trick — explaining success backwards from the result. A bracing corrective on causation, hindsight, and why no formula guarantees performance.
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
The case that some things gain from disorder, and that we should reduce fragility rather than forecast shocks. The ideas are sharp and durable; the manner, less so — read past it.
- Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Two centuries of capitalism read as five recurring surges — from technological big-bang through speculative frenzy and crash to, if institutions adapt, a golden age. A disciplined way to ask: early or late?
- Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions Under Uncertainty
Separates calculable risk from true uncertainty, and shows that in the latter simple rules of thumb often beat complex models. Clear and humane on framing and judgment.