Noise and control charts (chapters 2 to 4)

• Walter A. Shewhart. Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product. 1931. ASQ, Walter A. Shewhart, on the memorandum of May 16, 1924. On chance, assignable, common and special causes: overview.
• Donald J. Wheeler. Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. SPC Press, 1993. “What Makes the XmR Chart Work?” Quality Digest Daily, December 3, 2012.
• On the three detection rules and baseline length: ProSocia, “Process behavior charts are the key to understanding your business”; Deming Alliance, “Process Behaviour Charts: An Introduction”. Mark Graban, Measures of Success.
• The W. Edwards Deming Institute. On process tampering and the funnel experiment.
• Apple. Mail Privacy Protection and privacy.
• Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean. “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors.” Journal of Finance 55(2), 2000, 773–806.
• Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean. “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(1), 2001, 261–292.

Regression, skill and luck (chapters 5, 6)

• Francis Galton. “Regression Towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute 15, 1886, 246–263. Data: HistData.
• Daniel Kahneman. Autobiography, Nobel Prize, 2002. Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, chapter 17; quoted in Farnam Street.
• Michael J. Mauboussin. The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing. 2012; quoted in Farnam Street. “The True Measures of Success.” Harvard Business Review, October 2012. Interview, Farnam Street.

Playbooks and case studies (chapters 7, 8)

• Phil Rosenzweig. The Halo Effect. 2007. “The halo effect, and other managerial delusions.” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2007.
• Jerker Denrell. “Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management.” Organization Science 14(3), 2003, 227–243. “Selection Bias and the Perils of Benchmarking.” Harvard Business Review, April 2005.
• Peter N. Golder and Gerard J. Tellis. “Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend?” Journal of Marketing Research 30(2), 1993, 158–170.
• Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. “Evidence-Based Management.” Harvard Business Review, January 2006. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense. 2006.
• Casper Sleep Inc. IPO price from its 10-K for 2020 and 10-Qs (SEC XBRL data); revenue and net loss from its 10-K for 2020, filed February 26, 2021; “Durational Capital Management Completes Acquisition of Casper,” 8-K exhibit 99.1, January 25, 2022.
• Allbirds, Inc. “Allbirds Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering,” November 2, 2021. Net revenue from 10-Ks for 2021 to 2025 (SEC XBRL data). Smartbird, Inc. (formerly Allbirds, Inc.), 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.
• Madeline Halpert. “Emily Weiss Steps Down As Glossier CEO Months After Company Layoffs.” Forbes, May 24, 2022.
• Albert J. Dunlap. Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great. 1997. SEC, Litigation Release No. 17710, SEC v. Albert J. Dunlap et al., September 2002.

Deciding before you know (chapters 9 to 12)

• Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo. “Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts: A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking.” Management Science 39(1), 1993, 17–31.
• Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. How Big Things Get Done. 2023. Figures as summarized in The Independent Review, Fall 2023.
• Annie Duke. Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. 2022. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. 2018. Books and Thinking in Bets pages.
• Gary Klein. “Performing a Project Premortem.” Harvard Business Review, September 2007.
• Deborah J. Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington. “Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 2(1), 1989, 25–38.
• Beth Veinott, Gary A. Klein and Sterling Wiggins. “Evaluating the Effectiveness of the PreMortem Technique on Plan Confidence.” Proceedings of the 7th ISCRAM Conference, 2010. Jason Collins, “The premortem,” course notes, on the 30% figure.