The books behind the guides.

A practical field guide to transforming a reactive maintenance department into a proactive, world-class function that boosts plant output, reduces costs, and eventually shrinks the need for maintenance itself.

A behavioral economist demonstrates through clever experiments that human irrationality is not random but systematic and predictable, shaping the decisions we make about money, relationships, honesty, and happiness.

Effectiveness—doing the right things well—is not an inborn trait but a learnable set of habits that any knowledge worker can master to convert intelligence, knowledge, and ability into results.

A concise survey of how cognitive psychology explains human thinking, reasoning, and decision making, showing why we are often biased yet broadly intelligent, and proposing a dual-process 'two minds' account.

An exploration of rapid cognition—the split-second, unconscious judgments we make in the blink of an eye—that reveals when these snap decisions serve us brilliantly and when they betray us catastrophically.

A practicing CEO teaches managers that their true output is the output of their team, and shows how applying production principles, leverage, and motivation systematically raises that output.

A logical discipline for developing efficient scheduled maintenance programs for complex equipment by focusing on failure consequences to achieve inherent safety and reliability at minimum cost.

A veteran aviation maintenance leader shows how predictable, patterned 'error traps' lie hidden in aircraft design, tools, procedures, and human behavior, and how competence, awareness, compliance, and teamwork can help people avoid becoming their victims.

A guided tour of why smart, capable leaders and organizations make disastrous decisions—and how to design decision processes that harness collective intelligence to make better choices.

A failing plant manager, guided by a Socratic physicist named Jonah, discovers that the goal of any manufacturing organization is to make money, and learns to manage by identifying and exploiting system constraints rather than chasing local efficiencies.

To improve our relationships and accelerate personal growth, we must shift our focus from giving better feedback to becoming better receivers by understanding and managing the three triggers—Truth, Relationship, and Identity—that block our ability to learn.

Some ideas survive and thrive while others die, and the difference lies in six learnable principles that make ideas 'sticky'—understood, remembered, and capable of changing behavior.

Two IDEO and d.school founders argue that creativity is not a rare gift but a natural human capacity anyone can reclaim by building 'creative confidence'—the belief in one's ability to create change combined with the courage to act.

Driving Eureka! shows how to transform innovation from a random gamble into a reliable, data-driven science by applying W. Edwards Deming's system thinking to how organizations create, communicate, and commercialize ideas.

Idea generation is not magic but a definite, learnable five-step mental technique built on the principle that ideas are new combinations of old elements.

Human error stems as much from 'noise'—the unwanted and costly variability in our professional judgments—as from bias, and this book reveals its hidden impact and provides a systematic 'decision hygiene' toolkit to reduce it.

A practical field guide to transforming a reactive maintenance department into a proactive, world-class function that boosts plant output, reduces costs, and eventually shrinks the need for maintenance itself.

A practical guide to making better decisions by using a four-step process (WRAP) that counteracts the four biases that systematically undermine human judgment.

A comprehensive academic handbook exploring the diverse theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of organizational decision making from multiple disciplines including psychology, economics, and sociology.

This book provides a framework and actionable techniques for transforming emotionally-charged, difficult conversations into productive learning conversations by deconstructing them into their three core components: what happened, feelings, and identity.

A consumer psychologist reveals how human decisions are 'manufactured' from the interplay of cognitive machinery, motivational controls, and informational raw materials—and why we so predictably deviate from rational choice.

A compact workbook of fifty visual decision-making models drawn from business, psychology, and philosophy that help you structure complexity and make better choices about yourself, others, and the world.

A practical framework for measuring and managing the maintenance/asset management function using hierarchically linked performance indicators that connect shop-floor functions to corporate strategy and profitability.

A 1984 compendium of Transportation Research Board papers documenting how highway maintenance management systems evolved through computerization, priority-setting methods, contracting, and equipment management to improve cost-effectiveness of road maintenance.

A former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator distills field-tested, emotion-driven tactics into a practical system for winning any negotiation while preserving the relationship.

A scientific tour of how human decisions are actually made—through a metaphor of decision-making as a manufacturing process shaped by cognitive machinery, motivational controls, and informational inputs.

A practical, science-grounded guide to implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that actually work by detangling goals from compensation and running disciplined short cycles from mission down to metrics.

Successful change—individual, organizational, or societal—follows a repeatable three-part pattern: direct the rational mind, motivate the emotional mind, and shape the surrounding environment.

A practitioner's comprehensive guide showing how properly implemented maintenance planning and scheduling can nearly double maintenance workforce productivity by reducing delays and freeing up technician time.

A comprehensive engineering reference that consolidates human reliability, human error, human factors, and safety in engineering maintenance—with emphasis on aviation and power generation—into a single volume of concepts, methods, and mathematical models.

Our world is dominated by unpredictable, high-impact events ('Black Swans'), and our cognitive biases and flawed statistical tools make us blind to them, leading to catastrophic errors in forecasting and risk management.

A practical guide showing that disciplined, repeatable maintenance work management processes centered on the work order are the foundation for collecting the timely, accurate, complete, and usable data required to manage maintenance as a profit-generating business.

A practical guide arguing that maintenance error is not random human weakness but a systematic, manageable business risk shaped by tasks, workplaces, and organizations.

A legendary computer scientist reveals that greatness is a learnable style of thinking, teaching readers how to cultivate a vision, work on important problems, and make significant contributions in science and engineering.

Organizations that operate reliably under trying conditions do so by cultivating collective mindfulness—continuously tracking small failures, resisting oversimplification, staying sensitive to operations, committing to resilience, and deferring to expertise—so unexpected events are caught and contained before they become catastrophes.

A practical economics guide that reveals where the uncertainty in our lives comes from and how to use tools from economics and finance to manage risk rather than eliminate it.

A logical discipline for developing efficient scheduled maintenance programs for complex equipment by focusing on failure consequences to achieve inherent safety and reliability at minimum cost.

To be a great boss you must combine caring personally about your people with challenging them directly, and then operationalize that stance to build relationships, give guidance, motivate people, and drive results.

A practical treatise on the mental skills, habits, and craft that enable scientists to make discoveries, arguing that research is an art rather than a purely logical science.

A framework for moving equipment management beyond traditional maintenance functions into a 'post-maintenance era' where a single platform-ownership organization owns the entire equipment lifecycle to meet the demands of complex, fast-changing high-tech industries.

Through nine years of matched-pair research on companies that thrived in extreme uncertainty, Collins and Hansen show that greatness in chaos is a matter of disciplined choice, not circumstance or luck.

A guide to becoming a 'many-model thinker' who confronts the complexity of the modern world by applying ensembles of formal models to reason, explain, design, communicate, act, predict, and explore.

Organizations can overcome their inherent learning disabilities and achieve sustained success by collectively mastering five core disciplines: Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning, and the integrative discipline of Systems Thinking.

A practical method for negotiating agreements that satisfy both parties by focusing on interests and objective merits rather than haggling over positions.

The Cynefin framework helps leaders diagnose which of five decision contexts they face—simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, or disorder—and adapt their leadership style accordingly.

A passionate argument that rigorous engagement with the humanities—what the author calls sensemaking—is the essential, irreplaceable skill for understanding human behavior and making wise decisions in a world dangerously seduced by big data and algorithmic thinking.

A practical guide to adopting the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework to set ambitious goals, align teams, and lead an engaged, high-performing workforce.

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, mastering the skills of dialogue lets you speak honestly and safely about almost anything and turn tough moments into better results and relationships.