How do the best writers actually work?

Shell states he was inspired by Cialdini's Influence to write a negotiation book blending social-scientific research with storytelling, and uses Cialdini's reciprocity and consistency throughout the leverage chapters

Bargaining for Advantage→ cites →Influence

Engages with Kolbert's extinction narrative by documenting the vanishing species and habitats that Macdonald encounters in her essays

Vesper Flights→ cites →The Sixth Extinction

Montaigne's Complete Essays (Donald Frame translation) is listed in Flow's References. Csikszentmihalyi treats Montaigne as an early model of someone using writing as a tool for ordering consciousness and cultivating the self.

Flow→ cites →The Essays

Clear references Westover's memoir to illustrate how environment and identity shape who we become, and how changing your environment can transform your trajectory.

Atomic Habits→ cites →Educated

Catmull's memoir is inseparable from the Steve Jobs story. He describes decades of working alongside Jobs at Pixar, revealing how Jobs's demanding leadership style shaped the studio's creative culture.

Creativity, Inc.→ cites →Steve Jobs

Munger considers Influence one of the most important books ever written on human psychology. He recommends it in his famous "mental models" framework as essential for understanding misjudgement.

Poor Charlie's Almanack→ cites →Influence

The Undoing Project tells the story of the Kahneman-Tversky partnership that produced the research behind Thinking, Fast and Slow. Lewis provides the human narrative behind the scientific breakthroughs.

The Undoing Project→ cites →Thinking, Fast and Slow

References Taleb's Black Swan arguments about narrative fallacy and our inability to predict rare events

The Art of Thinking Clearly→ cites →The Black Swan

References Taleb's Black Swan arguments about our blindness to randomness and tendency to construct false narratives

The Drunkard's Walk→ cites →The Black Swan

Humble references Brooks's no silver bullet essay.

Continuous Delivery→ cites →The Mythical Man-Month

Kidder's narrative echoes the challenges Brooks described in The Mythical Man-Month.

The Soul of a New Machine→ cites →The Mythical Man-Month

Mann challenges Diamond's narrative from Guns, Germs, and Steel about pre-Columbian Americas.

1491→ cites →Guns, Germs, and Steel

Builds on Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions framework, noting that trust is the prerequisite for the vulnerable storytelling that surfaces a team's why

Find Your Why→ cites →The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Google's SREs reference Kim's Phoenix Project as the canonical articulation of the Dev/Ops conflict that Google addresses by staffing operations with engineers who write software.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems→ cites →The Phoenix Project

Forsgren, Humble, and Kim reference Kim's own Phoenix Project as the narrative foundation for the DevOps practices they empirically validate in this book.

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps→ cites →The Phoenix Project