In progress

How Professions Think
Forthcoming, early 2026
An examination of how different professions attend to reality, solve problems, and miss what falls outside their field of vision.

The Limits of Our Best Thinking
Forthcoming, early 2026
A study of how capable people and institutions lose intelligence through unexamined habits of attention, and how it can be recovered.

Writers I return to

These are writers whose ideas continue to orient my thinking.
This list is deliberately incomplete and short by design.

Art Kleiner
For his careful documentation of how power, reform, and idealism collide inside corporations, and how cultural change actually happens.

David Edwards
For insisting that we create things that matter, and for grounding creativity in reality rather than abstraction.

Bo Seo
For demonstrating how disciplined argument sharpens thinking. His work inspired my use of debate as a personal thinking practice.

Patsy Rodenburg
For her writing on presence, voice, and command, and for showing how attention is something we actively take responsibility for.

Janet Malcolm
For her unsparing clarity about how intelligent minds navigate truth, institutions, and self-deception.

Richard Rorty
For contingency, anti-foundationalism, and the insistence that responsibility survives the collapse of certainty.

Walter Kaufmann
For intellectual courage, clarity, and an insistence on thinking without borrowed authority.

René Girard
For revealing how desire, imitation, and mimesis shape action more than reason admits.

Ken Segall
For showing how simplicity functions as a discipline of attention, not an aesthetic preference.

Hector Macdonald
For exposing how language distorts supposedly “data-driven” decisions, without resorting to philosophy to do so.

Wilfred Burchett
For moral courage, proximity to reality, and entering places others avoided.

Peter Drucker
For responsibility, orientation, and a conception of management that still feels ethically serious.

Edward W. Said
For articulating the intellectual’s role as an outsider, and the obligation to resist reductive thinking.

Clayton Christensen
For reframing problems through the deceptively simple question: what job is this doing?

Charlie Munger
For demonstrating the practical value of multi-disciplinary thinking and scenario-based reasoning.

Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin
For grounding problem-solving in lived reality through positive deviance.

Raymond Geuss
For returning philosophy to reality, power, and context.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For self-reliance, intellectual ownership, and the primacy of one’s own mind.

J. E. Littlewood
For insight into the contingencies of creative work and the conditions that allow it to emerge.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For perspectivism, becoming, affirmation, and the foundations of how I think about intelligence, attention, and life.

Fiction and biography

Fiction matters here in exploreing attention in its most human form.

Key influences include Dostoyevsky (Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment), Edith Wharton, Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Oscar Wilde, Michel Houellebecq (The Map and the Territory), Somerset Maugham, Andy Warhol (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol), Lawrence Olivier (Confessions of an Actor), and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited).