Sources and Further Reading
FOURTEEN FOUNDATIONAL WORKS
The following works are selected entry points into the intellectual traditions this book builds from. Each is worth reading in full.
1. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, 1966. The efficiency versus effectiveness distinction that opens Chapter 1. 2. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1947. Bounded rationality and why preparation expands organizational decision capacity. 3. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1982. Quality as a system property, supporting the treatment of readiness as a system capability. 4. Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995. Why organizations can fail to recognize situations even when relevant signals are present. 5. Gary Klein, Sources of Power, 1998. Why expert organizations recognize situations rather than deliberate through every option. 6. Michael Porter, "What Is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996. The strategic foundation from which this book asks how organizations become ready to act. 7. Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, 1997. The disruption argument that frames the need to mobilize once an emerging pattern becomes visible. 8. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull, "Why Strategy Execution Unravels, and What to Do About It", Harvard Business Review, 2015. Cross-silo coordination breakdowns that help explain why execution loses strategic intent. 9. Amy Edmondson, Teaming, 2012. Cross-boundary coordination and learning under changing conditions. 10. Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, Team of Teams, 2015. Shared understanding and distributed authority built in advance. 11. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011. How pre-staged decisions can reduce error and improve judgment under pressure. 12. John Kotter, Leading Change, 1996. Change sequencing relevant to the First 100 Days discussed in Chapter 13. 13. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, 2012. The distinction between systems that merely withstand disruption and systems that improve through it. 14. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, 2009. Moving critical coordination into prepared structures rather than relying on memory under pressure.
SOURCE NOTES BY PART
The following works are cited or used as supporting context, organized by the parts of the book they support. These notes distinguish direct support for claims from further reading that provides useful context; they are not exhaustive.
Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance, Agile Practice Guide, Second Edition, Project Management Institute, 2026. Short framing on preparation and delayed value (p. 86), enterprise agility and structural enablers (pp. 95, 103-104), xMO sensing and portfolio feedback (pp. 100-104), and human decision authority for AI inputs (pp. 107-108), used as source context in the Introduction and Chapters 7 and 11. This source is not presented as an endorsement or validation of Enterprise Readiness.
Introduction and Part I: The Problem • Alison Geskin, personal contribution. Source of the Chapter 1 opening callout, quoted with permission. • Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, Harper & Row, 1966. The source for the efficiency versus effectiveness distinction in Chapter 1 only. • Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, Macmillan, 1947. The primary source for bounded rationality and satisficing discussed in Chapter 2. • The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1978, awarded to Herbert A. Simon, NobelPrize.org. Confirms Simon's 1978 Nobel Prize for research on organizational decision-making, discussed in Appendix B. • W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, MIT Press, 1982/1986. Supports trust-as-system in Chapter 3 and measurement in Chapter 9. • Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive, Harvard University Press, 1938. The source for the claim in Chapter 4 that an organization's purpose is to make human cooperation effective. • Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman, "An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust," Academy of Management Review, 1995. Further reading on established models of organizational trust. • Edelman, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report, 2025. Further reading on trust as a measurable institutional condition. • Aaron De Smet, Arne Gast, Erik Mandersloot, Richard Steele, and Carmen James, "Change Is Changing: How to Meet the Challenge of Radical Reinvention," McKinsey & Company, November 19, 2025. Exhibit 1 reports that 59 percent of change-initiative value is lost between the initial idea and execution. Used as broad economic context in the Introduction, not as validation of this book's Mobilization Tax model or estimates.
Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession 2014: The High Cost of Low Performance, PMI, 2014. Background on project-delivery performance and strategic outcomes relevant to Chapter 1. • Project Management Institute, PMO Frameworks, PMI, 2013. Further reading on PMO structures and mandates relevant to Chapter 10. • Gartner, "Infographic: Closing Critical Program and Portfolio Management Maturity Gaps," Gartner, 2025. Further reading on program/portfolio maturity relevant to Chapter 10. • Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull, "Why Strategy Execution Unravels, and What to Do About It," Harvard Business Review, 2015. Supports cross-silo coordination in Chapter 5. • McKinsey & Company, "Decision making in the age of urgency," McKinsey Global Survey, 2019. Further reading on organizational decision speed/quality. • Michael Mankins, Chris Brahm, and Greg Caimi, "Your Scarcest Resource," Harvard Business Review, 2014. Further reading on leadership capacity. • Michael Mankins, "This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours a Year," Harvard Business Review, 2014. Further reading on recurring-meeting cost. • Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. Further reading on transient advantage and closing windows. • Roger L. Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. Support for the strategy-as-integrated-choices argument in Chapter 1, where a delivery-optimized function answers neither where-to-play nor how-to-win. • Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Jossey-Bass, 2012. Support in Chapter 1 for the claim that alignment is a property of how a leadership team decides and commits rather than of individual intelligence. • Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007. Support in Chapter 2 for why identical information produces divergent meaning, the everyday form of the communication-without-shared-meaning failure. • Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, Free Press, 2006. Support in Chapter 3 for treating trust as an economic force whose absence taxes coordination with verification time. • Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Bantam, 2018. Support in Chapter 3 for the argument that high-performing groups are produced by designed practices that survive any single individual's departure. • General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Portfolio/Penguin, 2015. Support in Chapter 4 for Barnard's cooperative infrastructure, where shared understanding and distributed authority built in advance enable speed. • Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession, PMI, 2012 to present. Support for the recurring finding that delivery maturity alone does not guarantee strategic outcomes, used in Chapter 1.
Parts II and III: The Discipline and the Architecture • Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage Publications, 1995. The foundation for the collective-interpretation argument in Chapters 5 and 10. • Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World, third edition, Jossey-Bass, 2015. Support for the high-reliability-organization practices used in Chapter 5 and Appendix B. • Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1998. The source for recognition-primed decision making and expert situation recognition in Chapter 5 and Appendix B. • Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday, 1990. Support for the systems-thinking and learning-organization arguments in Chapters 6, 15, 17, and 23. • Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems, Wiley, 1974. Support for treating organizational performance as a property of an interacting system rather than isolated functions. • Michael E. Porter, "What Is Strategy?" Harvard Business Review, 1996. Support for the distinction between operational effectiveness and strategic positioning used in the early architecture argument. • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Support for the decision-under-pressure argument in Chapter 11 and Appendix B. • Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica, 1979. The source for predictable judgment distortions under uncertainty discussed in Appendix B. • John Sweller, "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning," Cognitive Science, 1988. Support for the cognitive-load argument behind pre-staging decisions and reducing working-memory demand. • Amy F.T. Arnsten, "Stress Signalling Pathways That Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function," Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009. Support for the neurobiology-of-stress discussion in Appendix B. • John H. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Addison-Wesley, 1995. Support for the complex-adaptive-systems argument that readiness must prepare the organization to adapt rather than predict every event. • Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business School Press, 1997. Context for disruption/adaptation in Chapters 12 and 14. • John P. Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 1996. Supports short-term wins and behavior-before-structure in Chapter 13. • Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Support for the Chapter 5 simple-rules claim. • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Random House, 2012. Supports the Chapter 6 distinction between systems surviving shocks and systems strengthened by them.
Parts III and IV: Operating Under Pressure and Building the Capability • Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, "On Strategy," in Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, edited by Daniel J. Hughes, Presidio Press, 1993. The source tradition behind the claim that plans must meet changing conditions rather than assume certainty. • Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, November 14, 1957, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. The source for the distinction between plans and planning used in the preparation argument. • U.S. Department of the Army, ADP 6-0: Mission Command, 2019. Support for the Auftragstaktik and distributed-authority principles applied to prepared adaptation. • Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Incident Management System, third edition, 2017. Support for the Incident Command System principles of pre-defined roles, common operating language, and scalable coordination. • Erik Hollnagel, Safety-II in Practice: Developing the Resilience Potentials, Routledge, 2017. Support for defining resilience as the capacity to succeed under varying conditions in Chapter 15. • Amy C. Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, Jossey-Bass, 2012. Support for cross-boundary coordination and learning under changing conditions. • Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Metropolitan Books, 2009. Support for moving critical coordination into prepared structures rather than memory under pressure. • James G. March, "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," Organization Science, 1991. Support for the balance between using established responses and adapting through learning.
AI Adoption and Organizational Design • McKinsey & Company, "Superagency in the Workplace: Empowering People to Unlock AI's Full Potential," January 2025. The source for the employee and executive survey findings in Chapter 11. • McKinsey & Company, "The State of AI: How Organizations Are Rewiring to Capture Value," McKinsey Global Survey, March 2025. The source for the CEO-governance and workflow-redesign findings in Chapter 11. • McKinsey Global Institute, "The AI Economy: Interconnected Forces, Feedback Loops, and Speeds of Change," September 10, 2026. • Deloitte, "AI Agents Are Only the Beginning: The Path to Agentic Transformation," August 2026. The source for the business-process redesign and agent-preparedness findings in Chapter 11. • Ali Sankur, Bernhard Mühlreiter, and Steffen Fuchs, "Cutting the 'Coordination Tax': How Agentic AI Can Reshape Workflows," McKinsey & Company, September 18, 2026. Supports interface-cost context in the introduction and Chapter 11, not Readiness OS outcomes. • Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Robert Levin, "The New Management Playbook for AI: How to Move Faster and Create More Value," McKinsey & Company, August 2026. Support for the operating-model and organizational-capability argument in Chapter 11. Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, Chief Reinvention Officer, public commentary, 2026. Source of the Chapter 11 activation-gap framing. Her book The Reinvention Advantage is published by Wiley. ---