The Effective Executive — Peter Drucker
The book I reread before every new operating role. Drucker's question — what needs to be done, rather than what do I want to do — is the discipline underneath every turnaround I have run.
The Shelf
What I actually recommend.
People ask what to read, which frameworks to steal, and which tools survived contact with real operating. This page is the honest answer, kept short on purpose. If it's here, I've used it. Updated as my answers change.
Books
Five that shaped the operating years
Not a reading list — a working shelf. Each earned its place in a specific situation.
Working Backwards — Colin Bryar & Bill Carr
The best public documentation of one-way-door versus two-way-door decisions, written by people who ran the mechanism rather than admired it. My essay on one-way doors argues with this book as much as it borrows from it.
Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey Moore
Still the clearest account of why the technology adoption curve breaks companies. In MedTech the chasm has a reimbursement code attached, which is where my predicates essay picks up.
The Outsiders — William Thorndike
Eight CEOs judged by capital allocation instead of charisma. The title coincidence is real but so is the argument: the operators who compound are the ones the industry did not see coming.
The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande
Medicine's answer to complexity is humility plus structure. Every data room I build is downstream of this book's argument that expertise fails without scaffolding.
Frameworks
Four I reach for weekly
Mine and borrowed. The full versions live on the Frameworks page; these are the ones that earn their keep.
The Ninety-Day Data Moat Test
If your team stopped touching the product for ninety days, would it still get better on its own? One question that separates a compounding asset from a photograph. From The Data Moat Nobody Has.
Read →The Four Tests of an Analogy
You are rarely talking to the decision maker; you are talking to the person who has to retell your argument without you in the room. Four tests for whether the retelling survives. From What Survives the Retelling.
Read →One-Way vs Two-Way Doors
Reversible decisions deserve speed; irreversible ones deserve the meeting. The single best filter for when “move fast” stops being good advice.
Read →Score What You Can, Judge the Rest
My first job was building the APACHE Score's data pipeline at GWU. The lesson has held for four decades: quantify the quantifiable so that judgment gets spent only where it is scarce.
Read →
Reading the industry
Where I actually get signal
The short list that survived unsubscribing from everything else.
MedTech Dive + LSI Market Reports
The daily wire for device commercialization, and the conference intelligence that actually reflects what strategics are buying.
Bessemer's State of Health Tech
The annual read on where healthcare capital is moving, written by people who deploy it. I test my own Series B assumptions against it.
Stanford HAI · AI Index
The one AI report I trust on capability trends, because it is measured rather than marketed. Most of my discipline-gap arguments cite its data.
JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions
Where interventional cardiology actually argues with itself. If a claim about the cath lab does not survive this journal, it does not go in my writing.