Standing on others’ shoulders.

Reading list

Listed so you can check our sources. Not every work here has been read in full yet; the papers say which passages we rely on.

1. Jesuthasan & Boudreau, Work Without Jobs (MIT Press, 2022)
   Takes jobs apart into tasks and reassembles them, including with automation. The closest earlier work: we build on it.
2. Malone, Crowston et al., the MIT Process Handbook (Organizing Business Knowledge, MIT Press, 2003)
   Describing processes at many levels, with their dependencies. The academic root of taking work apart.
3. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm” (Economica, 1937)
   Why firms exist at all: using the market has costs. Where those costs fall, the firm’s edges move.
4. Shahidi, Rusak, Manning, Fradkin, Horton, “The Coasean Singularity?” (NBER working paper 34468, November 2025)
   AI agents can cut the costs of searching, communicating and contracting, so the line between making and buying shifts. It also warns of new risks.
5. Microsoft, Work Trend Index 2025: “The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born”
   Three phases from AI assistant to agents running whole processes; the “work chart” in place of the org chart.
6. Gebru et al., “Datasheets for Datasets” (2018); Mitchell et al., “Model Cards for Model Reporting” (2019)
   Structured descriptions of what something is, how it was tested and when not to use it. Our Element card borrows from them.
7. Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin, Rock, “GPTs are GPTs” (arXiv 2303.10130, 2023)
   Measures AI exposure task by task, not job by job.
8. Anthropic, Project Vend phase 2 (December 2025)
   An honest account of AI running small shops: better, but not yet robust.
9. Bek (Sequoia Capital), “Services: The New Software” (March 2026)
   Selling the outcome rather than the tool.
10. The Open Group, TOGAF Business Capabilities guide
    Capability maps: describing what a business does rather than how it is organised.
11. Jesuthasan & Boudreau, Reinventing Jobs (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018)
    An earlier, practical method for taking jobs apart and applying automation to the pieces.
12. Rogiers & Collings, “The End of Jobs? Paradoxes of Job Deconstruction in Organizations” (Academy of Management Perspectives 38(2), 177–196, 2024)
    A critical look at taking jobs apart: what workers may lose in identity, belonging and security.
13. Cowgill, Davis, Montagnes & Perkowski, “Stable Matching on the Job? Theory and Evidence on Internal Talent Markets” (Management Science 71(3), 2025)
    Compares leaders assigning people to work with market-like matching inside one large organisation. Relevant to whether work is better assigned or chosen; listed for a full read.
14. Williamson, “Transaction Cost Economics: The Natural Progression” (Nobel lecture, 2009)
    Why work that rests on firm-specific investment tends to stay inside the firm. The economic case against buying everything.
15. Goodhart (1975, published 1976); Strathern, “‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system” (European Review, 1997)
    Why a number used as a target stops being a good measure. The popular wording is commonly credited to Strathern.