001
Self-examination
Michel de Montaigne
What the discipline of examining oneself can teach executives about uncertainty, conviction and the limits of their own judgment.
An editorial initiative of The Executive Institute
The Executive
Library
Timeless Thinkers.
Enduring Judgment.
An independent executive editorial publication revisiting thinkers whose ideas continue to illuminate leadership, institutions and consequential decision-making under uncertainty.
Editorial Premise
Ideas survive because they continue to illuminate problems that refuse to disappear.
The Executive Library returns to durable ideas as instruments of judgment, asking what they still reveal about leadership, institutions, power, uncertainty and decision-making.
The Founding Essays
Five thinkers. One continuing inquiry.
Self-examination. Falsification. Systems. Disproportion. Persistence. Five different routes into the same enduring problem: how better judgment is formed.
002
Falsification
Karl Popper
Why sound judgment depends not only on defending a decision, but on creating disciplined ways to discover when it may be wrong.
003
Systems
W. Edwards Deming
Why leaders must understand the system before asking Artificial Intelligence to improve it — and why better technology can otherwise reproduce the same problems at greater speed and scale.
004
Disproportion
Vilfredo Pareto
Why the ability to automate a task does not establish the wisdom of automating it — and how concentration, dependencies and consequences should guide executive attention.
005
Persistence
Albert Camus
What the persistence of Sisyphus can reveal about responsibility, meaning and the executive obligation to act without certainty of outcome.
Forthcoming
The past does not provide answers.
It provides better questions.
The Executive Library
The Executive Institute
The Library is one expression of a broader inquiry into executive judgment.