Community Reading List

2023

Leadership

For the full DFP Guides, see DFP Guide.

This section provides a list of recommended readings on leadership:

• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
• Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek
• Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot

Influence

Information Operations

• Putin’s Trolls: On the Frontlines of Russia’s Information War Against the World by Jessikka Aro
• Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, Prof Ronald J Rychlak

Social Engineering

• Social Engineering: The Science of Human Hacking by Christopher J. Hadnagy
• Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work, and Everything We Do by Ori Brafman
• The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod
• The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold by Robert Levine

Society

• Propaganda by Edward Bernays
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
• Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) Third Edition by Carol Tavris

Modeling

Applied Predictive Modeling

• Applied Predictive Modeling by Max Kuhn and Kjell Johnson
  • pdf link

Psychology

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Open Source Warfare

• Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb
• LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer
• The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

Crowd Psychology

• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
• The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon
• Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
• PUBLIC OPINION by Walter Lippmann

Foreign Perspectives of America

• Understanding Anti-Americanism by Paul Hollander
• Land without Ghosts by David Arkush
• Hating America by Barry Rubin
• Ugly American by William J Lederer

War

• Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI by Peter Lance
• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll
• War Is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier by Smedley D. Butler
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme by John Keegan
• The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Intelligence, Research, and Analysis

RSS

• Research Shorts and Notes

Intelligence Gathering and Analysis

• [https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Intelligence-Analysis-Richards-Heuer/dp/1684224128/ Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
• The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service by Henry A. Crumpton
• The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World by Allen W. Dulles
• The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Research and Analysis

• The Analysis and Use of Financial Statements by Gerald I. White and Ashwinpaul C. Sondhi
• The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t by Nate Silver
• Knowing What We Know

Technology

• Genius Makers by Cade Metz, John Lee, et al.
• The Information by James Gleick, Rob Shapiro, et al.
• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Cybersecurity

• The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll

• Cyber Spies by Gordon Corera
• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

Blockchain

• On Constellation:
  • The Unique Value Proposition and Bull Case for Constellation Network
  • A Brief History of the Hypergraph
• On Void:
  • Enter the Void NFT

Philosophy

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• [https://www.amazon.com/Enchiridion-Epictetus/dp/0879757035 Enchiridion: Epictetus, Robert M. Baird et al.