Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Why it stays on the shelfUseful for healthcare operations, protocol discipline, and any organization that has to keep promises after the launch moment passes.
Open bookHaotian Bai / Reads
Operator shelf
Books for building durable systems.
A working shelf for maintenance, institutional design, healthcare operations, AI, company building, and the civic machinery behind progress.
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The list is organized by operating problem, not by publication order. Hover or focus a title to make it the current field note.
Current field note
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Maintenance as strategy, not housekeeping.
Full reading list
Full reading list
Nineteen books, one operating question: what should a builder understand before asking institutions, teams, and technology to carry more weight?
- 01Open book
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Useful for healthcare operations, protocol discipline, and any organization that has to keep promises after the launch moment passes.
Maintenance as strategy, not housekeeping. - 02Open book
The Origins of Efficiency
The operating lens transfers cleanly from factories to clinics, education, housing, and any service that needs quality at scale.
- 03Open book
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025
A live map for product judgment, policy risk, and the operational gap between impressive demos and dependable systems.
- 04Open book
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
A useful provocation for deciding which temporary excesses create real capacity and which only create noise.
- 05Open book
Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
A compact operating manual for judgment when decisions are ambiguous, irreversible, or socially pressured.
- 06Open book
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
Founder motion has to become operating cadence: hiring, feedback, decision rights, documents, and repeatable management practice.
- 07Open book
Pieces of the Action
A bridge between science, policy, military urgency, and execution; especially relevant to healthcare and public-private operating models.
- 08Open book
Where Is My Flying Car?
Keeps the question of abundance concrete: energy, transportation, manufacturing, and the parts of progress that cannot be shipped as software alone.
- 09Open book
The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley
A reminder that ecosystems are made from hardware constraints, capital, talent density, and people taking technical risk early.
- 10Open book
Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization
Useful when designing funding, review, and accountability systems that should not accidentally delete the non-obvious work.
- 11Open book
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
A clean lens for public digital infrastructure: who carries the work, who captures the value, and what breaks when attention moves on.
- 12Open book
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
A discipline for builders who need taste, rigor, and the courage to work on problems that might matter for decades.
- 13Open book
The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993
A useful diary of craft, doubt, persistence, and shipping when the work is still fragile.
- 14Open book
Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People
Useful for founder-led communities, patient communities, alumni groups, and any movement that cannot be managed by broadcast alone.
- 15Open book
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Covers the practical questions that decide whether software teams get leverage: migrations, debt, sizing, succession, and pace.
- 16Open book
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Important for anyone communicating through distrust, platform dynamics, and public institutions that no longer control the information surface.
- 17Open book
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
A counterweight to short-horizon decision making: compounding, responsibility, freedom, and welfare over long timeframes.
- 18Open book
The Dream Machine
A reminder that technology revolutions need patrons, labs, taste, and a narrative strong enough to organize decades of work.
- 19Open book
High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People
Useful for executive hiring, boards, capital, M&A, and the moments when company design becomes more consequential than product taste alone.
Haotian Bai
Reading is part of the operating cadence.
I use this shelf as a map for systems that have to work in public: teams, clinics, software, policy, and the institutions that hold them together.
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