This page, organized in alphabetical order, is an ever-evolving "DAO contributor bookshelf" for anyone interested in building and working in decentralized systems.


Read this first: The Infinite Machine

by Camila Russo

This book provides the essential building blocks you need in your understanding of where DAOs come from.

Now that you're ready to dive into the rest of your DAO reading journey, let's go in alphabetical order:

Brave New Work : Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

Good for:

  • Tactical solutions and exercises to try in your organization right away.
  • History of work and how it led to where we are today.
  • Making change in large companies that feel too big to change.

Community: The Structure of Belonging

by Peter Block

Good for:

  • Addressing wider social problems, such as ideological polarization.
  • Building community without old-school techniques like persuasion and propaganda.

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and The Human Brain

by Antonio R. Damasio

Good for:

  • Understanding the relationship between emotions and rational thinking.
  • Dive into neuroscience as it relates to Descartes' reasoning, "I think, therefore I am."

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Good for:

  • Navigating a constantly changing world by being flexible rather than bracing ourselves against change.
  • Understanding "emergence" through a feminist, afro-futurist lens.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

Good for:

  • Learning how to work less and get more done.
  • Contributors working in a bountied-system rather than a salaried-system (where it's essential to do what's essential to get paid—more output means more payment).
  • Running a more simpler, leaner organization by using the philosophies of essentialism.

Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

Good for:

  • Moving away from bureaucracy and toward agility
  • Building creative, deeply innovative organizations that can weather massive changes.

Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change

by David Ehrlichman

Good for:

  • Understanding large-scale, systemic change.
  • Diving into "network science" and systems thinking.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Good for:

  • Learning how to communicate with empathy to improve your relationships.
  • Moving beyond blame and finger-pointing and into a more healthy, productive way to interact with others.

Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home

by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson

Good for:

  • Best practices for working in a remote-first organization.
  • Truly flexible working arrangements that create a more equitable work environment for everyone.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired By the Next Stage in Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux

Good for:

  • Fundamentals of Teal Organizations.
  • The birth of many of the ideas present in the DAO movement today.
  • A unique look at human evolution and how organizations track with our stages of consciousness.
  • Examples of organizations working in a Teal structure and how they handle big topics, from hiring and firing to budgeting to compensation.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Good for:

  • Everything about human history that you didn't learn in school.
  • How the appearance of human cognition and consciousness shaped us and the world we live in.
  • Implications for humans now that we don't need to worry about natural selection.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

by James C. Scott

Good for:

  • Understanding how large-scale state-run efforts have failed in various ways, often due to faulty top-down social planning.
  • The effects of poor, state-run schemes on everyday people.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement in a Complex World

by General Stanley McChrystal

Good for:

  • "Complicated" vs. "complex" systems and how teams can work with complexity.
  • Agility (not "Agile" with a capital A) and how to adjust on the fly to changing circumstances.
  • Small team empowerment: letting leaders make decisions within smaller groups.

The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy

by William von Hippel

Good for:

  • Evolutionary science that helps us understand how we evolved into the type of humans we are today.
  • Deep understanding of human development.

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

Good for:

  • High-level concepts around the importance of what we're building with blockchain and web3
  • Longterm political and economic background and predictions

The Strategy of Conflict

by Thomas C. Schelling

Good for:

  • Game theory and understanding how actors behave in various circumstances.
  • Conflict framed in the aftermath of WWII and the Cold War.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Essay by Jo Freeman

Good for:

  • Understnading power relations within groups.
  • Democratic solutions to structurelessness.

Who Decides Who Decides? How to start a group so everyone can have a voice

by Ted J. Rau

Good for:

  • Basics of decision-making in sociocracy.
  • Decision-making without getting stuck in governance and process.