Not productivity advice. Somers noticed that when a tool gets fast enough, you attempt things you'd never have started otherwise, so the real change is in what becomes thinkable at all.
Peyton Jones on writing papers people actually read, and most of it carries over to any technical writing. His inversion — write the paper first, do the research second — genuinely helps.
A precise, unsentimental account of why a good engineer left a good job. No grievance, no moral, just the actual reasoning laid out — rare in a genre built on tidy hindsight.
Whyte diagnosed the conformist, belonging-hungry corporate culture of the fifties before anyone had the words for it. Grounded in what he saw rather than management theory, which is why it still bites.
The father of cybernetics thinking through what automation would do to human work and dignity, with a seriousness that reads as contemporary. He's reasoning toward consequences, not predicting gadgets.