Peopleware and Slack by Tom DeMarco are must-reads. I re-read Peopleware once every few years. I also liked Delivering Happiness (by @zappos) and Tribal Leadership, although they are more about organizations than management per se.

Just finished reading Tribal Leadership. Opened my eyes to things I had not realized before about life in general and working with teams. I would highly recommend it if you have not read it yet.

Next up, The Lean Startup.

I know I'm a year or two late on both of these, but they have proven to be awesome books whose contents I was able to apply almost immediately. One is great for hacking and the other is about leadership and developing company culture.

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright

This makes me think of the Tribal Leadership book and talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership/t... ).

Their model has 5 stages. Stage 1 is 'life sucks' and stage 2 is 'my life sucks'. What you describe fits between those stages. Their ideas about stages beyond that are pretty interesting.

I’d suggest reading Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.

Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.

Science? Hard to measure workplace behavior and team health. There are probably books which offer advice and anecdotes, but a "science of workplace behavior" seems unlikely. On the other hand, there are books which may be useful. For example, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace by Ron Friedman might be helpful. (Your query motivated me to purchase a copy.) I found Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
by Dave Logan,‎ John King,‎ and Halee Fischer-Wright worth the read.

My point--there is not much real quantitative science in this area: just stories and cautionary tales.

One thing isn't inherently harder than the other. To put things in linear dualistic terms like

hard vs easy
good vs bad
moral vs immoral

can sometimes be over simplifying due to the normative nature of these concepts.

For someone who knows Vietnamese to learn Chinese is easy, but for someone who only knows English learning Chinese can be harder.

Each discipline has its' own linguistic domain. The difference between a software programmer and a rocket scientist is the rocket scientist knows a set of specific terms/vocabulary that distinguishes different parts of rocket, fuel, working process of aerospace and other stuff I don't know anything about. Not only does the rocket scientist knows all the terms, he/she also understands the relationship between each terms. It is mastery of this Linguistic Domain that make it possible for rocket scientists.

Programmer has mastery of a different Linguistic Domain and for some rocket scientists it may seem hard.

I do some what agree with you on the 'insecurity thing'. Although I think that is only a case in below stage 4 working culture (see Dave Logan, Tribal Leadership for reference on organizational culture stages http://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.ht...).

* Thinking Fast, Slow by Daniel Kahneman

* Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

* Slack, by Tom DeMarco (also re-read Peopleware). Both of these books are fundamental to anyone developing software within an organization.

* Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh. It's not fantastic but it's helpful if you are trying to build a business.

* Tribal Leadership - recommended by the above. Not great but interesting.

* Rework - short read, worth the time.

* Managing Humans by Rands - very entertaining, useful if you manage people.

Other stuff I read is not worth mentioning in a "best books" list.

I am not big fan of US imperialism. However, if one examine the facts, it is unlikely that China and Russia/Europe will be the dominant force anytime soon. US still can dominates EVERYTHING if they really wanted to with their military, political and economic power.

If you read

The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century

Jim Norman

http://www.amazon.com/The-Oil-Card-Economic-Warfare/dp/09777...

A high oil price checkmates China (with its large population) but puts money in Putin’s coffers. Going back to the cold war one will see the fall of Soviet Union is engineered by suppression of Oil Prices during the cold war. After 1989 the Soviet reexamine, they agrees that it is cheap oil price that checkmated them.

The trick now has a lot to do with strategy and game theory. I find that to be a bit depressing. As Dave Logan who wrote Tribal Leadership says:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

It would be nice to see the countries foster a kind of culture that will generate wealth for all, instead of devising game theory and strategy to out compete each other or different corporate factions.

Healthy competition is a great instrument on small individual scale, it is idiosyncratic/inefficient on the country scale.