How to Read This Page

The chapters in Changing the System draw on industry research and organizational science beyond the KBCM survey series, and this page is where those references live in full. Each entry links the most authoritative, durable source available so a reader unfamiliar with the person or the work can see exactly what the report is referring to. None of these is a source for the report’s certified figures; those come only from the survey editions cataloged on the Resources page, and the separation is deliberate.

Industry Research

Eldridge, M., Fiore, G., Heap, S., & Haygood, K. (2024). Why Software Companies’ Customer Success Is Failing. Bain & Company, 2024 Technology Report. NRR declined for 75% of surveyed software companies while nearly 60% increased customer success spending; buyers rank technical implementation help first among post-sale needs, practitioners rank it sixth.
Pulido, A., Erdogan, B., & Berliner, J. (2025). The Net Revenue Retention Advantage: Driving Success in B2B Tech. McKinsey & Company. On the valuation premium of NDR outperformance across market cycles, and why single-owner accountability for the metric is rare in practice.
Poyar, K. (2025). The SaaS Retention Report: The AI Churn Wave. ChartMogul. Retention benchmarks across 3,500 software companies through September 2025, including the retention economics of AI-native products.

Organizational Research

Goodhart, C. A. E. (1975). Problems of monetary management: The U.K. experience. The origin of Goodhart’s Law; the popular phrasing, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” was popularized by Marilyn Strathern (1997).
Deming, W. E. (1982). Out of the Crisis. MIT Press. His System of Profound Knowledge at the Deming Institute covers the system-over-local-optimization argument the report draws on.
Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses. Allyn and Bacon; and (1991) Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Harvard Business Review. A complete free overview of defensive routines and double-loop learning is at infed.org.
Pfeffer, J. (1981). Power in Organizations. Pitman; and (1992) Managing With Power. Harvard Business School Press. See his Stanford GSB profile.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization. Wiley. Her psychological safety resource page collects the research the report cites.