The Economics of Intelligent Work™

Resources, lineage, and the stories behind the work.

A living companion page for The Economics of Intelligent Work—including earlier work that helped shape the ideas, language, and scars behind the book.

Silicon Stories

Before EIW, there were stories from the trenches.

Silicon Stories is an earlier book by Carlos A. Leyva about business, software, organizations, failure, learning, and the technology industry. The recovered edition preserves the prose from the archived 2010 website and restores the surviving chapter artwork from the print edition.

A recovered companion to EIW

Read it as lineage, not as a rewrite. The prose has been preserved rather than modernized. What makes it useful now is the continuity: many of the questions that later surface in The Economics of Intelligent Work—competitive advantage, process, architecture, talent, knowledge, organizational learning, and the economics of technology work—were already being wrestled with here.

Original illustrations by Debbie Leyva. The restored edition intentionally keeps their hand-drawn character.

Dirty Little Secret illustration from Silicon Stories by Debbie Leyva
“Dirty Little Secret” — original illustration by Debbie Leyva.
Preservation Note

The point is preservation, not polish.

This recovered edition is intentionally archival. The prose remains the prose of its time, and the illustrations remain Debbie Leyva’s original work. The objective is to keep the record available—and to make the intellectual path from Silicon Stories to The Economics of Intelligent Work visible.