Will try to update this post if I come across a good book.

This RAND Blog Post covers activities that happened during RAND's first seventy-five years of history, which is still nice, as well as browsing through some of the publicly available papers and reports:

- https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2023/rand-turns-75-a-look...

- https://www.rand.org/about/history.html

- https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7857.html

- https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P3705...

- https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA255904.pdf

Books:

- Soldiers of Reason (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467227.Soldiers_Of_Reas...) I haven't read this book myself, but it may scratch your itch

- History of Operations Research in the United States Army (https://books.google.com/books?id=KqtZ5XpcDHEC)

Some articles on RAND in general:

- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1963/09/the-ran...

- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/22120/rand-corporation-t...

Related back to the topic of "magic":

- There's a RAND paper that I recall reading while I was there on designing an office campus for intentional serendipity as part of cultivating a research organization. I hope I can find a copy online so I can link it to this article, as many of the ideas were incorporated into the design of RAND's future/replacement campus in Santa Monica, CA.

- The ideas on office/campus design were quite good and even included the subject of floor planning and desk assignments. Despite the inherent draw of organizations to divide office space by departments and functions, the RAND ideas were to deliberate interleave the locations of personnel such that people would have increased chances of collaborating with others that they would not naturally be drawn to directly in executing their work. This extended further to how walkways and passageways should be designed to connect floors, buildings etc... ensuring that people would pass by and see other people/functions/departments that they would not normally see or consider in their day-to-day work. I recall trying to cite some of these ideas when I worked in other research organizations (e.g. Google Research) where one of the principal complaints was siloing/lack of collaboration, yet teams were allowed to physically silo themselves in seating plans (by their own request/demands).

- I never got to see the original campus, as it was demolished and later turned into a public park. However, the drawings and photographs of the original campus reminded me of something that resembled an American high school or small university campus.

- There are many small details about working at RAND that were part of deliberate efforts to influence an individual's experiences and decisions to improve their creative/work potential. For example, the equivalent of Vacation/PTO time at RAND is called "sabbatical time." RAND employees were paid more, on an hourly equivalent rate, when taking their "sabbatical time" than for regular work time; this idea was not implemented to reduce financial liability of unspent PTO time for the company under modern standards, but because it was believed and understood --through research-- that employees were more likely to bring their best selves to work when having sufficient and periodic time away from their work -- often bringing back new ideas that wouldn't have emerged simply by grinding away at a problem... So they hoped to incentivize employees to take that time away from a problem by paying them more during their time off.