October 2009 – Page 21 – Public Intelligence Blog

Heart of a Soldier tells the story of two men who, well before it happened, foretold not only of the terrorist attack of 9/11 but also the 1993 bombing in the World Trade Center parking garage that preceded it.

It was Hill who converted to Islam as a young U.S. Army paratrooper stationed in Beirut in 1958. It was Hill who learned fluent Arabic. It was Hill who joined the Mujahedeen Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan and fought the Soviet invasion there in the 1980s. It was Hill who personally met Osama bin Laden. It was Hill who used information from Islamic extremists to warn Rescorla that terrorists would use the underground parking garage for a car bomb attack on the World Trade Center. It was Hill who asked the U.S. government to assist him in an assassination attempt on bin Laden in 1998 (the request was rejected). And it was Hill who warned the FBI just weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, that his Mideast contacts told him “something big” was about to happen in the United States, in New York, Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia — maybe all three.

He didn't want to talk about the past. He wanted to talk about the future. The very near future.

The man who predicted 9/11 is worried that its sequel is imminent. “Muslims that I talk to say things like, ‘America thinks they're safe now. They've forgotten about 9/11. But watch, Daniel. Stay near your TV. It's going to be bigger than 9/11,' ” he said.

2009/10/112009/10/11

Review: The Design of Business–Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Public Administration, Strategy, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

In Its Niche Beyond a Six–In Larger Context a Four

October 11, 2009

Roger Martin

First off, what got me to buy this book does not appear in the book at all–the author on record as saying that Wall Street was not designed to make money for its investors, only for its mandarins–the same is true of how universities are designed, businesses, etc. but that one observation really got my attention. I bought the book before BusinessWeek featured it as one of four in the October 5th edition (Europe version), and after looking the others over, chose this one.

In the larger context of changes to the Earth that now take three years instead of ten thousand years, as an entire literature flourishes on The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, the book is a four for narrow-casting and lack of context, but you can use Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to search and sort among my other 1,400 reviews, so no penalty is warranted, This book will be scored Beyond 6 Stars at PBI/PIB for the simple reason that it addresses the core need of all eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental organizations), to re-design away from the Industrial Era waste (where Six Sigma stops), and to instead envision how the world could and should be, and set out to achieve that–a prosperous world at peace.

2009/10/112009/10/12

Journal: Google Good, Bad, & Ugly

Technologies

Google Ugly: Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience. Contrast with Gourmet to All That and the death of expertise in the public interest.

Google Bad: The above image is accurate. Google is one of 75+ search engines, and barely scratches the surface. Worse, Google now offers results based on who pays for what you see, not on what you need or wish to see.

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2009/10/102011/12/10

Reference: Building Agility, Resilience and Performance in Turbulent Environments

Articles & Chapters

Definitions:

Adaptive Capacity: The amount and variety of resources and skills possessed and available for maintaining viability and growth relative to the requirements posed by the environment.

Agility: The capacity for moving quickly, flexibly and decisively in anticipating, initiating and taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding any negative consequences of change.

Resiliency: The capacity for resisting, absorbing and responding, even reinventing if required, in response

Below is a key table from the article. The degree to which US Government elements–and especially elements of the secret world–are NOT agile and NOT resilient, is striking. Money has been a substitute for everything else, and secrecy a means of avoiding accountability. The below table is more characteristic of those emergent organizations that embrace M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.

Agility

1. Our organization is open to change

2. Our organization actively and widely scans for new information about what is going on

3. Our organization is good at making sense of ambiguous, uncertain situations

4. Our organization takes advantage of opportunities quickly

5. Our organization is good at quickly deploying and redeploying resources to support execution

Resiliency

1. Our organization has a strong sense of identity and purpose that can survive anything

2. Our organization has a strong support network of external alliances and partnerships

3. Our organization is expanding its external alliances and partnerships

4. Our organization has “deep pockets”—access to capital and resources to weather anything

5. Our organization has clearly defined and widely held values and beliefs

Source

2009/10/102009/10/11

Review: The War After Armagedoon

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Culture, Research, Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion

Not Really a Novel, More Like a Wake-Up Call

October 10, 2009

Ralph Peters

Although I read mostly non-fiction, one of Ralph Peter's novels (his first in ten years, the last one I really liked was Traitor), is better than reality, for it portrays what we can expect when our delusional political, economic, and military acquisition practices play themselves out, and in the case of this book, what happens when we ignore the desperate need for religious counter-intelligence that I have been calling for since the 1980's.

The non-fiction foundations or complements to this book are American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.

In a nut-shell, this a marvelous depiction of what happens in the future when enemies of the USA plant two small nuclear devices in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, leading to a nation-wide call to arms with crusade overtones.

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2009/10/102009/10/10

Journal: Strategy versus Secrecy

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats

We pay careful attention to the search terms used by those who visit us, and have noticed a very healthy focus on strategy and on secrecy. The two are incompatible.

Strategy, by its inherent nature, must be holistic, transparent, and sustainable. It demands broad collaboration and the broadest possible information-sharing and sense-making.

Secrecy, by its very nature, is reductionist, completely opaque, and generally not sustainable beyond the moment. It restricts collaboration, excludes key stake-holders with relevant information, and does not share effectively.

Michael Herman's book on Intelligence in Peace and War is the best available review of why intelligence at the strategic level should not be secret.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book on Secrecy remains one of the best articulations of the hidden costs of secrecy to a Republic.

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