Radical management: what to do when your customer is the government
One constraint on implementing radical management is that the customer is on a different path altogether. A frequent example is where your customer is a government bureaucracy. You are aspiring to delight your client, and your client is saying, “Don’t bother with me such questions. Just deliver what the specifications ask for.”
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…realistically, most government organizations are not even trying to practice radical management. One way of understanding how they function is to recognize that organizations operate at three levels, using a schema proposed by Ranjay Gulati in Reorganize For Resilience: Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business(Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)
Level 1: “You take what we make.”
Level 2: “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you.”
Level 3: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with our offerings”
While radical management is operating at level 3, most government organizations are still stranded at level 1. They are paying scant attention to their stakeholders. Often they have not even taken any decision as to who their primary stakeholders are. As a result, no one really knows what the purpose of the organization is. The managers in such organizations typically follow rules and procedures, rather than systematically consider: how could we deliver more value sooner? These organizations are the quintessential bureaucracy, and the management is quintessentially Dilbertian.
Phi Beta Iota: The government is full of good people trapped in a bad system. We've decided that in addition to educating the five billion poor one cell call at a time, we have to give government employees an easy to use cell tether to a World Brain that helps them evolve the consciousness of government from the bottom up.
Smackdown of Obama by Supreme Court may be inevitable
Full Story Online
According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government, a smackdown of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.
Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
Phi Beta Iota: Our Contributing Editor received the entire story via email but without a date from a Colonel serving in Afghanistan. This story is evidently circulating among military personnel and for that reason we take note. However, we note that it was originally posted9 July 2010, and have linked to that original post rather than post the entire email. We would observe that ever since Dick Cheney was Chief of Staff in the White House, Executive disrespect for the Constitution and Congress has been growing, and that Newt Gingrich was the one who led Congress to its practice of abdicating its Article 1 role in the Constitution, instead playing foot-soldier to a party president. We reiterate, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by Electoral Reform.
Journalists, Media Professionals Donating Frequently to Federal Political Candidates this Election Cycle
By Megan R. Wilson on September 14, 2010
Last year, Christopher Hayes gave $250 to the congressional campaign of a good friend, Alabama Democrat Josh Segall. That’s hardly noteworthy, but for one factor: Hayes is the Washington, D.C., editor of The Nation, a left-leaning news magazine that covers U.S. politics. And his political donation is not an anomaly in journalism, where donating to or otherwise advocating for politicians is often taboo – if not prohibited outright by some news companies.
Hayes is one of 235 people who identified themselves on government documents as journalists, or as working for news organizations, who together have donated more than $469,900 to federal political candidates, committees and parties during the 2010 election cycle, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis indicates.
People identifying themselves as working for hard news outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New York Post, News Corp., Vanity Fair and Reuters are among the listed donors. Also listed are employees from outlets offering lighter fare — ESPN, Vogue — or community news. Some have donated thousands of dollars.
The average contribution per person identified is eight times Hayes’ amount, and because of some big-spending media professionals, that number is slightly skewed upwards — with the median amount donated coming in at $500. Sixty-five percent of all identified donations went to Democrats, the Center’s research indicates.
To download an itemized spreadsheet of self-identified journalists and other people working for news organizations, click here: Media Donations 091410.xls
The cartels have grown so sophisticated, law enforcement officials say, that they are employing Cold War-era spy tactics to recruit and corrupt U.S. officials.
“In order to stay in business, the drug trafficking organizations have to look at different methods for moving product,” said Thomas Frost, an assistant inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security. “The surest method is by corrupting a border official. The amount of money available to corrupt employees is staggering.”
Phi Beta Iota: This is an especially well-done, detailed article by The Washington Post, and not one of the run-of-the-mill apologias from the camp followers. What is not fully discussed is the MASSIVE corruption as well as the in-extremis one-time recruitments (e.g. fishermen shown photo of their captive family, one run only) on all four borders–north and west as well as south-gulf-florida and east. Furthermore, the reality is that corruption starts at the top, and global corruption starts in New York City and Washington, D.C. Corruption riddles every aspect of US Government planning, programming, budgeting, and operations across the twelve core policies, from agriculture to water.
“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community. I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.
It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.
This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.
The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.
Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.
EXTRACT 1: Leslie Deak's resume also notes his role as “business consultant” for Patriot Defense Group, LLC, a private defense contractor with offices in Winter Park, Florida, and in Tucson. The only names listed on the firm's website are those of its three “strategic advisers.” These include retired four-star General Bryan “Doug” Brown, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command until 2007, where he headed “all special operations forces, both active duty and reserve, leading the Global War On Terrorism,” and James Pavitt, former deputy director for operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he “managed the CIA's globally deployed personnel and nearly half of its multi-billion dollar budget” and “served as head of America's Clandestine Service, the CIA's operational response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
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EXTRACT 2: So, to recap: From 2006 to 2008, R. Leslie Deak worked as a “business consultant” to this super-secretive security contractor with ties to the CIA and counterterrorism forces, and in those same three years he also donated nearly $100,000 in seed money to the foundation now advocating the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.
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EXTRACT 3: Goldline is to Glenn Beck what General Electric was to Ronald Reagan: The company sponsors Beck's TV and radio shows as well as his touring act, and Beck is its public face. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, along with the Santa Monica City Attorney's office, are currently investigating Goldline for defrauding customers by railroading gullible customers into buying their most debased products.
Speaking of Glenn Beck, it has been reported that Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company Fox News, which airs Beck's program, is also a major funder of Imam Rauf's projects, as Jon Stewart viewers heard all about last week.
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EXTRACT 4: But add to this array of unexpected connections the work of Imam Rauf on behalf of the U.S. government—which includes serving as an FBI “consultant” and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes, who headed up the administration's propaganda efforts in the Muslim world—and a compelling picture begins to emerge. Bush's favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America. In the name of “[cultivating] understanding among all religions and cultures,” he puts forth a project that offends a majority of Americans and deals a significant setback to the broader acceptance of Muslim-Americans. It's a little like Billy “White Shoes” Johnson claiming the only reason he moonwalks after scoring a touchdown is to lower tensions on the football field and raise the other team's spirits.
Phi Beta Iota: It would appear that as the public is becoming more informed and more outraged, the military-intelligence complex on behalf of its global banking sponsors is becoming more brazen. As it has with the Martin Luther King and JFK assassinations, the Tonkin Gulf and Iraq lies, and most recently with the 9-11 cover-up, the truth cannot be held back. It has a way of reconnecting that is profoundly moving.
Pastor Terry Jones, right, of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to the media in Gainesville, Fla., as Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida looks on. Phil Sandlin / AP
Even ogres can serve a purpose. The “Reverend” Terry Jones has at least shown us the ugly consequences of the Islamophobia that was this summer's political fad — by turning the tables. How does it feel to be caricatured as a nation of Koran-burning radicals? Americans were appalled to find that a solitary religious bigot and his tiny congregation of 50 pseudo Christians had hijacked our global image. We squirmed as a warped little corner of America's Judeo-Christian culture colored the entire country in the eyes of the world — the way Americans let a warped little corner of Islamic culture color all Muslims, even Muslim Americans.
Phi Beta Iota: There are no coincidences within totalitarian corporate-controlled governments. The combination of the Christian dupe calling for the burning of the Qu'an and the manufactured theater of the Muslim mosque with CIA funding at Ground Zero are all too reminiscent of the FBI-sponsored car bombing of the World Trade Center in the 1990's, and totally consistent with what Buckminster Fuller called “White House Theater” and Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.” In light of this shallow and manipulative TIME story, the five “filters” that Chomsky and his co-author identified bear reiteration:
First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the “Propaganda model” views the private media as businesses interested in the sale of a product — readers and audiences — to other businesses (advertisers) rather than that of quality news to the public. Describing the media's “societal purpose”, Chomsky writes, “… the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature”.[1] The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are:
Today anti-communism (which was nurtured in part by the CIA's importation of 100+ senior Nazis each year after the end of WWII) has been replaced by the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and its occasional theatrics such as the “Underpants Bomber.” The tragedy is that 80% of the US public has been so dumbed down and anesthitized as to take this garbage seriously, while the 20% that “get it” are marginalized, which is of course the point of it all.
