Best Practices in Management – Page 6 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/03/222013/03/26

Review (Guest): The Squandered Computer: Evaluating the Business Alignment of Information Technologies

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Paul Strassmann

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves careful study–a powerful message about technology March 4, 1999

The main targets for Paul Strassmann's unmasking of misconceptions about the business use of computers include the Gartner Group, advocates of Best Practices, and that mouth piece of computing vendors, the computing trade press (e.g., CIO Magazine). While not a particularly angry polemic, Strassmann is all the more devastating for his understated, simple, and straight-forward marshaling of basic facts.

The Gartner group is making a fortune telling executives in various industries what per cent of revenue for a particular vertical industry should be spent on their firms computing function in order to remain profitable. For example, insurance spends a relatively high per cent of revenue, whereas manufacturing is less. Retail is in the middle. In industry after industry, Strassmann demonstrates there is no correlation in spending on computers and profitability. None.

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2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Rodrique Tremblay

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Manifesto Slams Religions, Foundation for Reflection, December 22, 2012

I bought this book on the recommendation of Pierre Cloutier in Quebec, and very deliberately as the first book to read on 22 December 2012 as Epoch B begins (see graphic above with book cover).

Across the entire book are what I now call E to the 5th: Empathy, Ethics, Ecology, Education, and Evolution. The bottom line of the book is clear: abandon religions as selective (and generally exclusionary) arbiters of morality, each severely hypocritical in having one morality for insiders and another for “others” (infidels, shiksas, whatever the name, moral disengagement is the rule and genocide is often the result).

When addressing really important books, I read the notes, bibliography, and index first. The notes are a second book — these are not normal cryptic notes, each note is a short exposition, and any reading of the book is incomplete without a reading of the notes. The bibliography is extraordinary, and my attention was immediately drawn to the authors honored with three or more books being cited: Karen Armstrong, Mario Bunge, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, A.C. Graylink, Robert Ingersoll, Immanuel Kant, Hans Kung, Paul Kurtz, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Baruch SPinoza, E. O. Wilson, and Robert Wright. Among them Kurtz, Singer, and Wright are central. Roughly 1,000 books are listed by title in the bibliography.

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2012/11/192012/12/07

Review: Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Civil Society, Congress (Failure, Reform), Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

cover intelligent governance — Amazon Page

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Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels

5.0 out of 5 stars Influential, Integrative, with Integrity, Avoids Three Core Topics

December 6, 2012

Here's what is really great about this book:

01) The authors are connected, admired, and conversant with the great minds of Silicon Valley (Eric Schmidt offers a very strong blurb) and even more importantly, this book both represents the best from those minds, and has clearly had as positive effect in getting this particular meme (“intelligent governance”) considered.

02) The authors force attention to a fundamental flawed premise in the West, that any form of democracy (even if corrupted beyond recognition) is preferable to any form of dictatorship (the authors refer to China as a mandarinate). As someone who grew up in Singapore and has the deepest admiration for Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and the professionalism of the Government of Singapore (it employed my step-mother from New Zealand for many years, ultimately as head of the Department of English), I am among the first to suggest that the West falls short, but I would point to Singapore and the Nordics and BENELUX as my preferred alternative, not just hybrid, but rooted in ethical evidence-based decision-making. I would also note that the West has actively supported 40 of 42 dictators for the last fifty years — integrity is NOT a strong suit for our so-called Western democracies.

03) The book is strongest — no doubt as the publisher and the authors intended — in relation to the impact of social networks as feedback loops helpful to governments, whether democratic or mandarinate, that are capable of LISTENING. Chapter 4, “The New Challenges of Governmance,” is certainly suitable as a stand-alone assigned reading. The authors are heavily reliant on David Brin (I am a fan of his) but distressingly oblivious to Howard Rheingold, Tom Atlee, Jim Rough, Harrison Owen, and a host of others that have spent — primed by Stewart Brand — decades thinking about deliberation and consensus-building. Having said that by way of balance, this chapter strikes me as the heart of the book, and it gets high marks for pointing out that Google and all other options today are not facilitative of deliberative dialog.

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2012/10/302012/11/18

Review: Designing a World that Works For All: Solutions & Strategies for Meeting the World’s Needs

5 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Priorities, Public Administration, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean)

Medard Gabel

5.0 out of 5 stars Revolutionary Sequel, Second Book in Series,October 30, 2012

This is the second book in the series, the first was Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond. They are different books, not the same book. This book brings in new perspectives and new initiatives from the design labs that occurred after the first book was published.

I have known Medard Gabel for close to a decade, and while disclosing that he is one of the contributors to the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network that I funded when I had money, I consider him, as the co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and as the designer of both the digital Earth Dashboard for the UN and the digital EarthGame for all of us, to be in a class of his own. He is unique.

Medard Gabel is modest–the blurbs do not do justice to him or his work or the incredibly talented and imaginative individuals (not just youth, but mid-career professionals) that he attracts to this calling.

I have participated in two of his design labs and recommend them to one an all. Everyone enters with their own issue area (urban planning, energy, whatever) and halfway through they experience the “aha” moment (epiphany for Republicans)–everything is connected and NOTHING can be planned, programmed, budgeted, or executed without integrating everything.

As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts. Comprehensive architecture and prime design–all threats, all policies, all demographics–are the future.

Other high-level books that I recommend with this one are:

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2012/08/122012/08/12

Review: Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

Michael Hyatt

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Handbook On How To Extend a Personal Brand in Cyberspace,August 12, 2012

I bought this book in part because I am about to help a small company modernize its brand in cyberspace, and in part because I was given as a gift Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator–it joins other great books I have reviewed such as Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.

This book by Michael Hyatt is everything that the other book is not, and vice versa. I recommend them both — the Holiday book if you want to understand the sleaze and corruption of cyberspace, this book is you want to build a clean house with a white picket fence, never mind the criminal neighborhood.

The book is a solid four; I give it a five because it taught me things I did not know and it's resource section at the end is useful. However, it is also out of date on some key points (for example, recommending RSS for anything). Over-all, the book is so thoughtfully put together and so coherent and complete that I believe it deserves to be read by anyone who wants to leverage cyberspace that is NOT a blogger.

The book seriously understates the amount of time it takes to do all this stuff, especially if you are not just running your mouth and actually trying to be useful (according to the Holiday the vast majority, which I do not agree with, if you take out pornography and gambling that are 80% of the web more of less (see The Myth of Digital Democracy my best guess is that 80% of the popular websites are garbage, while within the last 20%, most are honest.

Robert David STEELE Vivas
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2012/07/212012/07/30

Review: Value-Based Fees – A Guide for Serious Consultants

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Leadership

Alan Weiss

5.0 out of 5 stars Opened My Eyes – One of Three Books of Huge Value, July 21, 2012

A colleague pointed me toward the books of Alan Weiss, and I bought three. This is the first one I have read. The other two, that I will review over the next ten days or so, are Million Dollar Consulting Proposals: How to Write a Proposal That's Accepted Every Time and Million Dollar Web Presence: Leverage the Web to Build Your Brand and Transform Your Business.

In a manner of speaking I felt my life passing before my eyes as I read this book. For over twenty years I have led the charge on connecting governments to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), only to see every government and every corporations seeking to suck at the government breast go with “butts in seats” and “time & materials.” I myself come from that culture, and as smart as I may be, I confess to have never considered the obvious: consulting fees based on the Return on Investment (ROI) in relation to specific outcomes. As I followed the author's roadmap in this book, inventorying what I know and what outcomes I can achieve for organizations that are generally mired in the Industrial Era of stove-pipes and information hoarding, oblivious to the potential of open source everything, crowd-sourcing and crowd-seeding, and so many other things, I felt a mixture of shock (how could I be so stupid) and awe (the best years are ahead of me).

I read a lot, and this book stands out as a work of practical art–the organization, the detail, the white space, the end of chapter summaries, and at the very end of the book, a series of questions that are priceless and alone worth the cost of the book.

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2012/07/122012/07/13

Review: Seven Complex Lessons for the Future

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Information Operations, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

cover seven complex lessons — Amazon Page

Edgar Morin

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Spectacular,July 12, 2012

This is one of a handful of books I will not donate to the library as has been my custom. I first learned of this author through his work Homeland Earth : A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences). I was hugely drawn into the author's brilliant web of thinking, and delighted to learn that he is still alive and active in France.

This book can serve in so many ways. For myself, it is an independent confirmation of all that I have been exploring through the minds of others–the 1,800 plus authors whose works I have reviewed here at Amazon. It is a spectacular indictment of the existing educational, intelligence, and research systems that have become so fragmented and wasteful as to be an impediment to progress.

Since Look Inside the Book is not available, I will just list the main chapter heading–each chapter has three sub-chapters. This is an elegant cathedral of a book, the equivalent for the author's huge body of work that Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons of History 1ST Edition was for their own multi volume The Story of Civilization (11 Volume Set).

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