Can Cause Discomfort, But This Book MATTERS, May 17, 2008
Grover Norquist
I was given this book as a gift, along with Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and to my great surprise, being an estranged moderate Reagan Republican, I found that I am much more of a Libertarian than I realized, and this author, although he causes me great discomfort in some areas (such as privatizing Social Security), he makes complete sense. I learn he has been voted one of the 50 most powerful people in DC by GQ (2007) and I believe it. Senator McCain has better listen this time around. I urge all who are enthused with Senator Obama to read Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate. Senator Obama is NOT transparent and I consider his top foreign policy advisors to be dangerous–Dr. Strangelove (Brzezinski) has one last war with Russia left in him, and seriiousl believes he can confront the Chinese in Africa–this is lunacy (search for my Memorandum online <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.
The book lacks an index. This is a HUGE MISTAKE on the part of the publisher because there are too many important ideas in this book. The publisher should create and post online an index to this book. The publisher can also be criticized for failing to provide Library of Congress cataloguing information. This is a REFERENCE work. The author should consider holding the publisher accountable for such fundamental incompetencies that detract from the book's lasting value.
The five core reforms that he builds up to are:
1) Portable pensions
2) Competitive health care
3) Educational choice including home schooling
4) Outsourcing of all government functions possible
The author posits a stark choice between the Leave Us Alone movement, that appears to be growing daily (and included 27 secessionist movements that meet annually at a conference organized by Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale, and what he calls the Takings Group, the tax and spend elected officials both Republican and Democratic.
This is a serious reference work with an even mix of books, articles, and online citations.
There are some areas where the author could benefit from knowledge that is not yet mainstream–for example, we can blow away the Medicare unfunded obligations by negotiating prices that are 1% (ONE percent) of what we foolishly pay now, and as a recent PriceWaterHouseCooopers study documented so well, also eliminating the 50% of the medical professional that is waste, including (the author does address this–the tort lawyers like Senator John Edwards who make millions putting good doctors out of business so bad doctors can do more elective operations).
On balance–and this was my first exposure to this individual–I put the book down thinking to myself that this author deserves his reputation, and that he combines a very powerful intellect with an equally powerful moral force.
I normally do not buy books coming out of Gartner or Forrester or other similar shops that produce cookie cutter products. I am very glad I was given this book. I was deeply impressed from page one and continually gratified and astonished as the level of detail as the book progressed.
This is a graduate course in New Age Marketing, and the only thing this book does not have is the need to address “true costs” and honor the triple-bottom line (profit, economic and social justice, and zero environmental footprint: memes are cradle to cradle, sustainable design, green to gold).
The book's bottom line: it's about LISTENING to PEOPLE, not about the technologies. The Presidential candidate that dismisses all their advisors and creates a national blog to address the ten high-level threats to mankind, the twelve policies that must be harmonized, and how nothing we do matters unless we give Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo a model for avoiding our mistakes while achieving our quality of life, should win. Then they can come to Chicago on Lincoln's birthday and participate in the Citizens' SUmmit being organized by Joseph McCormick, a co-founder and guiding light for Reuniting America (110 million strong and growing).
I am very impressed by the examples, and the fact that they are not presented in a cutesy box fashion but woven into the text.
The authors provide numbers that show how an investment in executive blogging and nurturing customers and partners can give back at least 150% if not more (I think it is closer to 5 to 1 RoI), and on the basis of the totality of the book, I take their word for it. I take this to the next level and would point out that the US Government investment of our dollars in “Strategic Communication” will continue to be a failure because no amount of “PR” is going to overcome the reality of our overbearing presence everywhere.
Very interesting to me was the authors' information, including tables, that shows that Republicans and Independents are not as active in the Web 2.0 environment, and this should be cause for concern among those who wish to challenge the shiftless Democrats and their smoke and mirror enthusiasm for Senator Obama, who is NOT transparent at all (see my review of Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate.
Because of this book I have decided to shift all of my online activity to Citizens-Party.org, leaving Earth Intelligence Network as an archive. My intent is to inspire individual public intelligence minutemen (and women) who can disclose the true costs of all products and services, and help us bring to bear the full diversity of public opinion on such controversial matters as the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators.
See also the images above under the book cover. Peace–and prosperity–in our time.
Elaborative Comment:
For those that send me emails asking for my usual summary, the bottom line on this book is that I cannot do it, do not want to do it, within the Amazon 1000 work limit. However, am adding a short edit to offer a bit more detail. This book cannot receive justice with a summary. It is literally an operating manual for the intersection of legacy industries and Web 3.0.
Re Steve Ballmer, am just blown away that they are willing to spend $40 billion and up for Yahoo, and evidently have no clue how to build Web 3.0 for under $10 billion, faster, better, cheaper than Google (see my review of Stephen E. Arnold's “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator” not sold on Amazon, online from Infonortics UK. Here is the URL on how he is now at Plan C and evidently has no idea how to build on all that this book suggests:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?sto
ry_id=59703
There are no fewer than 10 cash-starved companies that are priceless and can be picked up for pennies. For the rest, see my review of “Bloomberg on Bloomberg” where he makes the case for building from the inside instead of buying. He says “Outsiders give you what you ask for, insiders give you waht you need.” Ballmer is assuredly a smart and talented individual, but in many ways he now strikes me as the Henry Kissinger of the private sector: he's become like a moron, unable to LISTEN (see my review of Daniel Ellsberg for a recounting of the converation Ellsberg has with Kissinger, “SECRETS: A Memoire.”) Ben Gilad says much the same thing in Blindspots: CEO's information is invariably filtered (incomplete), biased, late, and by my own experience: less than 20% of what should be presented to them.
Fascinated by three negatives on what would normally be considered a tipping point book. The point is that the “best and the brightest” very often get trapped in their own delusions–the Microsoft business development process DOES NOT WORK. Their process for screening vendors and consultants relies on lower common denominator minds, and cannot handle break-out visions, especially those that call for abandoning the legacy stuff that is not only untenable of on laptop, but not even marginally viable on a hand-held.
Very sorry to have offended several of you, eager to engage. I can change or add to the review, but only if you use the comments section as intended.
Superb, Well-Presented, Helpful at Multiple Levels, May 10, 2008
Ben Rigby
Edit of 18 May to recommend Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies as a different book, with more practical tips and annecdotal support, but in no way does that reduce my appreciation for this book. Both are excellent, I think of them as truly complementary of one another.
—–
I *like* this book. Although I have years of exposure to advanced information technology and read everything by gurus like Paul Strasssman (cf. Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporationsand Stephen E. Arnold (Arnold IT, look for “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator, not sold on Amazon), I learned stuff from this book, and I found it to be exactly right for getting an old-school CEO or other management skeptic “oriented.”
In 268 well-organized and well-presented pages, the book covers:
+ Blogging
+ Social Networking
+ Video and Photo Sharing
+ Mobile Phones
+ Wikis
+ Maps
+ Virtual Worlds
Each chapter has extremely clear headlines, gray boxes, figures, and endnotes. To get a sense of the book and the online offerings that back it up, visit mobilizingyouth.org, just add the www.
A special value is short essays from top practitioners including Mitch Kapor whose essay, next to last, focuses on the coming convergence of virtual worlds and social networking. Visit BigPictureSmallWorld for a sense of the possibilities there–I have very deep admiration for Medard Gabel, who built the analog World Game with Buckminster Fuller, and I am so very eager to see him create EarthGame(TM) in which we all play ourselves and have access to all information in all languages all the time–at that point, we will end looting of our commonwealth, end corruption, and create invite wealth or as he puts it in the title of his new book, “Seven Billion Billionaires.”
Most useful to me were the following:
+ Use all these tools internally to get a sense of them, before trying to do something with the broader online population
+ One billion people are connected, the rest are not, but what the billion do with their connections could impact on how quickly we get the other 5-6 billion connected and creating wealth
+ 55% of teens are active online, 80% of college students have a Facebook profile
+ Digg is an example of a global intelligence service in which every citizen is an intelligence consumer, collector, and producer
+ Cool examples that I will certainly look into include Care2, Causes, Hi5, and Gather
+ Politicians (including the three running for President now) simply do not get it. They are still using phone banks that call at all hours and spamming (Obama does less of it) instead of asking permission and then building on the relationship
+ I am very impressed by the natural manner in which the book communicates the relationship between having a good story with heroes, villians, and catalysts, and the sequence of fund-raising via text connection and follow-up. This book strikes me as both a very very good elementary text for digital immigrants (us old guys) and also a useful “once over” for the more experienced who may be overlooking a couple of pieces of the overall campaign.
+ The book emphasizes the many uses of the wiki, many of them internal, some external, but the most important being that wikis are a way of crowd sourcing. See the first book from Earth Intelligence Network, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (free at oss.net/CIB just add the www, but utterly lovely here at Amazon) and especially the later chapters on large scale collective and collaborative intelligence in action.
+ Tag clouds are vital, as is the selection of unique tags for clusters of informaiton you want to make easily available.
+ Virtual worlds are in their infancy, and when they finally develop, will be extraordinary as nuanced immersive learning environments (low cost low risk environmental, I would add).
The last essay from Katrin Verclas is great, and I selected the following quote with which to end this review–it captures the essence:
“Web 2.0 describes a participatory, bottom-up, decentralized world full of individual expression where people have direct access to one another and enjoy an unprecedented ability to organize, meet, and coordinate without centralized control or traditional hierarchies.”
Focused on Media, Art, Culture, Less So on Social Networks, May 10, 2008
Henry Jenkins
I come late to this book, published in 2006. I do not regret it. It is a bit too focused on media, art, and “culture” for me, but I cannot penalize the author for being a master of arcane tid-bits. This book is a collection of previously published articles reworked into a book–for me, that is a good thing, as I do not cover the sources that originally carried the pieces.
The book comes recommended by Howard Rheingold and Bruce Sterling, two of the originals, so that alone should encourage anyone interested in this area to take this book very seriously.
Although the author focuses on “participatory culture” the emphasis is this book is on the CULTURE part, not the social networks, integral consciousness, appreciative inquiry, co-intelligence, and so on as I have learned from my Eco-Topia colleauges.
The author himself speaks early on about the book speaking to three concepts:
+ Media convergence
+ Participatory culture
+ Collective intelligence
He gets an A for the first, a B for the second, and a C for the third.
I don't consider myself qualified to be critical of this book, so here are the tid-bits that grabbed me:
+ Paradigm shift is not about communications among individuals but rather about their *being* in *being* with one another (from one to many and one to one to many to many)
+ Author credits Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983) with seeing the transitions that were coming
+ Convergence changes relationships and logics
+ The biggest convergence may be the sharp total confrontation between top down attempts to keep control, and bottom up demands to wrest control
+ Media right now is being excessively influenced by the wealthy that can afford the trinkets (look for my 1993 rant to INTERVAL on “God, Man, and Informaiton: Comments to Interval” for the other side of the story)
+ Emotions and feelings of connection matter more–the author writes of an “affective economy”
+ Producers are finding they must agree to co-creation (this media or cultural trend has a counterpart in the business world, see the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005 on “The Power of Us”)
+ Media industry is split between the prohibitionists and the collaborationists, and I am most fascinated to see mobile telephone companies in the latter category. If I had to place a bet on Nokia versus Google, I would go with Nokia.
+ Citing another author (always with credit) I am engaged by the concept of “adhocracies” as the opposite of bureaucracies.
+ Digital enclaves are becoming counter-productive, allowing nesting rather than engagement (at least among the one billion rich), need to get out and cross those cultural divides.
I am glad I got and read this book. It is clearly very learned in the media convergence and media-mind aspect, but it is not at all as versed as I was expecting in the nuts and bolts of participatory networking, appreciative inquiry, deliberative democracy, integral consciousness, world brain, etcetera, nor is it all oriented toward large scale problem solving with collective intelligence.
Together with C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks), this book redirected my life. Although I have been an intelligence and operations professional all my life, and spent the last 20 years kicking doors down all over the world to get secret intelligence communities to focus on the 96% of the information they could get legally, ethically, and generally free or at very low cost, I was lacking a strategic frame of reference.
Free Online
This book literally blew my mind into smithereens. Starting with the fact that LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcorft is one of the last adults still standing with his integrity intact, I was moved to the core of my being by the following list, which is in priority order:
I cannot under-state the force with which this list hit me. In combination with Prahalad's book, which makes the point that capitalism is focused on the billion rich with a one trillion marketplace, while the five billion poor represent a FOUR trillion marketplace, I suddenly realized that the Panel had delivered one side of a strategic matrix for creating a prosperous world at peace.
These two books led to my decision to sell my for-profit, OSS.Net, and create, with 23 other co-founders, the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity, and to commit myself to being intelligence officer to the poor for the remainder of my life.
I will just list the twelve policies and the eight humanities below, all other information is at EIN, and I do not want to distract from other reviews. This book, this list, is the single most important first step in empowering the collective intelligence of the public to the point that we can eradicate corruption, protect our commonwealths, and achieve a prosperous world at peace.
Twelve policies that must be harmonized at the budget level across all Nations and corporations and foundations, and organizations (this is important because governments are organized as stovepipes–it is lunacy to use up water we don't have to grow grain we do not need to create ethanal with food instead of sugar cane, bacteria, or algae):
01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water
The eight humanities (this is important because nothing the US or EU do unless we create, within seven years, an EarthGame that helps these dominant demographics avoid our mistakes:
01 Brazil
02 China
03 India
04 Indonesia
05 Iran
06 Russia
07 Venezuela
08 Wild Cards (e.g. Congo)
There are so many books relevant to all of the above I must point to my lists, but want to list just a couple of future-oriented books here, the last being the first by EIN (free online, but lovely here at Amazon):
Seminal Work for Commercial Intelligence, May 8, 2008
Benjamin Gilad
This is one of a tiny handful of truly useful, insightful, and applicable books in commercial intelligence.
Page 1 has the following line that I continue to cite:
“Top manager's information is invariably either biased, subjective, filtered, or late.”
True then, true today, and also applicable in government and in the non-profit world.
The other vitally important quote:
“Using intelligence correctly requires a fundamental change in the way top executives make decisions.ā
Ben Gilad, Babette Bensoussan, Jan Herring, Leonard Fuld, Mats Bjore, Arno Reuser, and Steve Edwards are the only minds that I consider to be at the pinnacle of the profession. No doubt there are others, but these are the ones that in all of my reading, have never, ever, been displaced from the top rank once I understood their work.
Buy this book used, it is a CLASSIC of enduring value. Buy anything published by this brilliant practitioner.
Undergraduate Overview, Superb Price, a Real Value, May 4, 2008
Graham Fuller
I might have made this a four star since it is missing a couple of big pieces, but the overall book is so well presented in summary form, and the publisher has made it so reasonably priced, this would appear to be exactly the kind of book that is ideal for both the undergraduate and the graduate whom might be beginning a more intensive look at Turkey in its new “360 degrees” or Ankara-centric re-emergence as both a regional power and a continental power.
No Turks in, of, and for Turkey are on the credits, which confirms my first impression that this is a superb primer of, by, and for American students, but the US Institute of Peace is the publisher, so I get over it. Still, the book does not address the Muslim world outside the immediate region, and I am immediately irritated by the early depiction of Paul Wolfowitz as a proponent of democracy in Iraq–Wolfowitz lied to Congress and the public, and is no more a proponent of democracy anywhere than I am in favor of making Islam the ruling religion in America.
Having said that, the author's commitment and knowledge cannot be denied, and I found this book totally worthy of my time. I learned from it.
+ Turkey *is* a part of the Middle East, but ignored it up through the 1990's and did not settle its border with Syria until 2004.
+ Turkey, not Saudi Arabia or any other pretender, has been the center of the Muslim world (the Caliphate) for six centuries, and as the center of the Ottoman empire was the protector of the Holy Places.
+ The author asserts that Turkey is the most advanced secular and democratic state in the Muslim world. Huh? Coming out of an era of military dictatorships, and never mind Malaysia, Indonesia, or India (second largest Muslim population after Indonesia)? Not so fast!
+ While the author sets forth a key question, will Muslims embrace democracy, I point the reader to Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think and the finding in that book that most Muslims consider democracy to be a FOREIGN concept.
+ The author shocks early on in pointing out that Turks consider the USA to be the TOP THREAT to Turkey. I begin to realize the author has delicately folded major truths in, with a minimalist pandering to the jerks that are still in power (or seeking power one last time before they run out of Depends diapers for adults).
+ No one in the White House or anywhere else in the USG is likely to read this book (less well-intentioned Foreign Area Officers on their way there) so I regard the book as a useful cautionary tale for all of us. The neoconservatives took Turkey for granted, offended Turkey, and are so visibly amoral and inept as to inspire contempt from Turkey, a contempt I certainly share. As the author puts it, we are “treading water” with Turkey (as a time when they should be one of our “top ten” for deep engagement).
+ The author tells us that Turkey abolished the Caliphate in 1924, and that this was a body blow to Islam. In a brilliant analogy, he says that this would be the equivalent of an Italian Prime Minister abolishing the Papacy without consulting Catholics worldwide, and doing so as a snap decision.
+ The author illuminated the Turkish intellectual vision of state, faith, and modernity being compatible, and provides two very valuable pages on t he Abant Forum for intellectual tolerance and inquiry.
+ A great deal of the book is undergraduate level brevity (e.g. the Iran-Iraq war gets one paragraph at a time when Turkey was a major adjacent party).
+ The author teaches me that the Kurdish revolutionaries and separatists, the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, or Kurdish Workers Party) are a problem in Syria and Iran as well as Iraq and Turkey. I gain the impression that Turkey will do just about anything to prevent a free Kurdistan, but I also wonder in Kurdistan and Palestine are two areas that could be turned into zones of peace and development.
+ On that note, I learn that Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire, and that the Sultan was the Protector of Holy Places.
+ I am deeply engaged by the author's discussion of Islamic banking, and Turkish concerns that the Saudi regime is using increased focus on this as a means of reinforcing Islamic forces within Turkey.
+ I learn that Turkey is pursuing a regional strategy of “no enemies” and has a foreign policy strategy of “proactive peace.” Wow. This is seriously good stuff, and it shames me that America cannot rise to this level of sophistication and future-focus.
+ I learn that four of the five Central Asian states are Turkic, and that after the USA and Russia, China is Turkey's major concern, in part because the Uyghurs are Turkic. Has the USA ever had a Turkic strategy or a Caliphate strategy? Highly doubtful.
+ The author states that the Turks are suspicious of Saudi international policies, and I wonder why there is no deeper discussion, especially since it is now widely known that the Saudi dictatorship has been funding Bin Laden, rote-learning madrasses, and total hate crimes against Shi'ites (15%, with Iran as the only state).
+ He says that Turkey has a strong commitment to Afghanistan, but here I have a note, “too much avoidance.” This is an excellent book and easily understandable by an undergrad, but it needs a couple more chapters (one on Saudis as enemies of Muslim stability world-wide, another on Turkey and the non-Arab Muslim states), and a decent bibliography with a 360 view of competing authorities.
+ He tells us the Kurds have entered mainstream Turkish politics, including election to their Parliament, but I am skeptical and wondering if there is not a really big deal to be cut that runs from Turkey to Kurdistan and Lebanon to Palestine–the three trillion we have wasted in Iraq could have resurrected America AND paid for a massive Marshall Plan for the region.
+ The US chapter is vital. It will never be read by those that make their own idiotic reality, but for the rest of us, it is a fine tale of friction, opportunity lost, a lack of sufficient respect, and more. This is a really good and really important chapter.
The book concludes that Turkey has three choices: continue to be US centric, become Europe centric and join the European Union, or return to Ankara centric, with 360 interests and responsibilities in all directions. I am truly inspired by this book, and in the future will factor Turkey in as co-equal to Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.
Bottom line: this book was a real pleasure to read as an adult hooked on respecting reality, and I strongly recommend it for both teaching at any level, and for anyone interested in what is clearly a major player in the 21st Century. On balance, this book respects Turkey in a very sincere and useful way, while delicately calling out the USA (under all recent Administrations of either party) for being distant, dumb, inattentive, and generally stupid. I am reminded of Daniel Elsberg lecturing Kissinger on how one becomes like a moron the higher up the secret classification scale you go, thinking you know more secret, and becoming unwilling to listen to those with their feet on the ground and decades of eyes and ears on and in place. See my review of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
