Category: 5 Star

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Review: Making the Cisco Connection–The Story Behind the Real Internet Superpower

5 Star, Information Society, Information Technology
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5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful Guide to 1990's and 2010's,
February 24, 2001
David Bunnell

I bought this book because Vint Cerf says the Internet will go from 3.5M users today to 3.5B users in 10-15 years, and that means that businesses involved in Internet infrastructure–and especially multi-media multi-lingual narrowcasting–have a growth (or implosion) prospect on the order of 1000X.

The book tells a helpful story about CISCO's growth in 12 years, and I for one found it both well-written and fascinating. I am especially impressed by the CISCO rules for successful acquisitions, by the CISCO distinctions between core competencies and outsourced manufacturing, and by the CISCO implementation of its enterprise information system and related web sales and service sites.

As for the future, I agree with John Chambers that telephone calls will be free in the future. Arthur Clarke said this 20 years ago. Chambers' vision for a global multi-service (voice and data) offering that easily integrates wireless, fiber-optic, and other forms of transmission is inevitable, but CISCO is not necessarily pre-ordained as the dominant enterprise.

Corporate and national information strategies must have four components: connectivity, content, coordination of standards and investments, and communications/computing security. CISCO, as described by the book, has a superficial interest in encryption but does not really understand the urgency of establishing “deep encryption” that is embedded in all data (including data in storage) and unencumbered by the retarded US and European policies seeking to give their spies an easy back door to use.

CISCO also appears to be overlooking two major opportunities for future expansion: first, in leading a much broader coordination of standards such as transparent and stable Application Program Interfaces (API) that would permit the remote integration of applications and multi-media data; and second, in exploring all aspects of data classification, indexing, and visualization, both in terms of data access and automated filtering, and in terms of pattern analysis across the network.

There are so many over-hyped books on the Internet Revolution that I found this book to be a real pleasure. Whether for entertainment or for business lessons or for insights into the future, it is a solid 5.

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Review: Global Mind Change–The Promise of the 21st Century

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Tragedy of Scientific Myopia, Portal to the Future Paradigm,

February 11, 2001
Willis Harman
This is a wonderful indictment of the Western scientific tradition, less comprehensive than Voltaire's Bastards but more readable and more focused as a result. The author shows a clear connection between existing global problems (ethnic violence, water scarcity, pollution, poverty, criminalization of society) and the earlier Western decisions to adopt scientific objectivity (with all of its inherent bias and ignorance) as well as the primacy of economic institutions such as have given rise to the consumerist society, regardless of the external diseconomies, the concentrations of ill-gotten wealth, and the cost to the earth resource commons. The author is especially strong on the need to restore sprituality, consciousness, and values to the decision-making and information-sharing architecture of the world–only in this way could community be achieved across national and ethnic and class lines, and only in this way could environmental sustainability and justice (economic, social, and cultural) be made possible. This is not a “tree hugger” book as much as it is a “master's class” for those who would be master's of the universe. It is a very fine portal into the growing body of people who wish to be cultural creatives, and easily one of the guideposts toward the next major paradigm shift, away from scientific materialism and toward a new communitas in which people really matter.
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Review: Infinite Wealth–A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Force Structure (Military), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Survival Manifesto for Anyone with A Brain,

February 11, 2001
Barry Carter

First off, this book made the cut above another ten or so options on the fringes (the amazon reviews helped). It was a good choice. The author captures the essence of many other books as well as real-world experience with two fundamental points that every manager and every employee–including fast-food employees and others in “drone” jobs–needs to absorb: first, that the existing bureaucratization of the economy at every level is costing so much as to place those companies in jeopardy during the forthcoming economic shake-out, and second, that the sooner every individual begins the process of inventorying their personal capabilities and creating the networks for offering their personal services and knowledge via the Internet to all comers, the sooner they will be able to share in the profits associated with their direct individual contributions to the new economy.

The Department of Defense acquisition and contracting examples are especially shocking because they show, so credibly and in detail, how we have institutionalized multi-billion dollar waste.

This is a special book. It is by a practical man who has drawn very personal and transformative lessons from the school of hard knocks, and whose recounting of those lessons have value for anyone who expects to work for a living today and in the future. This is not a “get rich quick” book as much as it is a “get rich together or get left behind” book.

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Review: Intelligence Power in Peace and War

5 Star, Diplomacy, Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), War & Face of Battle

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Graduate/Policy Text on Intelligence,

January 10, 2001
Michael Herman
This is the textbook for the best and the brightest of both the academic world and the policy world. It is not an easy read, between the British language form and the deep thinking, but it is, as Christopher Andrew says, “the best overview” and “surely destined to become a standard work”. I especially liked its attention to components and boundaries, effects, accuracy, and evaluation. Perhaps most usefully within the book is the distinction between long-term intelligence endeavors that rely primarily on open sources and serve to improve state understanding and state behavior, and short-term espionage that tends to be intrusive and heighten the target state's feelings of vulnerability and hostility. No intelligence library is complete without this book–it provides a rock-solid foundation for serious thinking about the intelligence in the 21st Century.
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Review: Soldier Spies–Israeli Military Intelligence

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Really Serious, Really Current, Combat Military Intelligence,

January 10, 2001
Samuel M. Katz
Use the out-of-print service, this book is a gem. This is a great book about the minutia and the value of a well-rounded military intelligence capability–it is relevant to U.S. and other operations going on right now. I was especially impressed with four aspects: the emphasis on prisoner interrogation; the development of easy to install tactical signals collection devices that could be carried in and installed by deep reconnaissance units; the over-all commitment to long-range patrolling; and the clearly authorized commitment to “behind the lines” covert violence (assassination), using all the tools of intelligence to identify and then kill very specific individuals such as the two Egyptian Colonels believed to be guiding the Palestinian terrorist actions against Israel. These are all areas where the U.S. military is weak (and in one case clearly forbidden to consider action), and I consider this book a helpful manual for military officers who wish to take a more active role in preparing defense intelligence for the future–we cannot do military intelligence the way the Israeli's do it, if we persist in thinking that desk-bound beltway analysts and overhead satellite collection are all that we need.
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Review: For the President’s Eyes Only–Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush

5 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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5.0 out of 5 stars For Presidents, Cabinet Members, Commanders, & Senior Staff,

January 10, 2001
Christopher Andrew
“Over the past two centuries only four American presidents-Washington, Eisenhower, Kennedy (briefly), and Bush-have shown a real flair for intelligence.” This 660-page book documents this assessment, and ends with the conclusion “The presidents in the twenty-first century, like their Cold War predecessors, will continue to find an enormously expensive global intelligence system both fallible and indispensable.” His general findings in the conclusion are instructive: presidents have tended to have exaggerated expectations of intelligence, and have frequently overestimated the secret power that covert action might put at their command. For all that failed, both in intelligence not getting it right and presidents not listening when it did, intelligence undeniably helped stabilize the Cold War and avoid many confrontations. This book is extremely relevant to the emerging discussion, in 2001, about the need to depoliticize the position of the Director of Central Intelligence, and perhaps to consider a new National Security Act of 2001.
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Review: Tools for Thought–The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technolog

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Rheingold 10, Gates 0,

December 29, 2000
Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold, former Editor of the Whole Earth Review and one of the pure-gold original thinkers in the Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly circle, lays down a serious challange to both decisionmakers and software producers that has yet to be fully understood. Originally published in 1985, this book was a “must read” at the highest levels of advanced information processing circles then, but sadly its brilliant and coherent message has yet to take hold–largely because bureaucratic budgets and office politics are major obstacles to implementing new models where the focus is on empowering the employee rather than crunching financial numbers.

This book is a foundation reading for understanding why the software Bill Gates produces (and the Application Program Interfaces he persists in concealing) will never achieve the objectives that Howard and others believe are within our grasp–a desktop toolkit that not only produces multi-media documents without crashing ten times a day, but one that includes modeling & simulation, structured argument analysis, interactive search and retrieval of the deep web as well as commercial online systems, and geospatially-based heterogeneous data set visualization–and more–the desktop toolkit that emerges logically from Howard's vision must include easy clustering and linking of related data across sets, statistical analysis to reveal anomalies and identify trends in data across time, space, and topic, and a range of data conversion, machine language translation, analog video management, and automated data extraction from text and images. How hard can this be? VERY HARD. Why? Because no one is willing to create a railway guage standard in cyberspace that legally mandates the transparency and stability of Application Program Interfaces (API). Rheingold gets it, Gates does not. What a waste!

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