Best examination of intelligence-firepower disconnects,
April 8, 2000
Robert H Scales
Major General Bob Scales may well be the Army's brightest light and this generation's successor to General Don Starry and Dan Morelli (who inspired the Toffler's book on War and Anti-War). First published by the National Defense University Press in 1990, this book reflects deeply on the limitations of firepower in limited war situations, and the conclusion is a telling indictment of our national intelligence community and our joint military intelligence community, neither of which is willing to break out of their little boxes to find a proper response to this statement: “The common theme in all five case studies presented here is the recurring inability of the side with the firepower advantage to find the enemy with sufficient timeliness and accuracy to exploit that advantage fully and efficiently.”
Brilliant Look at Need to Link Direct and Indirect Leaders,
April 8, 2000
Howard E. Gardner
I bought this book sometime after concluding that national intelligence leadership needed to inspire and appeal to the citizens of the USA at large, rather than being so narrowly focused on staying out of trouble with Congress while collecting secrets. This book reviews leadership of both domains and nations, with case studies on Margaret Mead (Culture), J. Robert Oppenheimer (Physics), Robert Maynard Hutchins (Education), Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (Business), George C. Marshall (Military), Pope John XXII (Religion), Eleanor Roosevelt (Ordinariness and Extraordinariness), Martin Luther King (Minority) and Margaret Thatcher (National). The best leaders that emerge are those who are willing to confront authority and take risk, while also creating networks of contacts that number in the hundreds or thousands rather than tens. Most tellingly, aleader in a discipline (e.g. intelligence) only emerges as a long-term leader if he finally realizes that “he is more likely to achieve his personal goals or to satisfy his community if he addresses a wider audience than if he remains completely within a specific domain.” The six constants of leadership are the story, the audience (beginning with a message for the unschooled mind), the organization, the embodiment, a choice between direct (more practical) and indirect (more reflective and often more enduring) leadership, and a paradox-the direct leaders often lack knowledge while the indirect leaders often have greater knowledge, and transferring knowledge from the indirect leader to the direct leader may be one of the central challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Deflates Knowledge-Based Innovation, Very Practical,
April 8, 2000
Peter F. Drucker
Drucker has a remarkable ability to deflate any self-styled entrepreneur and “innovator.” His book discusses the sources of innovation, concluding rather significantly that knowledge-based innovation is rarely successful-that innovation generally works best when all the factors are known and put into new combinations that work exceedingly well-and that successful innovations start small, focus on the simplest element that can be understood by any half-wit, don't cost a lot, and are never grandiose.
Twelve principles of killer app design: 1) Outsource to the customer, 2) Cannibalize your markets; 3) Treat each customer as a market segment of one; 4) Create communities of value; 5) Replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces; 6) Ensure continuity for the customer, not yourself; 7) Give away as much information as you can; 8) Structure every transaction as a joint venture; 9) Treat your assets as liabilities; 10) Destroy your value chain; 11) Manage innovation as a portfolio of options; 12) Hire the children.
Knowledge Policy As Root of Economic Stability & Prosperity,
April 8, 2000
Peter F. Drucker
Drucker and Toffler agree on one important idea: fiscal and monetary policy is no longer the real driver for national prosperity. At best it is a place-holder, a means of keeping the economy stable. There is a strong element of accountability throughout the book, first with respect to the managers of governments and corporations, and finally with the managers of schools that must ultimately be held accountable for producing students who are competent at both learning and sharing knowledge. For Drucker, the organization of the post-capitalist society must commit itself to being a destabilizer able to change constantly. “It must be organized for systematic abandonment of the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable-whether products, services, processes, human and social relationships, skills, or organizations themselves. It is the very nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today's certainties will be tomorrow's absurdities.” So speaketh Drucker of the U.S. Intelligence Community….
This was the original “reengineering” book and rather than summarize the components of his process I will just name the one big “no no” that the current leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community is passively pursuing…the most frequently committed error: “Try to fix a process instead of changing it.”
New comment: Buckminster Fuller had it right: create new systems that displace the old ones. The emerging literature is full of examples. Below are ten links I consider relevant to displacing flawed industrial era organizations. See the literatures on social entrepreurship and on civilization building as well as green, sustainable design, etcetera.
This book sparked my understanding of “community intelligence” and the need for an integrated network of civic leaders, corporate leaders, academic leaders, and social or non-profit leaders all sharing the same “intelligence” on what the threat to the local community is in terms of losing jobs and remaining attractive as an investment. The author boils it down to each community deciding if it is a thinker, a maker, or a trader community, and then setting out to ensure that everything about the community supports that specific kind of business at a “world-class” level.
