Review: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Not What I Expected But Hugely Satisfying,

June 27, 2009

R. Buckminster Fuller

I was actually expecting an Operating Manual. Although what I ended up with is a 136-page double-spaced “overview” by Buckminster Fuller, a sort of “history and future of the Earth in 5,000 words or less, bracketed by a *wonderful* introduction by grandchild Jamie Snyder, an index, a two-page resource guides, and some photos and illustrations including the Fuller Projections of the Earth.

First, the “core quote” that I can never seem to find when I need it:

OUR MISSION IS “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” Inside front cover.

The introduction is a treat–I note “impressive” and appreciate the many insights that could only come from a grandchild of and lifelong apprentice to Buckminster Fuller.

Highlights for me:

Founder of Design Science, a company by that name is now led by Medard Gabel who served as his #2 for so long. I just attended one of their summer laboratories and was blown away by the creativity and insights. It is a life-changing experience for those with a passion for Earth.

He imagined an inventory of global data. I am just now coming into contact with all of this great man's ideas, but my third book, Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, also online at the Strategic Studies Institute in very short monograph form, is totally in harmony with this man's vision for a global inventory of global data.

“Sovereignness” was for him a ridiculous idea, and a much later work out of Cambridge agrees, Philip Allot tells us the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge wrong turn in his book The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

“Great Pirates” that mastered the oceans as the means of linking far-flung lands with diversity of offerings was the beginning of global commerce and also the beginning of the separation between globalists who knew the whole, and specialists whom Buckminster Fuller scathingly describes as an advanced form of slave.

He was frustrated with the phrases “sunrise” and sunset” as they are inaccurate, and finally settled for “sunsight” and “suneclipse” to more properly describe the fact that it is the Earth that is moving around the sun, not the other way around.

In 1927 he concluded that it is possible for forecast with some accuracy 25 years in advance, and I find this remarkably consist with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's view that it takes 25 years to move the beast–see for instance Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy.

He has an excellent discussion of the failure of politics and the ignorance of kings and courtiers, noting that our core problem is that everyone over-estimates the cost of doing good and under-estimates the cost of doing bad, i.e. we will fund war but not peace.

He described how World War I killed off the Great Pirates and introduces a competition among scientists empowered by war, politicians, and religions. He says the Great Pirates, accustomed to the physical challenges, could not comprehend the electromagnetic spectrum.

He states that man's challenge is to comprehend the metaphysical whole, and much of the book is focused on the fact, in his view, that computers are the salvation of mankind in that they can take over all the automaton work, and free man to think, experiment, and innovate. He is particularly forceful in his view that unemployed people should be given academic scholarships, not have to worry about food or shelter, and unleash their innovation. I am reminded of Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era as well as Thomas Stewart's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization.

There is a fascinating discussion of two disconnected scholars, one studying the extinction of human groups, the other the extinction of animal species, and when someone brings them together, they discover that precisely the same cause applied to both: over-specialization and a loss of diversity.

Synergy is the uniqueness of the whole, unpredictable from the sum of the parts or any part individually.

On page 87 he forecasts in 1969 when this book was first published, both the Bush and the Obama Administration's ease in finding trillions for war and the economic crisis, while refusing to recognize that we must address the needs of the “have nots” or be in eternal war. I quote:

“The adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive solutions to any and all problems never cost too much.”

I agree. I drove to Des Moines and got a memo under Obama's hotel door recommending that he open up to all those not represented by the two party crime family, and also providing him with the strategic analytic model developed by the Earth Intelligence Network. Obviously he did not attend, and today he is a pale reflection of Bush. See the images I have loaded, and Obama: The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

Early on he identified “information pollution” as co-equal to physical pollution, I am totally taken with this phrase (see my own illustration of “data pathologies” in the image above). I recognize that Buckminster Fuller was about feedback loops and the integrity of all the feedback loops, and this is one explanation for why US Presidents fail: they live in “closed circles” and are more or less “captive” and held hostage by their party and their advisor who fear and block all iconoclasts less they lose their parking spot at the White House.

Most interestingly, and consistent with the book I just read the other day, Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change (The Changing Face of War), he concludes that wars recycle industry and reinvigorate science, and concludes that every 25 years is about right for a “scorched earth” recycling of forces.

He observes that we must preserve our fossil fuels as the “battery” of our Spaceship Earth, and focus on creating our true “engine,” regenerative renewable life and energy.

He joins with Will Durant in Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers: education is our most formidable task.

I am astonished to have him explain why the Pacific coast of the US is so avant guarde and innovative (as well as loony). He states that the US has been a melting pot for centuries, and that the West Coast is where two completely different cultural and racial patterns integrated, one from Africa and the east, the other from the Pacific and the west.

I learn that he owned 54 cars in his lifetime, and kept leaving them at airports and forgetting when and where. He migrated to renting, and concluded that “possession” is burdensome.

See also:
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised)

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Review: Fast Strategy–How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Strategy

Fsst StrategySuperb, Needed by the 90% of Leaders Who Don't Read, August 26, 2008

Yves Doz

Minus one star for publisher being lazy about using Amazon tools to help readers see the table of contents and otherwise “look inside the book,” and for lack of deeper reference to externalities that deeply impact on emerging business models, including natural capitalism, moral capitalism, and transcendent capitalism.

I found the content engrossing, while on every page I realized that with every word, the authors are describing precisely what 90% of the “successful” leaders refuse to do–and especially those in the secret intelligence community that I know so well.

The authors blend deep strategic experience with Nokia and at INSEAD among many other qualifications, and I recommend this book be read together with two others that I recently reviewed:

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
Execution Premium

Book's bottom line: leaders must create and nurture counterintuitive blending–sustained constant blending, of the following:
+ Strategic sensitivity
+ Collective commitment
+ Resource fluidity
+ Management depoliticization

They summarize the challenge early on: “interdependent opportunities in the world of convergence and fuzzy enterprise boundaries and of rapid emergent systemic change in environment.”

Before summarizing the really compelling points made by the authors, I want to skip ahead to their appendices and list the thirteen toxicities that define most successful businesses today, as well as government agencies and most especially secret government agencies that are, in the words of one Defense Intelligence Senior Leader (DISL) cited in Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon: “institutionalized lunacy.”

The thirteen toxicities (buy the book for these pages alone):
– Tunnel vision
– Tyranny of core business
– Strategic myopia
– Dominance mindset
– Snap judgment and intellectual laziness
– Imprisoned resources
– Business system rigidity
– Ties that bind
– Management mediocrity and competence gaps
– Management divergence
– Heady charm of fame and power (or in secret world, lack of accountability for failing to deliver anything truly valuable)
– Expert management (making operational decisions instead of strategic)
– Emotional apathy

In the book in you are looking at it in a bookstore, pages 124-126 are a priceless inventory of the drivers, consequences, and toxicities that undermine strategic sensibility, collective commitment, and resource flexibility. Any CEO or Board of Directors can use these three pages alone to fail just about any company, right now, across the board.

Now here are the gems I pulled from this worthy offering:

STRATEGIC SENSITIVITY
+ Casting a wide net (as I suggested to AGSI in 1994)
+ Multiple levels of analysis (see image–threat and opportunity change depending on the level of analysis)
+ Including understanding of one's creeping and binding “lock ins”

COLLECTIVE COMMITMENT
+ Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy
+ Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos
+ Make time for full information sharing and interaction
+ Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs
+ Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation

RESOURCE FLUIDITY
+ Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients)
+ Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial
+ Generative growth (on the edges) is key–one reason I hate tethered devices like the X-Box or the iPhone
+ Must MAXIMIZE knowledge SHARING with OUTSIDE parties
+ Experiment

MANAGEMENT DEPOLITICIZATION
+ “Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.” Page 79 citing Teams At the Top. In my own experience and that of Ben Gilad, author of Business Blindspots (order from UK Infonortics), the INFORMATION reaching most managers is biased, late, incomplete, filtered, and poorly focused–thus making opinions even more dangerous.
+ Authors feel strongly that teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
+ “Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs.”
+ Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future
+ Have an OPEN strategy process
+ Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.

Other key points that grabbed me and are memorable:
+ Strategy now is continuous
+ Strategy now is less about foresight (still important), more about insight across every domain
+ Agility is the key ingredient, means being able to think and act differently (so much for most leadership teams)
+ Emotions matter–people not products innovate, learn to use this

I put the book down (at the beach, in Rohoboth) with three ideas bringing this encounter to a close:

1) Mature *successful* businesses die of strategic paralysis and the thirteen toxins

2) Three core values the authors use to conclude are

+ Dedication to EVERY client

+ Innovation that matters to both the company and the world

+ Trust and personal responsibility in ALL relationships.

3) Strike three for the US Intelligence Community and the US Government.

Here are some other books I consider to be, as with this one and the ones cited above, worthy of top minds seriously interested in doing the right thing for country, company, and customers:
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace Battle for the Soul of Capitalism]]
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

I had something to do with the last two and hope I can be forgiven for including them–it is not possible to perform as a smart company in the context of a dumb nation, nor is it possible to co-create value without recognizing that the gold standard now consists of meeting individual needs without social or environmental costs being externalized.

Excellent book. Buy it–this review is a taste, not the meal.

Review: The Necessary Revolution–How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Necessarry RevolutionValue Priced, Superb Overview, Isolated from Other Literatures,August 28, 2008

Peter M. Senge et al

At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.

I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.

Following from my extensive notes:

+ A handful of top global businesses “get it” and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.

+ Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world “writing off” the one billion extreme poor) than any market “intelligence” firm.

+ With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality “bubble,” and the “real real” world bubble that is catching up with it. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.

+ Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.

+ Other “big ideas” by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

1. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)

2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)

3. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline

4. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)

THREE GUIDING IDEAS:

1. No viable path neglects future generations

2. Institutions matter

3. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).

THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:

1. Energy & Transportation

2. Food & Water

3. Material Waste & Toxicity

THREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:

1. Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)

2. Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)

3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolation

SIX BASIC IDEAS:

1. Natural system encloses social and economic systems

2. Industrial system must operate in that context

3. Regenerable resources have harvest limits

4. Non-renewable resources are finite.

5. Waste is a cancer on the Earth

6. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for change

THREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:

1. Convening diversity of viewpoints

2. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy

3. Nurturing relationships over time and above money

EXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:

1. Save dollars internally

2. Make dollars externally

3. Provide customers with competitive value

4. Sustainability as point of differentiation

5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share

6. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot

7. Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)

The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of “toolbox” pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.

I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:

1. Vivienne Cox of BP

2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GE

I put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA! That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.

Other important books NOT mentioned by this book:
The Story of Civilization by Will Durant with The Lessons of History (Complete in 10 Vols. plus The Lessons of History which was written by Durant to accompany the 10-volume set)
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
The Knowledge Executive
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:
1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.
2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.
3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.
4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).
5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be “the” reference work for the next seven years).

Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works.

Review: Seeing What’s Next–Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Future

Seeing NextBook-End for Prahalad's Fortune at the Bottom, July 29, 2008

Clayton M. Christensen

The primary author's first two books were each sensational in their own way–.I was particularly gripped by his description of the throw-away camara as being unattractive to the high-end camara shops, but when adopted by grocery stores, led to the 90% of the non-consumers of high-end camaras getting into photography. The key: low-cost offering for the non-consumers introduced outside the incumbent arena.

That is the heart of this new book, and the addition of two co-authors suggest that the author's vision is spreading.

I actually read the two chapters on education and health care first–the first because my oldest son blew off his senior year in high school at not worthy of his time, and is now racking up community college credits at very low cost (with the same instructors from the higher cost Geroge Mason University) and is a living embodiment of the education chapters first focus: what matters is not credentialling from the higher end universities, but the low cost acquisition of “just enough just right” learning from key teachers (the brand is shifting from schools to teachers).

Both the education and the health chapters drive home three big points that I find compelling and exciting in the context of C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks):

1. The innovation and profit opportunities are with the non-consumers–the ultimate non-0consumers today are the five billion poor, and especially the 1.5 billion each in China and in India, two countries that have the capability to create call centers for “just enough just in time” learning via cell phone.

2. The keys to health innovation, both in the developed world of one billioin rich and in the undeveloped world of the five billion poor, are:

a. Creating “good enough” solutions that are very low cost and easy to push into remote areas that could not afford high end care; and

b. Pushing innovation down the pyramid from the expensive sites and specialists to the nurse-practitioners and ultimately to the patient themselves; while also moving the diagnostics and the remedies down to the point of care and aware from the hospital “hubs” that are now as antiquated as the airline “hubs” that block point to point travel.

Chapter Ten on “The Future of Telecommunications gave me goose-bumps. No kidding. Thunderclaps and blinding lighting accompanied the third page of this chapter, in part because I have been thinking about Open Spectrum (see David Weinberger's brilliant chapter on this, free online, and also his new book, a sensational new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Althought the chapter focuses priimarily on wireless versus hardline hardware options, and does not mention either the obvious fact that satellites still have too much delay for ubiquitous wireless from outer space (something that should go away in ten years with higher energy pulses), or the other obvious fact, that even wireless is being commoditized and that on demand services and sense-making are the next big offering from the innovators, I found this chapter compelling. Arthur Clarke said long ago that telecommunications should be more or less free as an enabler, and I agree. We need to make both communications and education free to all, and monetize the transactions, the patterns, the early warning, and the aggregate sense-making.

The next most important chapter for me was Chapter 3, “Strategic Choices: Identifying Which Choices Matter.” What stuck with me are three things:

1. Start early–don't wait for everyone else to realize the need

2. Hire accordingly. This is HUGE. Most companies have a profile for new employees that is 20 years out of date. Most companies have no clue that Digital Natives are completely different from Digital Immigrants (as one author notes: this is the first generation where the kids are not little version of us–they are a metaphysical transformation well beyond us and anything we can comprehend). Hence, companies have to have the leadership needed to create a “safe” skunkworks where iconoclasts and others who are largely antithetical to the gerbils and drones hired in the past, can innovate without having to deal with the insecurities, ignorance, bad habits, and “rankism” of those trapped in the pyramidal paradigms of the past.

The Appendix provides a summary of key concepts and has some really excellent illustrations that are very helpful. The point within the Appendex that escaped me earlier in the book and was driven home here is that ultimately the innovative firms make investments as a means of learning, not as a means of realizing their pre-conceived notions of what is needed next. I continue to recommend the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005, “The Power of Us.” Innovation, it appears to me, works best when firms both hire and invest to learn, *and* dramatically and deliberately expand the stakeholder circle to embrace the end-user being sought as a customer.

The rest of the book is very worthwhile for those that do not read broadly in the business or innovation leadership.

Other books that I have found as exciting at this one:
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Finally, a book I published with 55 contributors, free online but utterly wonderful in

Review: Beyond Civilization–Humanity’s Next Great Adventure

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Culture, DVD - Light, Future, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Beyond CivilizationPointer to Other Relevant Works, April 13, 2008

Daniel Quinn

I considered this book, and found the reviews so very informative, as well as negative on what the “next steps” should be, that I enter this contribution not as a review of the book, but as a pointer to other books that go beyond this book. Epoch B Swarm B Leadership, Transpartisanship, and bottom-up Citizen Wisdom Councils is what comes after civilization deconstructs and the nation-state model is finally devolved to tighter regional alliances and the end of predatory immoral capitalism (in favor of moral green capitalism).

Here are ten books I have read and reviewed that I believe readers and admirers of this author will find most beneficial:
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Handbook of Large Group Methods: Creating Systemic Change in Organizations and Communities (Jossey-Bass Business & Management)
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

My thanks again to the reviewers. I buy and read a great many books, and the reviews help me make tough choices within my limit of five books a week. I hope the links above are considered helpful.

Review: The Second World–Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Future, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Second WorldTour of the world in concise but precise terms,March 30, 2008

Parag Khanna

This is an extraordinary book, a tour of the “real” world where the future is being defined. While I respect the reviewer's that have difficulty with inaccuracies or inconsistencies, on balance, in all of my reading as reviewed on Amazon, I would rate this one of the top 20 books, perhaps even one of the top 10 (let's go with that, making it one of the top 10 on reality, while my other “top ten” would encompass world changing, social entrepreneurship, the Tao of democracy and other solution-oriented writings).

My notes must of necessity be cryptic. I will start with the bottom line and urge the Amazon reader to take my notes as a strong incentive to buy and read the book cover to cover.

Bottom line: US has screwed up big time, and is taking third place to China's achievement of globalization on its terms, using consultation, incentives, and efficient/effective agreements to propel itself past Europe, which has consensus model that has displaced the US but cannot compete with China's global juggernaut. The US is gently tarred with confusing “security” for prosperity or legitimacy, with preferring single-party strong-arm partners, and with being generally clumsy, inept, ignorant, and hence losing on all fronts.

+ Second World is internally divided between rich and poor sectors

+ Second World is the tipping point domain that will determine the tri-polar (China, Europe, US) outcome

+ Author covers five regions 1) east of Europe including Russia and Turkey; 2) Central Asia; 3) South America with little attention to Caribbean; 4) Middle East; and 5) Asia and the 4 Chinas.

Early on the author states that the Americas are terribly ignorant of both the old and new geography, and I would agree while emphasizing that the “expert” advisors to Presidential candidates are themselves as ignorant (or biased)–from those that are state-centric to those that are ideologically unbalanced to those that believe their ego and social network are sufficient in and of themselves. Not a single one of them knows how to lead a nation-wide conversation, much less a regional or international conversation–they are the “walking dead” of the pyramidal era, and any contender that listens to them and allows them to exclude the iconoclasts and the avant guarde is destined to be neutered, so to speak, before their time.

+ According to the author, America is now viewed as destabilize, in an era when the Second World judges legitimacy on the basis of proven effectiveness (one could also add: sustained effectiveness, not a US forte). Further on the author drives this point home by saying that success trumps ideology, and across the Second World, democracy is not considered practical (nor credible as a US claim for access).

+ European Union is the standard bearer for both technology and regulation (another book I have reviewed pointed out that USA has become a “dumping ground” for products from China Europe will not admit–thank you, Dick Cheney).

+ USA, EU, and China have no common culture, and (combined with the distinct cultures of the other four emergent regions), this is cause for concern about future misunderstandings and over-reactions.

+ The world is demographically blended and so increasingly inter-dependent that the day of major war is indeed likely to be a thing of the past.

+ In the early focus on Europe, the author quotes a European to the effect that Europe is expanding, each time getting poorer, but each time delivering and buying priceless stability. This is one reason why Eastern Europe is skyrocketing and at the same time, displacing the USA as a source for many exports to Europe.

+ He tells us that Europe is confident, incentivizes its partners, has a generation in charge that is transcendent, and is disdainful of the US for its ineptness.

+ Russia is described as a “Siberian Saudi Arabia” but with an insecure nuclear arsenal. Ā¾ of the wealth is centered in (controlled from) Moscow while 2/3 of Russians are living at the poverty line or below.

+ Russia is being emptied of Russians as they vote with their feet and move west, at the same time that Chinese are moving north into Siberia, which global warming is making more hospitable.

+ In the Balkans instability threatens Europe, but European agro-technology is making a huge difference, as is the European penchant to support multiple parties rather than any single dictator. Still, “lurking tribalization” is of concern.

+ Turkey is a key player in saving the Balkans, and in the author's view, is powerful, democratic, secular, and Muslim, and also responsible for ten times more trade with Europe than with the US.

+ Black Sea is creating its own unified region.

+ Georgia does not have a single decent road.

+ Caucasian Corridor is a Balkans waiting to happen.

+ While Brussels is central, London, Ankara, and Moscow each have their own key role in the region.

+ Central Asia benefits from the re-creation of the Silk Road for East-West trade, while also suffering from being the “laboratory” for imperial excess seeking to play the Great Game (not something the US is at all qualified to “play”)

+ The author points out Central Asia is at the intersection of Russia, China, Europe, and the US, to which I would add Iran as well.

+ Mongolia is militarily aligned with the US (and from my own knowledge, has one of the finer peace keeping training programs as well as an ideal pre-Afghanistan mobilization training environment)

+ According to the author, China, in sharp contrast to the US and Russia, is making huge gains in Central Asia because of “swift settlement” of all outstanding border issues, its promotion of shared development strategies, its “massive charm offensive” and its role as a “consultative leader,” and its being the “standard bearer for business practices” which is code for no-strings attached loans nearing one billion. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is now called the “NATO of the East.” China is winning Central Asia through strategy, trade, and co-development. [See also my online memorandum “Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net”]

+ Kazakhstan has energy and retained its own language, shows promise.

+ Kyrgystan a mess, Tajikistan a bridge for revival of Sino-Iranian trade routes.

+ Uzbeckistan and Tajikistan are Islamic targets.

+ American failure to reconstruct Afghanistan has left Karzai neutered, perhaps soon to go.

+ South America has been suffocated by US hegemony, and US sponsorship of 30 years of “Dirty War” pitting authoritarian rightists against [liberation theology and populist] leftists.

+ Unlike other regions, South America simply wants US to live up to its rhetoric about free trade and democratization, “without exceptions.”

+ US threatened by crime, drugs, migration from the South, does not seem to appreciate the value of South American integration and self-sufficiency in energy and food sectors.

+ Four Mexico's–northern, central breadbasket, indigenous destitute isthmus, and very poor Mayan Yucatan.

+ Chaves in Venezuela is a spendthrift and has quadrupled Venezuela's debt, but he actually has a serious strategy that includes China to offset US, a pipeline to Argentina, state to state barter of commodities, modernizing Caribbean energy sector, and welcoming Iran and Europe.

+ Colombia is the key to the future of the region, unique for having Pacific and Caribbean coasts while also being the entry point for a Pan-American highway of greater potential.

+ US is losing the drug war and screwing up the alternatives of trade and economic accelerators.

+ Brazil is the USA of South America, and has formed a trade axis with China. It is multiracial, with the largest populations of Arabs outside Nigeria, Lebanese outside Lebanon, Italians and Japanese outside their own countries. Crime is the wild card, the Achilles' heel.

+ Argentina is a basket case (the author does not tell us that Argentine is also being seduced by Chinese men and is likely to be majority Chinese by 2025).

+ Chile, despite US mis-deeds, benefited from German farmers and is today's success story, focused on stability, pragmatism, and profit.

+ Arabs are redefining themselves in the Middle East in a manner not seen in the past 1000 years. They remain central, and the author anticipates Arab economics will triumph over Islamic radicalism. Later in the book he concludes that the Arabic opinion and sense of self is solidifying.

+ North Africa is Europe's southern shore, and part of the Mediterranean culture, but suffers a massive disconnect between unemployable poorly educated youth and jobs without qualified applicants.

+ Libya (I learn for the first time) is a huge success, with major gains in education, advancement of women, and per capita income over $7000 a year.

+ Egypt as the Arab cornerstone and the difficult blend of Arabia and Islam. This government, the author tells us , “provides neither moral leadership nor public services” and therefore is “a perfect target for Islamist groups well-equipped to provide both.” He believes an Iranian-style revolution is possible.

+ The Mashreq–Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, he sums up as “Iranian interference, Syrian intransigence, Lebanese weakness, Israeli aggression, and Palestinian desperation.” I was surprised to not see “American idiocy” in there, since my taxpayer dollars are funding the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.

+ He anticipates the death of Iraq and the emergence of Kurdistan, and here I quote two gifted turns of phrase: “Wars are like a geopolitical reset button.” and “The Iraq war exposed the United States as a superpower whose intelligence does not match its aspirations.” As an intelligence professional, I must clarify this: both the Army leadership and the CIA professionals, that is to say, Charlie Allen, got it exactly right–no weapons of mass destruction, kept the cook books, bluffing for regional sake. It was George Tenet who parked his integrity on the same shelf as Colin Powell and Mike Hayden, who allowed Dick Cheney to hijack the US Government and send the US military to war on the basis of 935 explicitly documented lies to the public and Congress and the UN, and 25 explicitly documented high crimes and misdemeanors.

+ Iran does not get enough coverage, but that is insufficient to undermine my very high regard for this book.

+ Gulf will provide 40% of the energy for the foreseeable future. Oil windfalls were mis-directed by the leaders, who funded luxuries for themselves, and militaries, rather than seeing to the public good.

+ Wahhabist reckoning is coming–they teach selected elements of the Koran by rote, not Islam. However, they correctly evaluate the Saudi Royals as the near enemy and the USA as the far enemy, joined at the hip.

+ United Arab Emirates is where Las Vegas meets Singapore, with Dubai as the icon. He notes with studied understatement that Chinese goods and Chinese whores are half price to any competing goods or whores, and the former “designed to disintegrate.”

+ Malaysia and Indonesia have huge Chinese Diasporas. Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam not as well covered as I would have liked, especially Vietnam which is totally independent of China.

+ There are four Chinas–the southeast quadrant with Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (I was surprised to see no mention of Macau, through which China is aggressively wooing all former Portuguese colonies including Brazil); the Beijing centered northeast, and the far edge of Tibet and Xinjiang, which the author tells us earlier in the book are as vital to China as the Rockies and West of the Rockies are to the US.

+ He says that China is “blending” Asia, and that from Malaysia and elsewhere there is broad recognition that a form of Chinese “Monroe Doctrine” is being established. He specifically points out that US offers of “security” are losing out to European offers of “capacity” that nurture prosperity (as well as Chinese offers of co-development).

+ I grew up in Singapore, finishing high school there, and I am in total agreement with the author's admiration for Lee Kuan Yew and the manner in which communitarian trumps democratic when it comes to producing more stability and prosperity. I recently learned from my step-mother, who just left Singapore after decades of being the leader of English education for the government (and Chinese teachers) that one cannot run for Parliament in Singapore without first earning a Masters in Business Administration.

+ Uniquely, Asians want to stay in Asia while visiting everywhere else.

+ He plays down India and I completely disagree with his dismissal of them. India has made more progress than China when one considers the totally divergent and conflictive situations they must handle across tribes, religions, classes, and environmental challenges.

In his conclusion, the author suggests that a tri-polar world now exists, but one read what can only be a list of indicators of USA suicidal tendencies: lousy education, no investment in technology, as many gang members as there are policemen (roughly 750,000 he tells us). The USA can learn to co-exist and co-develop with the rest of the world, and abandon its military “big stick” paradigm, or it can be relegated to third place forever, and gradually go down even further.

I am very worried. I see no one that has strategic perspective, a holistic understanding of the ten threats and twelve policies, nor an appreciation of the urgency of creating an alternative development model for Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, among others.

See also:
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
The Future of Life
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Review: The Power of Unreasonable People–How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)
Unreasonable People
Amazon Page

Remarkable, Inspiring, Instructive, a Total “Wow”, March 25, 2008

John Elkington

I became very enthusiastic about the term “social entrepreneurship” when I made the transition from reading about collective intelligence and citizen wisdom councils and wealth of networks, to understanding that there was a form of energy I first encountered in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition.

This book is remarkable, all the more so for being the third in the series that started with Cannibals with Forks in 1997 that introduced the term “triple bottom line” (financial, social, environmental); and in 2001, The Chrysalis Economy: How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation, anticipating the period of creative destruction coming from 2000-2030.

I like this book very much, in part because after 20 years of thinking of myself as a reformist beating his head against the idiot secret world, I now realize I am a social entrepreneur who has turned his back on secrets and is focused on creating public intelligence in the public interest.

The authors made me smile with their early explanation that most social entrepreneurs can be so unreasonable as to be called lunatic. This is precisely what happened to me when I published “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence” in the Fall 1992 edition of the Whole Earth Review–for having the temerity to suggest that we should emphasize open sources of information instead of spying, and sharing instead of hoarding, I was told that Sandra Cruzman, the top woman at CIA at the time, said “this confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe.” So forgive me for this sidebar, but this book speaks to me in very personal as well as socially meaningful terms, it resonates with me, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to think about ways of doing good while doing well enough.

I always look for whether authors are respecting those that came before or have made adjacent contributions, and on that score this book is completely satisfactory. It is also blessed by the authors' broad range of examples, carefully selected from what is clearly a universe they know better than anyone else.

Citing George Bernard Shaw, they explain early on that “unreasonable people” are seen so for their seeking to abandon outmoded thoughts, mindsets, or practices. Amen, brother!

This is not a feel-good book in intent, although it achieves that effect. It is a serious book that methodically reviews new business models, leadership styles, and thinking about value creation. It held my total attention over two evenings of reading.

The authors offer esteem to social entrepreneurs with the observation that corporations are noticing and hiring such individuals for three reasons:

1. They see the future sooner than the average cubicle resident
2. They help retain talent by making the business challenging
3. They bring love and fun into the office environment

The authors caution that social entrepreneurs fail more often than not, but they persist and ultimately find means of making a difference while making a living.

They suggest that immature markets are best explored by non-profits while noting that hybrids with blended values are the most interesting forms.

Page 5 is suitable for scaling up and framing for the office. The ten characteristics of social entrepreneurs (severely abbreviated here):

1. Shrug off ideology and discipline
2. Focus on practical solutions
3. Innvoate
4. Do social value creation and SHARE
5. Jump in without waiting for back-up
6. Have unwavering beliefs in innate capacity of others
7. Dogged determination
8. Passion for change
9. Have a great deal to teach change makers in other sectors
0. Healthy impatience (don't do well in bureaucracies)

They tell the reader that confusion is a normal circumstance for social entrepreneurs, whom they define as those that take “direct action that generates a paradigm shift” while attacking an “unsatisfactory equilibrium.”

They see a deep and lasting need for social entrepreneurs because coming decades will require unprecedented levels of system change (I add, and will have unprecedented and often unanticipated disasters, many turning into catastrophes for lack of planning, preparation, or responsiveness)

The authors tell us that the best of the charitable foundations are shifting from plain grant-making to sequential investments and deeper continuing relations with those being funded. At the same time they tell us that corporation and private equity firms are beginning to notice the value options in this space. [I think to myself, this is great, just at a time when corporations are also understanding green to gold, sustainable design, ecology of commerce, and true cost accounting.]

I am totally impressed with one page that describes how China has developed new green accounting methods and now realizes that environmentally-related work loss is no less than 10% of their newly-understood green Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

They provide a fine overview of new measures of merit including the double bottom line, the triple bottom line, the Social Return on Investment (SROI), and the “blended value proposition.”

On page 20 I see a quote worth posting: social entrepreneurs “bring together natural, social, human, intellectual, and cultural forms of capital.”

LEVERAGE is a key concept for these authors, and one I take very serioiusly as they describe how small investments can leverage indigenous capabilities (such as hard work from people who are poor but not stupid), philanthropic and other support, business partnerships, and income from previously untapped markets (at the Base of the Pyramid, like my Seattle friends they are clearly not comfortable with C. K. Prahalad's choice of title in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks).

The middle section of the book discusses three models and examples of each:

1. The leveraged non-profit, which is hard to scale, dependent on hand-outs, focuses on public goods and being a change catalyst

2. The hybrid non-profit that combines non-profit and revenue generating activities, with a focus on outcome generation, empowering the people at the base, community-centric, focused on low cost long term, and on driving the market or pulling more traditional providers into the market.

3. The social business, which focuses on both social and financial returns, scales much more easily because it can assume both debt and equity. We learn that Whole Foods is an example, that it drove the organic market and leverages voluntary cooperation among many networks. Another example combines sustainable organic agriculture, rural employment of the uneducated but willing, price security for farmers, and transparent information.

I want to emphasize the latter: transparent information. I have been persuaded by numerous books on the wealth of knowledge as well as my own 30+ years as an intelligence professional that shared information and transparent decision support is a wealth creation process that scales fast and inexpensively.

The authors go on to discuss ten markets that lend themselves to social entrepreneurship, and I will list them with tiny examples–the book is absolutely a gem that merits buying a reading from end to end.

1. Demographic: condoms, aging, disadvantages
2. Financial: child knowledge of finances, simple technologies, helping poor self-organize for leverage
3. Nutritiional: duck rice, food bank, food waste elevated to tasty and nutritious near zero cost consumables
4. Resources: energy, energy, energy (I would add water, and throw a respectful salute the the George Mason University professor born in Bangladesh who created a virtually free means of removing arsenic from water using a combination of charcoal and steel filings (from the ships torn apart there, see The Outlaw Sea : A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
5. Environment: educatae, plant trees
6. Health: high volume low cost (or free), cateract cures, telephone centers to help poor remotely
7. Gender (best ROI ever is on educating women, see A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid)
8. Educational: end rote learning, cross-pollinate, barefoot college that trains doctors and engineers narrowly and without years of credentialing (my own idea is call centers to education “one cell call at a time,” I would love to see India do this sooner than later)
9. Digital: embrace and empower poor as citizens
0. Security: redefine as jobs for everyone rather than high-end military

The last third of the book covers

1. helping those at the base of the pyramid with access (e.g. curing neglected diseases); price (slash to 10%); and quality (e.g. $100 laptops).

2. Democratizing technology (four clusters: basic building blocks, motorcycles and free neutral air in and out of disaster zones; media and media technology; and genetics and biology.

3. Changing the rules of the game (search for my “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” free on the Internet). They emphasize transparency; accountability; certification; land reform; emission trading; and value & valuation.

4. Scaling solutions, with examples covering true costs, clean toilets for tens of millions, and General Electric's commitment to 17 clean technoloogies, sustainability attracting the best and the brightest of the social entrepreneurs.

5. Lessons for leaders (below does not do the section justice–buy the book and read the whole thing):

– Focus on scalable entrepreneurial solutions
– Tackle apparently insolvable problems
– Be prepared to fail–but learn from failures
– Experiment with new business models
– Close the pay gap
– Join forces
– Seed tomorrow's markets
– Fuel growing expectations
– Help democratize technology
– Work to change the system
– Figure out how to scale and replicate
– Within reason, cultivate the art of being unreasonable

I put the book down extremely pleased with the content and the presentation. This is a very serious book for serious people, not just social entrepreneurs, but Second and Third World policy makers, bankers, investors, international and non-governmental leaders, and so on.

As I see it, social networks and collaboration among what I call the “ten tribes” (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, labor, religion, and civil society) are in their very infancy. The Internet has not been matched by easily available information sharing and decision support tools (DARPA STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL is a start), and governments persist is wasting tens of billions waging war and stealing secrets, instead of waging peace and nurturing open sources of information in 183 languages.

This book continued the inspiration that I have been getting from others, and here I list a few others including the first book from Earth Intelligence Network (free at the website):

Improper behavior
Radical man
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

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