Startling clarity, common sense, and immediate relevance
September 21, 2010
Steve Denning
I received a copy of this book as a galley from the publisher, and I strongly recommend it in any form. I first met Steve Denning when he was recently retired from being program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, and had created no-cost global networks for multinational information sharing decades before the term M4IS2 came into vogue (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). His first book, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (KMCI Press) remains an essential reference for any leader at any level.
This book grabbed me right away, and while it reminds me of Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, and Gifford Pinchot, with a strong leavening from all the books I have been reading in the Collective Intelligence, Evolutionary Activism, Human Scale, and Epoch B Leadership arenas, this is clearly his own unique work and I would venture to say that this is the first book that captures the essence of 21st Century leadership. Continue reading “Review: The Leader's Guide to Radical Management–Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century”
Phi Beta Iota: two reviews are provided, one from the blogsphere (Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn, and one from Amazon. If not obvious, this new trend in organizational learning assures that “secret” organizations will get dumber and dumber as time goes by.
Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.
For the international audience, this book is a very fine complement–despite lacking visualization and a more interesting lay-out on both water technologies over time and the environmental challenges they generated (with what time lags)–to the top world view books. If you buy only one, Marq de Villier Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource is still the very best single book, followed by Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water now also a DVD Blue Gold: World Water Wars, and the original short book Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. There are others, you can find my reviews of all water books I have touched at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, under Reviews/Water (middle column far down). All my reviews there lead back to the Amazon page of the respective book.
Real book, real facts, desperately needs visualization
August 29, 2010
Robert Glennon
I was torn between a four and a five and came down on the side of five because this is a real book with real facts and real interviews and it covers a vital topic very ably. I was tempted to drop to a four for two reasons: this book desperately lacks visualization, something publishers are going to have to learn to integrate if they want to survive (see the TED Briefing “Data is the New Dirt” by David McCandless); and because this book is part of a twelve-book read and review series started for UNESCO, I don't see all the solutions well represented at the end–the book ends weakly. Still, it is a vitally serious, desperately serious book, a sequel to the author's Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping And The Fate Of America's Fresh Waters, and should be read with When the Rivers Run Dry: Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink.
I've been reading for a week to clear twelve water books for shipping before I leave Guatemala, this is next to last and perhaps the most valuable of the lot in terms for actually doing something useful in the future. The last, The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water I will look at tomorrow, but I already do not recommend it for two reasons: its utterly outrageous price, and its narrow focus on the law in isolation from all else. This book is the “capstone” book in my twelve book program, and I will rate it as 6 Star and Beyond at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where you can see all my reviews on water books with one click.
I am impressed very early on as the author discusses how institutions not only restructure within their existing paradigms instead of in novel ways, but they have the greatest say at the table. This is a death sentence for society. For an understanding of how important this insight is, that we must stop doing the wrong things righter and do the right things instead, see Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World and its root book by Russell Ackoff, Redesigning Society (Stanford Business Books).
Three quotes merit sharing immediately.
QUOTE (3): One motive for writing this book is to examine the stark disconnect between the [corporate/UN] forum's blueprint for forging a global water regime and the contentious politics surrounding water all around the world.
QUOTE (5): We have been witnessing the development, proliferation, and growing embeddedness of rules, roles, and practices that shape water-related policy decisions and political struggles all over the world.
QUOTE (7): Unlike most conventional international environmental regimes, these emerging institutions have found a way to incorporate more pluralistic understandings of authority, more flexible conceptions of territorial sovereignty, and more heterogeneous ways of knowing about problems and solutions.
HERE I WANT TO STRESS: HYBRID COALTIONS & INFORMATION-SHARING. This is the consistent theme I have seen over the past 12 books. It CAN be done by multiple stake-holders who come together to share information and make-sense together–it is TRUE COST information, and completely truthful information about all concerns and interests, that makes trust and consensus possible.
QUOTE (10): Global environmental problems result from the poor fit between national borders, and a planetary ecology that ignores those borders.
HERE I WANT TO STRESS: There's only one person I have read who has it right and that is Phillip Allot out of Cambridge. See my review of his brilliant book, The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State. The artificial boundaries imposed by the colonial powers should not be allowed to stand. It's time for the tribes to come back to the fore and do three things: exile dictators; nationalize colonized property including land and water; and kick IMF, WTO, and World Bank out of town.
The author is way ahead in both his ethics and his intellect in understanding that stupid predatory laws and treaties will not stand the test of time. We are all now moving at Internet speed. He specifies that instead of laws or treaties, what hybrid groups must construct are “a bundle of common understandings, shared expectations, and cooperative norms.” That is precisely what Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Art Kleiner, Harrison Owen, Peggy Holman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Atlee, and Jim Rough, among many others, have been developing for the past three decades. It's called Conscious Evolution. See all those books easily at Phi Beta Iota.
The author backs into systems thinking with a discussion of how local systems in the aggregate comprise a global system that no one regime can control. Normally I would go “duh” but in the context of this book and the other discussion the author provides, that's not the right answer. He's on to a serious approach to the most serious problem we all face, and this book merits a full reading. Of course, one should also reach across Buckminster Fuller, Medard Gabel, Russell Ackoff, and the late John N. Warfield. They wrote the book on how to do this, along with Richard Falk and many others in the 1970's, the difference is that now people are starting to realize they were right and SHOULD have been listened to.
The author deconstructs and reconstructs the three core themes of knowledge (what Earth Intelligence Network calls public intelligence), territoriality, and authority. In all three instances, intelligence and ethics play huge roles. He devotes a chapter to the destabilization of knowledge (not “owned” by anyone), the hybridization (his word, very important) of authority, and the deterritorialization of nature (or recognition of reality 101).
Throughout the book I see clear evidence that the author is current with ecological economics, true cost, cradle to cradle, and the many other green to gold ideas, and what he is bringing into play here is a theory of gaming–of institutionalizing roles that states have ignored, or blending hybrid alliances, etcetera.
I am pressing ahead to the conclusion but see throughout the book a connection between legitimacy and shared knowledge or knowledge agreed to be in common, i.e. valid. This is hugely important and applies to every aspect of water governance. See Max Manwaring's edited work, Environmental Security and Global Stability: Problems and Responses.
In his concluding chapter, alone worth the price of the book and naturally “cutting to the chase,” the author addresses:
01 Acknowledging social conflict associated with environmental issues, rather than papering over it (IPCC) or mis-labeling it as ethnic conflict (India et al)
02 Establishing a global dispute resolution authority. While the International Tribunals are by no means the right model, I can clearly see how a hybrid regional organization that is intelligence (decision-support) driven could allow the UN and others to “Deliver As One” while addressing all ten threats across all twelve policies regardless of who is paying or doing what. INTELLIGENCE IS THE KEY–PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE.
03 Citing Ronnie Lipschutz, he describes an emergent system that sounds to me like Panarchy–everyone has a voice, all of the complexities are brought forward, diversity and respect and dignity are paramount. The Native Americans called this “seventh generation thinking.”
In his concluding two pages he brings up the term “politics by other means” and I find that absolutely fascinating. To me it means a rejection of the two-party or one-party tyranny's that subvert so many countries, and the emergence of participatory budgeting and Open Everything (see my brief by that title at Phi Beta Iota). He diplomatically slams political science for equating regimes, institutiions, and states, and generally calls for a broadening of the governance model to include all humans with access to all information all the time. I'm putting the last bit in, but we are clearly on the same track.
I cannot do this book justice in the time I have. It is a graduate level text that precocious under-graduates could handle, and it is continuing education for under-imaginative policy and political and economic leaders. It could easily be read multiple times, but I will content myself with concluding that this author is one mind that cannot be ignored.
First off, am really starting to pay attention to Right Livelihood, the Alternative Nobel that seems to avoid really big mistakes that have characterized the Nobel Peace Prize in recent decades (Kissinger to Obama). I first learned of this award when Herman Daly, conceptualizer of Ecological Economics, spoke at one of my conferences, and now I am going to look into this and post a listing of recipients at Phi Beta Iota, where all my reviews can be easily exploited across 98 distinct categories, something not possible here at Amazon.
Startling clarity, common sense, and immediate relevance
