Category: Information Operations

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Review: Real Time–Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars–This is a Very Deep Pool,

April 8, 2000
Regis McKenna

This may be one of the top three books I've read in the last couple of years. It is simply packed with insights that are applicable to both the classified intelligence community as well as the larger national information community. The following is a tiny taste from this very deep pool: “Instead of fruitlessly trying to predict the future course of a competitive or market trend, customer behavior or demand, managers should be trying to find and deploy all the tools that will enable them, in some sense, to be ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-ready in the brave new marketplace in gestation, where information and knowledge are ceaselessly exchanged.”

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Review: Information Productivity–Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporations

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Information Operations, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Report Card for CIOs: D- InfoTech is NOT Profit-Maker,

April 8, 2000
Paul A. Strassmann
Paul documents the fact that “a very large share of U.S. industrial firms are not productive in terms that apply to the information age.” He evaluates and ranks 1,586 firms, and the results are both surprising and valuable.
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Review: Information Space

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Vital, and On Target Evaluation of InfoSpace,

April 8, 2000
Max Boisot
Together with Edward Wilson's Consilience this is the most structured and focused book in this section, and has real applicability as to how one might organize a truly national (that is to say, not just spy) intelligence community. Written from a transatlantic perspective, integrating the best of American and European thinking in his references, the author addresses the nature of information, its structuring, the dynamics of sharing information, learning cycles, institutional and cultural contexts, and ends with this thought: that we have spent close to a century “de-skilling” the population to suit assembly line needs and now must spend close to a century “re-skilling” the population to deal with complex information tasks where every action and reaction will be unique.
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Review: Cuckoo’s Egg

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Communications, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Information Operations, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, Relevant Now, Deep Insights,

April 7, 2000
Clifford Stoll
This is an absolutely riveting story of how a brilliant physicist, assigned as an initiation rite to track down the reason for a 75 cent error in the computer accounts of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, ultimately identified and nailed an East German electronic espionage specialist. In passing, he outlines with great preciseness the insecurity of the entire U.S. government, military, law enforcement, business, and academic electronic communications and computing network, and reveals the total fragmentation as well as the general ignorance of almost all of the US and international organizations associated with these networks.
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Review: The Second Self–Computers and the Human Spirit

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5.0 out of 5 stars Priceless Early Look at Hackers with “The Right Stuff”,

April 7, 2000
Sherry Turkle
This is “the” book that described the true origin of “hacking” as in “pushing the edge of the envelope” by writing a complex program in six lines of code instead of ten. This is a really superior piece of work about computer cultures and the people that belong to them. It is a wonderfully readable book with magnificent insights into the psychology of the young people at the bleeding edge of the computer frontier.

Update of 31 May 08 to add links:
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)
The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

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Review: Consilience–the Unity of Knowledge

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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5.0 out of 5 stars Creating World Brain and the Virtual Intelligence Community
April 7, 2000
E. O. Wilson
EDITED 9 July 2007 to add comment and links to other books.

Comment: This is still one of the best books for someone who wants to think deeply about knowledge. Below are links to some others I recommend.

Our answer to Levy, but an order of magnitude more practical and steeped in some of the best endnotes I've ever enjoyed. Consilience is the “jumping together” of knowledge across boundaries, and the greatest enterprise of the mind. He begins with an example, showing how biology, ethics, social science, and environmental policy must all come together to properly resolve a global environmental issue, but actually do not-the learned individuals are fragmented into four separate communities, and within those communities further fragmented into nationalities and cliques and jobs, and it is our greater loss for we cannot arrive at the best policy without being able to integrate the knowledge across all these boundaries. He emphasizes that the public must be educated and have access to this unified knowledge, not just the policymakers. He poses, and then answers across the book, this question: “What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important to human welfare?” In my own mind, Edward O. Wilson has defined both national and global intelligence writ large, and done so in way that suggests the “virtual intelligence community” is a very practical and achievable vision.

The Future of Life
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Age of Missing Information
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporations

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