Information Society – Page 27 – Public Intelligence Blog

2007/05/302009/12/04

Review: Blessed Unrest–How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

5 Star, Democracy, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Pleasantly Brief for a Magnum Opus–Opens the Door to the Future, May 30, 2007

Paul Hawken

Edit of 16 Apr 08 to add five more links.

I ordered this book last December after hearing Paul Hawkin brief on the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), and before receiving the book, heard him speak again in Seattle on how governments and corporations are stealing the future (our challenge) while the Internet and WISER specifically are bringing all of together to put down the destructive minorities–he called this the Earth's immune system, and has a chapter in the book about it.

This book could have been a 750-page “big book” but the author has made it blessedly concise. You can join WISER and see everything else there.

He tells us that Lincoln was the first President to sign legislation to protect nature, and Theodore Roosevelt the first to create a wildlife preserve.

He puts the creationists down while providing a marvelous review of the path from Emerson to Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King. Truly a wonderful tour of the horizons of our pioneers for good intentions and respect for nature.

He directly connects environmental advocacy with advocacy for social justice.

He considers the 1990's rather than the 1970's to have been our age of awakening, and points out that today we have 1000 times more people than 7,000 years ago, and each person is using 100 to 1000 times more energy than their ancestors.

He teaches us that the Luddites have been terribly mis-represented; that they were not against technology, but rather in favor of full employment and dignity for every person. Lionel Tiger, in Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, makes the large case against the industrial era for destroying kinship, trust, and human dignity, See my list on transpartisan books for the healing works.

He does not repeat anything from Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution or The Ecology of Commerce. This is a completely new work, and one could call it a “call to action” for all of us, as well as directions for joining the largest movement on the planet, all for one and one for all (WISER).

We learn that Rockefeller treated renewable energy as a competitor and was ruthless against it. I still cannot comprehend why the CEO of Exxon is oblivious to the value of going green with all his ill-gotten profits from the past few years of insanity. Exxon is portrayed in this book as the greatest of all miscreants, spending tens of millions each year to bury the truth and spawn lies. I know for a fact that the CEO of Exxon is aware of all the knowledge available to him, and has chosen to isolate himself from reality and stick to the traditions of the past. He will go down with his ship when we all start boycotting Exxon as I have begun to do.

The very few repeated themes from past works focus on how business had always created value but never been held accountable for the true cost of what they produce, since they are so clever as well as duplicitous in legalizing the externalization of most of their costs (not talking small business here, just the 10% mega-business element that scorns humanity).

The author calls for third party objective science that is neither politicized nor fanaticized by religious zealots. I agree, and my several books tell us how to do this, I will mention only two: The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption and THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest.

The author discusses the direct relationship between climate change and poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, the top three high-level threats that the secret intelligence community refuses to focus on.

The author contributes to the growing literature on how the USA has been an aggressor Nation, and in the case of Mexico, specifically provoked the war that led to the Treaty of Guadalupe–Mexico has fought back asymmetrically ever since, and it can be safely said that they have taken back their lost land while multiple Administrations have condoned illegal immigration.

We learn that Rosa Parks was trained in civil disobedience prior to her momentous stand. We are reminded by the author that Thoreau said that if just one man withdraws his support from an unjust government, it is the beginning of a cycle that will grow.

The author gives us an absolutely superb chapter on the deep knowledge of indigenous peoples, and one can but weep at the genocide, not just of peoples, as I had understood it up to know, but of hundreds of years of acquired knowledge about how to live within nature. He points out that languages, like species, are disappearing, and every lost language, like every lost species, sharply reduces our access to useful knowledge.

I could go on, but the book is a real gem, and merits a complete and careful reading. The author ends with four time frames, the timeframes of commerce, of culture, of governance, and of nature, and tells us about blessed unrest as the Nation's immune system. If Silent Spring was the first call to action, this book is not just a renewed call to action, but a roadmap as well.

A 112 page annex on Wiser Earth is essential supporting documentation.

2007/04/212009/12/04

Review: A Crowd of One–The Future of Individual Identity

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Democracy, Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Major leap forward in understanding humanity and its future,

April 21, 2007

John Clippinger

As a long-time admirer of Kuhn's concepts on paradigms and how they shift (“The Structure of Scientific Revolution” I really appreciate any thought leader that puts us on the cusp of such a shift. John Henry Clippinger is there.

I will begin with his conclusion: we are in the process of a “Big Bang” in human identity that shifts us away from organizations and nationalities and races and religions, and toward the realization that we are all “one” in terms of fractional variations of the same DNA, and hence, the world is going to start to revolve around the human end-users, not the organizations that turned them into slaves, amoral components of the industrial system, or mindless fundamentalists party to intolerant religions. For a sense of how the industrial era introduced evil by killing the role of kinship in trust, see Lionel Tiger's “The Manufacture of Evil.”

In my view, this is one of three really great books on the coming revolution in human organization. The other two are Max Manwaring's “The Search for Security” and Philip Alott's “The Health of Nations.” As Alott says, we took a wrong turn at the Treaty of Westphalia, and the world is long over-due for a return to localized kinship and global responsibility.

Those who favor the transpartisan transformational model of earnest and honest elections and engaged citizenry must read this book. The author opens with a long discussion of why it is relationships that matter, not transactions. Indeed, I am reminded of Margaret Wheatley and Esther Dyson–make the connections, don't worry about critical mass.

I learn the term “social physics” for the first time, and read again about reciprocity (Tom Atlee taught me about reciprocal altruism). The author disputes the idea that violence is a given, and joins Jonathan Schell (“The Unconquerable World”) is stating that force is no longer a means by which to gain one's will.

The middle of the book discusses both the threat of technical progress when combined with more failed states, and the promise of digital modeling for accelerating our understanding and testing new paths forward. The author points out that we have no more than 20 years, having wasted the last six, with 2000-2025 being the tipping point period during which we can either go toward stable convergence or hyper-instability and cascading catastrophe.

Brilliant quotes on how the military must shift to soft preventive and remedial measures (General Al Gray, USMC and I called this “peaceful preventive measures in 1988), and how “Brute force is about to be rendered obsolete” at the state level (while flourishing at the gang level).

The author relates his thinking to terrorism in a very useful way, conceptualizing terrorism as a form of non-state parasite eating away at its host, and able to be more entrepreneurial than its bureaucratic adversaries, constantly changing the rules of engagement and winning the key terrain of the minds of the population, using perception in lieu of truth.

The heart of the book is on page 39: “But rather than being treated as peripheral to a primary military mission, well-articulated warfare doctrine and practices for the information, cognitive, and social domains could significantly reduce the need for more traditional methods of influence and control.” Robert Garigue, RIP addresses this in his technical preface to my third book, “Information Operations,” and I am writing my fifth book on how digital natives, serious games, and the way of the wiki are making our military obsolete and unaffordable.

The author attributes the US failure in Somalia (and one would add, Afghanistan and Iraq) to a complete lack of local knowledge and particularly knowledge about language, kinship, and the role of religion.

Key quote on page 44: “It would appear that the Americans and the Israelis are virtually alone in the world in not realizing that the rules and weapons of war have changed.”

The book draws to a conclusion with lengthy discussions of how the complexity of social networks both define the size of one's brain, and the potential success and prosperity of the collective. Language is described as “social grooming” (hence one must be concerned when fundamentalists and extremists hijack the language). The author cites Shakespeare in suggesting that the inability to comprehend complex social networks is at the root of many misunderstandings and attendant tragedies. My first book, “On Intelligence” points out how the US Intelligence Community, a $60 billion a year endeavor, is utterly incompetent at understanding ideas, minds, individual, groups, clans, gangs, and tribes. They are optimized for counting THINGS.

Notable observation that tracks with Michael O'Hanlon's research: when women are in charge, collaboration flourishes.

Long discussion of trust and reputation, listing and discussion of seven types of leadership: authoritarian, exemplary, visionary, gatekeeper, truth teller, fixer, connector, and energizer.

Fairness is the balance point of society.

Cites Michael Vlahos, one of my personal intellectual heroes, on how the radical Islamic movement is a study in the failure of group identity and the failure of the group's “story” to adapt and prosper.

Lists and discusses Cameron's seven laws for digital trusted identity (OSS automatically destroys all digitally signed messages that demand registration before one can respond–that stupid technology is NOT part of the answer).

Engagement, not isolation. The books ends quite properly with praise for STRONG ANGEL, pioneered by Eric Rasmussen and Dave Warner, and suggests that the end game is going to be when we can engage everyone, in their own language, in their own identity terms, in the greatest story YET to be told, that of creating heaven on earth.

I totally respect this book. It is a KEY building block for moving forward with an Open Source Agency and a global free online public education as public diplomacy endeavor. It validates my view that we need a reality based Earth Game with embedded reality-based budgets, immediately. See Medard Gabel, whom I hope will develop such a game.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Global Inc.: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation
Energy, Earth, and Everyone
Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening … consultant.: An article from: The Futurist

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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: The Google Story–Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

4 Star, Information Society, Information Technology

Useful Insights, Not the Whole Story,

March 2, 2007

David A. Vise

EDIT 10 Dec 07 to point to “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator.” Costs $675 for an online copy, causes panic behind the scenes on Wall Street. Google for my review book review by the same title.

This book is as close to the “authorized biography” as one can get. Engineers and investors and competitors should go instead to “The Google Legacy” by Stephen E. Arnold, sold only by Infonortics UK (online). End users and third party developers are better off with any of the 50+ other books that focus on penetration testing, analytics, Google Earth, etcetera.

The book purports to be a revelation of secrets, but that is simply not true. This is a compilation of what anyone could have put together from enough coffee house conversations.

What jumps out at me is Google's potentially crippling addiction to advertising revenue, its failure to offer sense-making and visualization, and its extraordinary good luck in being able to draw the best talent from NASA, Microsoft, Bell Labs, etc.

I am impressed by what Google is doing in becoming a multi-lingual service, and eager to see when they can start offering multi-lingual search with translation on demand for micro-cash.

There is no denying the brilliance of the founders in using links as a form of citation analysis, but as anyone who has compared the results from a professional set of sites via Deep Web Technologies, with a Google search, the former is 10 to 1000 times better on any given serious topic.

The book is useful for insights into the founders, and especially Larry Page. One learns of his interest in transportation analytics, and in molecular biology and genetics.

I was surprised to learn that Jeff Bezos helped the founders in the beginning, but now I have the impression that Google does not play well with others, even those that helped them get started, and that is a shame.

“The Google Legacy” does a much better job on the technical strengths of Google (see also the briefing by Stephen E. Arnold in the Archives at OSS.Net), but this books does note the strength of Google in combining software innovation with scalable economic hardware.

Anecdotes include how Google Doodles emerged, the early use of focus groups, and the hiring of a brain surgeon to be the network manager. There is adequate mention of the 20% free play rule, but insufficient discussion what has emerged from that.

On page 143 the author, no doubt misled by whoever he interviewed, claims that “CIA agents use Google to track terrorist groups.” Baloney. Google has a “secret” relationship with CIA (the Office of Research & Development), and a test was done that produced a handful of “hits” all of which were worthless and most of which were severely dated.

Gmail foundered on privacy issues, as did Google's desktop search. The author is incorrect when he says that Google has added sufficient security. The fact is that the US Government is still finding restricted documents leaking out whenever they install Google Enterprise. I for one would never trust Google on my small business machines.

The author describes the division of responsibility among the founders and the CEO: Eric is operations and finance; Serge is policy, politics, and people; Larry is hiring, priorities, and physical space.

While the author describes the Google digital library projects, he fails to satisfy. .

Google's idea for satisfying publishers by using the content only to entice the reader to buy the book is either idiocy, or a subterfuge. Presumably Google knows that synthetic information is free of copyright, but they seem loath to take the easy step of offering footnotes or micro-text extracts for micro-cash. In this regard, they really should be merging with Amazon and the Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle) to create a world library that can be translated into all languages on demand, given for free to the five billion poor, and monetized by using Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS).

The book ends with a few pages of “tips” on how to use Google that are nowhere as good as Nancy Blachman et all “How to Do Everything with Google,” or Arno Reuser's briefing at OSS.Net on the open source intelligence system of the future.

I end the book with a small diagram that is NOT in the book, it is my own intellectual property, but it is a useful means of evaluating why Google is not as good as it could be. On a compass, SEARCH is West; SENSE-MAKING is North, SHARE is East, and Saving the World is SOUTH. Google sucks at three of the four, and that may be their epitaph.

I asked a very smart person why Google does not play well with others and is so slow to reach out (see the two images I have loaded to the book on Wikinomics) and he had a direct answer based on direct experience with the founders: “Young guys who made their first 100 million on their own ideas are not really interested in ‘not invented here.'” That's a real shame. If Google were to focus on rapidly offering the eighteen desktop functions that were defined by CIA in 1986 (CATALYST, see OSS.Net), using Drupal 5.0 as the foundation, in close alliance with STRONG ANGEL, not only could we bury Microsoft and ORACLE, but we could save the world in the time allowed, which is to say, in the next fifteen years.

Larry Brilliant (Director of Google.org) points out that pandemics have killed over 20 popes, kings, queens, and prime ministers. Google has the opposite problem–it's not willing to gain control of the planet by giving up control of the hub. I know for a fact that India is thinking about how to displace Google (even if their chief R&D guy is there–who knows, he may have gone native again), and I am earnestly dismayed that Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and Amazon as well as IBM, CISCO, and Yahoo cannot get together with an anti-trust waiver similar to what was granted to the MCC with Bobby Inman and Doug Lenat. Time is a'wasting and time is the one thing we cannot replace nor buy.

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2007/01/302009/12/04

Review: Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures)

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Essential Contribution to Democratic Dialog,

January 30, 2007

Cass R. Sunstein

It took me a couple of years to get to this book, but I am glad I did. Interestingly, it is dedicated to Judge Richard Posner, who has become quite a celebrity in writing and talking, from a legal point of view, about secret intelligence, in addition to his many other works.

The author's position is not completely new (see for instance Elizabeth Janeway's 1987 classic, “IMPROPER BEHAVIOR: When and How Misconduct Can be Healthy for Society”, and the more standard but still seminal “The Social Construction of Reality.”

The author rises beyond the law to embrace sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and in that vein, reminds me of Norman Dixon's classic work, “The Psychology of Military Incompetence.”

The core of the book addresses what the author names the two influences (most people get most of their information second-hand; and the general desire for good opinion of oneself) and the three phenomena (conformity, social cascades, and group polarization).

He notes that pluralistic ignorance is dangerous; that groups and systems work better when there are incentives for sharing information openly; and that “free speech” requires BOTH legal protection AND cultural acceptance.

He discusses the superiority of the more adaptive and open democratic decision making to that of totalitarian societies, but his description of their pathologies, ideas hatched in secret and for which no opposition will be accepted, sound starkly like Dick Cheney's Standard Operating Procedure–facsist control, lies to the public with impunity, and no tolerance for flag officers, including flag officers like Tony Zinni and General Shinseki, who have the courage to say that invading Iraq is not only nuts, it will be a disaster. For deep insights into Cheney's impeachable suprression of dissent, see “One Percent Doctrine,' “VICE: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency,” and “Crossing the Rubicon”–and of course the various books on impeachment (see my list).

The author concludes with a special focus on the role of Judges and Senators as dissenting voices, and I am reminded of Senator Robert Byrd's courageous and erudite opposition to the illegal war on Iraq, with his speeches available to all in book form as “Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency”).

The author concludes with a very disappointing section on education and affirmative action, and in this section, spoils an otherwise superb book by focusing on the banalities of affirmative action. Like George Bush and Hillary Clinton, he is toying with the cosmetics and avoiding the deep–the really deep–need for a complete recasting of education to fully integrate distance and self-paced online learning, multi-cultural learning, deep historical and cross-cultural understanding; a draconian Manhattan Project to improve desktop analytic tools and the need for an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) such as Pierre Levy is creating (see his “Collective Intelligence”), as well as life-long learning, the localization of everything, and so on. I beg to emphasize this: it is the agricultural era school schedule (summer off) and the industrial era rote learning rigid structured program, that is killing the creativity of our kids while locking them up in a program that is nothing more than advanced child care with a semblance of prison population, the “club med” aspects for cheerleaders and jocks not-with-standing. Our HIGHEST national priority should be to churn education so that our kids are liberally and broadly educated and armed with all of the tools for thinking that the Central Intelligence Agency still does not have today because it too is a vestige of the Soviet era of gray desks and dumb telephones.

Thomas Jefferson had it right: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” Cass Sunstein is arguably, with Lawrence Lessig, one of the greatest lawyers of our generation, but in the final section, he plops quietly.

Never-the-less, a five star book.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Society, Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

People are the new super power–local resilience, global community,

January 28, 2007

David C Korten

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is unquestionably a five-star work of reflection, integration, and focused moral intent. On the other hand, while it introduced a broad “earth-friendly” literature that I was *not* familiar with, it does not “see” a much broader literature that I have absorbed, and so I want to do two things with this review: feature the highlights from this book, and list a number of other works that support and expand on the author's reflections for the greater good of us all.

Early highlights include the continued relevance of Dennis Kucinich and the emerging value of the Case Foundation and Revolution Health as funded by Steve Case, founder of AOL. The author posits early on the choice we have been a great unraveling and a great turning. He describes all our institutions as failing at the same time that we have unlimited potential. He concludes, as have many others, that centralized authority is not working, and suggests that we must confront that which does not work and devise new constructive alternatives (“for every no there must be a yes”).

In the middle of the book he describes the five levels of consciousness as magical, imperial, socialized, cultural, and spirirtual. I would have put socialized ahead of imperial, since the industrial era used schools to socialize us into both factory workers and conscripts for the armed forces. He concludes this section with a commentary on moral autism, which of course reminds us of nakedly amoral Dick Cheney.

The author moves toward a conclusion by pointing out that people are the new super-power, with the Internet and its many new features as the foundation for bringing people together and making people power effective.

A large portion of the middle section is a historical review of America, with its genocidal, slavery, and unilateral militant interventionist nature, and its extreme inequality now, which the literature on revolution clearly identifies (the latter, concentration of wealth) as a precurser to almost inevitable violent revolution).

The book ends with four strategic elements:

1) Awakening of cultural and spiritual consciousness
2) Resistance of the imperial empire's assault on children, families, communities, and nature
3) Form and connect communities of convergence
4) Build a majoritarian political base.

In parting notes he points out that the status of our children is the key indicator of our future, and that today one out of every two children is born into and lives into poverty (one reason why the High Level Threat Panel put poverty above infectuous disease and environmental degradation).

He ends by calling for local living economies at a human scale.

If you have the time to only read one book within the broad literatures of imagination, corporateism, and constructive prospects for the planet, this is probably that book. Below I want to a list quite a few that support this author's thesis, and for which I have provided a summative as well as an evaluative review within these Amazon pages:

The Corporation
WALMART-HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (DVD/FF/FR-SP-SUB)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

See also:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
“The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past”
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Deep Economy

There are many more should you wish to explore via my categorized lists, but the above both lend great credence to the author of this single book, and expand considerably on the reflections that he has distilled into this one book.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: One from Many–VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public)

Innovative Capitalism,

January 28, 2007

Dee Hock

Edit of 30 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New comment: something big is happening, in both politics and business. Moral green open transparent memes are in overdrive. See links.

I read a lot, a solace and a life line out of the madness of today. I finished up my week-end with this most unusual gem, and it is with some emotion that I put it down and take the time to write this review.

In my lifetime, there have been fewer than four individuals able to understand me and manage me, and Dee Hock now joins that number, sight unseen. This is one of the *good guys*! If he and Bill Bradley and Jim Turner (Transpartisanship) can come together, we can remake the world.

The book benefits from a Foreword by Peter Senge, who notes that VISA as it emerged was a disruptive concept that threatened traditional powers. Senge also notes the importance of distinguishing between enabling technologies, such as the Internet, and what is enabled, such as democracy or equitable wealth creation and sharing. Finally, Senge observes that global complexity requires distributed democracy, to which I and the author would both be quick to add: “and moral capitalism.”

The book is at root about the failure of all of our instititutions, and the need to find a third way between over-bearing centralization and anarchic decentralization. The author coins the word “chaordic” to deswcribe an even-handed and often-changing balance between the two.

Dee Hock is a philosopher-king, and I am reminded of “Voltaire's Bastards” and “Consilience” as I read his denouncement of the Western concept of separability and his own understanding that complexity is about never-ending and alway-changing relationships. In one example with the US Army, he explores how rules-based organizations waste 45-85% of the time and value of their employees. He specifically notes that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource and is abundant, but too often constrained if not crushed by schools, armies, corporations, and so on.

The author's morality shines forth as he describes non-monetary exchanges of value as the best possible foundation for what others call reciprocal altruism. At one point he observes that “leadership is not necessarily constructive, ethical, or open.”

The entire book is about the creation of an organization in which participation is the primal element, agreement is dynamic, and trust and tolerance are the prevailing values. He states that organizational heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgotory is paper and procedure. Hell is rule & regulation.

He realizes early on that fraud and theft are major challenges, and that information is, as he quotes Gregory Bateson, “a difference that makes a difference.”

I have a big note: this is a smart, ethical, practical, inspiring person–one of the good guys!

The author is deeply and empathetically aware of the discord between our industrial era understandings and perceptions, and the bio-cultural realities of the Earth and all its processes. He sees clearly what the “true cost” or natural capitalism literature seeks to teach.

A line jumps out, in which the author is lamenting that we have such a wealth of information, yet have drifted into “collective madness.”

He clearly sees that our current form of predatory immoral “bandit” capitalism specializes at the socialization of cost and the capitalization of gain, which is fancy wording for looting the commons and stealing the profit. He also points out that we are putting the debt on to future generations.

He clearly describes the current form of corporations as inimical to the commons.

The book concludes strongly, lionizing the will to succeed when joined with the grace to compromise, placing VISA on a par with the Internet and LINUX as an organizational model for the future, and noting that growth comes from failure.

On page 284 he lists the following ten attributes from a living organization in Spain that represents the best of the chaordic model:

01 Open membership
02 Democratic organization
03 Worker sovereignty
04 Instrumental subordinate nature of capital
05 Participation in management
06 Wage solidarity
07 Cooperating between cooperatives
08 Social transformation
09 Universal nature
10 Education (he might have added, life-long, unconstrained, free of the prison-rote we now suffer, and teaching sharing as well as learning)

He ends with the story of his recall from his wanderings in the wilderness, to explore examples, models, the intellectual foundation, and organizations by which we might save the Planet and our species, to include the necessary means of mind-crafting for the future.

I actually had goose-bumps as I put this book down. I felt, very strongly, that I had been within the aura of a great leader, a gentle person, a world-class humanitarian, a capitalist Dalai Lama if you will (don't laugh–this author strikes me as quite amazingly special).

I cannot say enough about this book. It joins the very short list of books I have posted on moral leadership through open source intelligence, and it places Dee Hock up there with Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Wheatley, Robert Buckman, and a tiny handful of Senge's and Druckers.

I hope I meet him one day. Right now, he joins Bill Bradley as one of just two people I'd be willing to leave my mink-lined bunker to follow into battle. This book and this author's mind and clarity of communication have simply blown me away.

See the two images I have loaded here to illustrate concepts that I share with this author. You can see other images at Earth Intelligence Network, where you can also use the Amazon Base Page to get access to my 30 lists of books for each of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. I am also creating Amazon discussion pages for each of these.

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2007/01/272015/01/05

Review: The Change Handbook–The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Democracy, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Philosophy, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Utterly Phenomenal: *The* Book for Living Life to the Fullest,

January 27, 2007

Peggy Holman

EDIT of 9 Feb 09 to add links (capability not available at the time) and to commit to attending NEXUS II in Bowling Green, OH 30 Mar – 1 Apr 08.

I could spend the rest of my life trying to learn, use, and share each of the methods in this book, and never finish. When it was first published in 1999, it was before its time. Now, in 2006, this is a book made for our times, when Burning Man is now Green Man, Al Gore is a rock star, and even the greediest Wall Street CEO is starting to realize the party is over and we have to get real, real fast.

I have been an admirer of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) and a champion of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and have gradually learned about other “opens” that are coming to the fore: Open Spectrum, Open Access, Open Culture, Open Innovation, and of course George Soros' Open Society. From this book I now add Open Circle, to complement the Open Space concept I learned recently in Seattle's Town Hall while listening to Paul Hawken talk about the World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility.

I have to confess that this book is over-whelming, and I can barely scratch the surface. This is more of a book where you should read one author, one segment, each night, and fall asleep thinking about how to implement that one small section, how to embrace someone else and engage them with that one method.

Having three teen-agers, all three of whom have completely rejected the prison/child care format and the rote learning objectives of the current school system (even as good as it is in Fairfax County) I will go so far as to say that this book, combined with serious games/games for change, is a complete one-to-one substitute for our current educational process.

Everything in here is what we *should* have learned in school, what we *should* be practicing in fulfilling our civic duty (what we *actually* do is described in “The Cheating Culture,” “Confessional of an Economic Hit-Man,” and “Rogue Nation”).

I am moving quickly and heavily into the intersection of Collective Intelligence (see my reviews of “The Tao of Democracy,” “Smart Mobs,” “Wisdom of the Crowds,” or my longer list; and Natural Capitalism with its “true cost” meme. See my reviews of Paul Hawken et al, “Ecology of Commerce” and “Natural Capitalism,” of the varied books by Herman Daly, and soon, my reviews of “The Great Turning,” the “Omnivore's Dilemma,” and others. For a broader sense of the possibilities, check out “Earth Intelligence Network” online.

I still have the 1970's operating manual for spaceship earth someplace in my lower library. This book is the manual for spaceship earth for our children and those of us recommiting ourselves to the joy of learning and changing in our later years. It's not over until *we* decide its over.

See these other books that have also inspired me and given me hope:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
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
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen
Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy

My lists are also a fast path to collections covering the ten threats, twelve policies, eight challengers, and various other aspects of saving humanity and the Earth from outselves.

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