Information Society – Page 32 – Public Intelligence Blog

2004/12/182009/12/04

Review: Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public)

Superb book, my choice for gift to colleagues,

December 18, 2004

Robert H Buckman

Every once in a while airport bookstores carry something truly extraordinary. This is such a book. It is so utterly perfect, sensible, readable, and on target that Monday I am buying copies to give to colleagues I know are interested in making more of our global information accessible and actionable.

I am sure this book will alter the perceptions of any management team in any domain. At a larger level of international information sharing, what the Swedes are calling M4 IS (multi-national, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional (or multi-domain) information sharing), this book is the single best and most practical book for turning Industrial era organizations into Information era organizations.

There have been other great books that captured some of these ideas early on, from the popular (Alvin and Heidi Toffler's POWERSHIFT, Paul Strassmann's Information PayOff) to the inspired (Thomas Stewart's Wealth of Knowledge, Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth : A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era), but this is the one that I think absolutely must be read by every flag officer and every colonel aspiring to be a flag officer, and their counterparts across all industries.

Heavily marked up, this book is already a classic. The author is brilliant in an elegant understandable manner in making several key points in an action-oriented implementation-facilitating fashion:

1) Technology is the easy part–changing the culture is the hard part (from information hoarding to information sharing)

2) Command and control stovepipes are a big part of the problem–we have to nurture trust and responsibility in all levels by giving all levels access to all information (within reason).

3) Communications, computers, and library services as well as external business intelligence services all have to be rolled together under one executive that has “direct report” relationship with the CEO–it is the networking of humans and their knowledge that has value, not the hardware and software and hard-wired comms lines

4) If you are not rolling over half your software and hardware each year, with nothing in your C4I system more than two years old at any one time, then you are losing capacity, productivity, and profit

5) 85% of what you know cannot be captured in structured knowledge archives–only a living network can allow employees to provide just enough, just in time articulation of answers that can be created in real time–this allows a *dramatic* shortening of the business information answer cycle, from months to hours.

6) If the CEO does not get it, live it, and enforce it, it will not happen.

The author shares with us practical real-world experience that makes this book a real-world manifestor rather than just a visionary proposal. His practical suggestions lead directly to the possibilities of global issue networks such as J.F. Rischard recommends in his HIGH NOON: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, but this book by Robert Buckman is the real deal, a true “revolution in business affairs.”

We've reached a tipping point. The day this book reached airport bookstores, the world changed. From this point forward, we are either implementing this author's wisdom and gaining value, or not.

2004/12/122009/12/04

Review: The Wisdom of Crowds–Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Turns Concept of “National Intelligence” Right Side Up,

December 12, 2004

James Surowiecki

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Edited 10 Jan 05 to point to Robert Buckman's book, Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization which is the implementation counterpart to this book. Those “stake-holders” whose egos are wrapped up in the hoarding of secrets will not like either of these books but the trends lines are clear: sharing beats hoarding, and collective intelligence of the group beats secret “single expert” intelligence just about every time.

Read this book along with Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Tom Atlee's The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace–and if you wish, my own, The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption This book has seriously altered my view of how to organize national decision-making. While I have been exposed to many great thinkers and authors, and formed my own views based on three decades in the defense-intelligence complex where America spends $70B a year on the 10% of the information it can steal, and next to nothing on polling, subject matter experts, and open sources of information, this book was an eye-opener for me.

I disagree with those reviews that dismiss this as “unscientific” or lacking in rigor. This book tells a very important story that could-that should-alter how we made decisions about very important matters with long-term consequences. While the author appears largely unwitting of the body of literature focused on this matter going back to at least Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and H.G. Wells, his book stands as a very valuable self-contained reference that cannot be ignored.

The author examines three broad situations: coordination, aggregation, and cooperation, and in all three concludes, with sufficient and compelling evidence as well as anecdote, that the best answers are from multiple disparate views that have been normalized. The author is also effective in pointing out that most “experts” rarely agree with one another, or get it right in the first place.

To take the simplest example, guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, the author examines how “experts” or “closest individual guess” get within roughly 20 of the right number, while the crowd of disparate individuals–including biased and illiterate individuals–comes within 2. That is a huge benchmark.

This book is relevant to the application of emerging technologies, for example, application oriented networking systems and intelligent networks where P2P puts most of the knowledge at the edge of the network. What hit me with great force is that P2P and intelligent networks cannot be fully effective without an aggregation capability, a super-sized federated database system that scales infinitely–hence disqualifying all of the so-called relational databases.

I have over 20 notes on how to monetize the information in this book, which I consider to be the single most valuable book I have read in the past couple of years, after Thomas Stewart's “The Wealth of Knowledge.” Here is one simple one as citizen blogs and other information including environmental information begins to come on line: why not create a citizen's digital dashboard for cell phones and hand-held devices, so that the barcode on a device creates a full price analysis–not just price in dollars and cents, but price in terms of the greenness of the maker, hidden costs, the human rights and labor relations record of the maker and the seller, etc. I see the day coming when government cannot fund stupid programs because the people put those corporations that build stupid things into bankruptcy, while the labor union pension funds start using their power to invest only in companies committed to sustainable growth. Far-fetched today–this book, and my own understanding of where information technology is headed in the next five years–made me smile.

This is not a “fad” book. It has a great deal of meat. For the hacker set, this is “SNOWCRASH” all grown up, married with children.

Other books with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

2004/10/212009/12/04

Review: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised–Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything

4 Star, Civil Society, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Media

Great personal story, important national message,

October 21, 2004

Joe Trippi

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Joe Trippi has produced a very fine personal story that clearly presents Trippi, Dean, and the Internet as the people's tool, in the context of “early days.” His big point is in the title: this is about the overthrow of “everything.”

I took off one star for two reasons: his very limited “tie in” to the broad literature on the relationship between the Internet and a *potentially but not necessarily* revitalized democracy; and his relative lack of attention to the enormous obstacles to electronic democracy getting traction, including the corruption of the entire system from schoolhouse to boardroom to White House.

There is a broad data point that Trippi missed that adds great power to his personal appreciation of the future: the inexpensive DoKoMo cell phone and network approach from Japan, when combined with Sony's new playstation that is connected to the Internet and opens up terabytes on online storage to anyone with $300, and to this I would add […]semantic web and synthetic intelligence architectures–these all combine into finally making possible the electronic connectivity of poor and working class voters, not just the declining middle class and the wealthy. 2008 is the earliest that we might see this, but I suspect it won't be until after two more 9-11's, closer to 2012.

There are a number of gems throughout the book, and I will just list a few phrases here:

— politics of concentric circles–find the pebble in every town

— polling substitute's conviction for bullshit (his word)

— citing Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone,” every hour of television watching translates to a 10% drop in civic involvement

— what gets destroyed in scorched earth politics is democracy

— McCain led the way for Dean in using the Internet and being an insurgent (“the Republican branch of the Republican Party”)

— the dirty secret of US politics is that fund-raising (and I would add, gerrymandering) take the election decision out of the hands of voters

— the existing party machines are dinosaurs, focused on control rather than empowerment–like government bureaucracies, they cannot accept nor leverage disruptive innovation (see my review of “The Innovator's Solution”)

— Open Source Rules–boy, do I agree with him here. He describes Dean's campaign as the first really committed “open source” campaign, and this is at the heart of the book (pages 98-99). One reason I have come to believe in open source software, open source intelligence, and open spectrum is that I see all three as essential to the dismantling of the Maginot line of politics, institutional dominance of money and votes on the Hill.

— Media will miss the message. He has bitter words for the media spin and aggression that helped bring Dean down, but his more thoughtful remarks really emphasize the mediocrity of the entertainment media and its inability to think for itself.

— TIRED: transactional politics. WIRED: transformational politics

— Democratic fratricide killed Dean–Gephardt on his own, and Clark with backing from Clinton, killed the insurgency

— Cumulative Intelligence is a term that Trippi uses, and he puts in a strong advertisement for Google's gmail that I found off-putting. Googling on the term “collective intelligence” will get one to the real revolutionaries. When he quotes Google as saying it will “harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers” this reminds me of my own phrase from the early 1990's, one Mike Nelson put in one of Al Gore's speeches, about the need to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth. My point: we don't need Google to get there–collective intelligence is already happening, and Google is a side show.

Tripi's final chapter has “seven rules”: 1) Be first; 2) Keep it moving; 3) Use an authentic voice; 4) Tell the truth; 5) Build a community; 6) Cede control; 7) Believe again.

There are a rather lame few pages at the end on Change for America. Forget it. Change for America is going to be bottom-up, from the county level.

I want to end by noting that at one point, on page 156, I wrote in the margin, “this is a moving book,” but also express my frustration at how unwilling Dean and Trippi were to listening to those of us (Jock Gill, Michael Cudahay, myself), who tried very hard to propose a 24/7 team of retired Marine Corps watchstanders with structured staff processes; a massive outreach to non-Democratic voters including the 20$ of the moderate Republican wing ready to switch. On page 161 Trippi writes “The truth is that we never really fixed the inherent problems in the organization that I saw that first day….” I could not help but write in the margin, “We told them so.”

The problem with Dean and Trippi is they became enchanted with the blogs and the newness of its all–as well as the fund-raising–and lost sight of the fundamentals. The winner in 2008 or 2012 will have to strike a better balance. One other note: the revolution that Trippi talks about is sweeping through Latin America, with active Chinese, Korean, and Japanese interest. It is just possible that electronic populism will triumph in Latin America before public intelligence becomes commonplace in America.

2003/08/222009/12/04

Review: Manufacturing Consent–The Political Economy of the Mass Media

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Information Society, Misinformation & Propaganda

25 Years Ahead of the Crowd–Vital Reading Today,

August 22, 2003

Edward S. Herman

Edit of 22 Dec 07 to add links.

It is quite significant, in my view, that today as I write this Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right is #2 at Amazon, and Sheldon Rapton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraqis #114 at Amazon. Not only are the people awakening to the truth, which is that they have been had through a combination of inattention and manipulation, but these two books and several others in this genre are validating what Chomsky was telling us all in the past 25 years.

The ability to set the agenda and determine what is talked about and how it is talked about is at the root of hidden power in the pseudo-democratic society. Chomsky was decades ahead of his time in studying both the power of language and the power of controlling the media message. Today, as we recall that so-called mainstream news media *refused* fully-funded anti-war advertisements that challenged the White House lies (62 of which have been documented with full sourcing in various blogs, notably Stephen Perry's Bush at War blog), we must come to grips with the fact that America is at risk.

Thomas Jefferson said “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry” and Supreme Court Justice Branstein said “The greatest threat to liberty is an inert public.” Today we lack the first and have the second, but as Amazon rankings show, the people, they are awakening. It is through reading, and following the links, and informed discussion, that the people can come together, using new tools for peer-to-peer information sharing and MeetUp's, and take back the power.

Chomsky had it right. It took 25 years for all of us to realize he had it right. I rise in praise of this great man.

Other links that validate his ethics and intellect:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit
Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
Al On America

2003/08/192009/12/04

Review: Pattern Recognition

4 Star, Information Society

Mixed–Some Gems, Some Meat, Lots of White Space,

August 19, 2003

William Gibson

This book has *huge* amounts of white space, and although it came to me highly recommended, over the course of reading every word I rated it at three stars–not nearly as interesting as, to take one book I especially liked, SNOWCRASH.However, I have raised it to 4 stars because of the gems, such as the loss of the future on page 57, good description of digital watermarking, the enormous distrust of false advertising and false impressions leading to false relations (p 85), the final denouncement of the loss of time and human intimary (p. 302-303), and–overall–the portrayal of web-life, the sympathetic portrayal of Usenet-type groups and their members, the idea of cool ideas and “cool hunter”, and the overall representation of mobile information and its vulnerabilities to interception.

Having said all that, I found this to be very light reading, half the text a book of this sort might have warranted, and on balance, disappointing.

2003/07/232009/12/04

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

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

Not Pedestrian at All–Packed with Insights,

July 10, 2003

Regis McKenna

Edit of 22 Dec 07 to add links.

Below is my review as planned before reading all the negative reviews….everyone brings their own baggage to any book. Following this short review, which was originally written for national intelligence professionals, I have added an addendum with a specific experience in France that illustrates why this book is valuable to anyone willing to take the time to reflect on its fundamentals.

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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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ADDENDUM: In coming to post the above review I noted a number of negative reviews along the lines of “so 1970's”, “no new ideas”, etc. Naturally any book is going to strike people with different levels of intelligence and experience differently. Our advice to intelligence professionals and managers at any level is to dismiss those other opinions, spend $20 and 1-2 hours with this book, and judge for yourself. Among many reasons why we found this book meaningful, given our focus on global coverage, weak signals, and being effective in 29+ languages, is the following experience:

In 1994, attending the French national conference on information, we heard one of the leaders of the French steel industry discussing a multi-million dollar business intelligence endeavor (in France this includes business espionage and government espionage in support of business) against steel industries around the world. The punch line, however, was stunning. At the end of it all, he said, they failed because they focused only on the steel industry. In the end, the plastics industry ate their lunch because it was able to develop very good plastic substitutes for automobile parts, including automobile under-carriage parts, and this hurt the French steel industry badly. It was from this occasion that we crafted Rule 003 (Book 2, Chapter 15) on the importance of Global Coverage, whose sub-title could be “cast a wide net.” McKenna has the basics right.

Fast forward to:
The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

2003/07/092012/10/27

2003 Information Peacekeeping & The Future of Intelligence: The United Nations, Smart Mobs, and the Seven Tribes

Articles & Chapters, Civil Affairs, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Chapter 13: “Information Peacekeeping & the Future of Intelligence: The United Nations, Smart Mobs, and the Seven Tribes” pp. 201-225