Category: Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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Review: Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Thorugh the Greatest Financial Crisis in Human History

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Webster Tarpley
Webster Tarpley

Three for Lacking an Index, Beyond Five Stars for Content

July 25, 2009

Webster Griffin Tarpley

This extraordinary work, first developed in the mid-1990's and updated recently for a second edition, would normally receive 3 stars from me for lacking an index. I know the author and I admire Progressive Press, but to put out a book of this quality in terms of content, without taking the week needed to create an index, is to me as a professional utterly unforgivable. I urge the publisher to create an index online and modify the description here at Amazon to alert readers to the availability of an index. Without an index for looking up Greenspan, Rubin, Goldman Sachs, or Morgan Stanley, this book loses half its value.

OK, that's the end of the rant. The content of this book–given that it was written a decade before Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) was bribed by lobbyists to put 200 pages of deregulation into a bill five minutes before it was to be voted on (and all Senators voted knowing this)–is beyond five stars. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that many, not just this author, have been putting before the public without effect since at least the 1970's.

At $26 this book is a gift and I urge one and all to buy it as both an education and as a keepsake. The author, whose books on Bush, on Obama, and on 9-11 I have found to be superbly researched and ably presented, is one of the modern greats in historical fact-finding and investigative history.

Up front he lays out a five point program for overcoming the world depression, and I am pretty sure that the Goldman Sachs executive now in charge of the US Treasury has absolutely zero interest in this public intelligence. The plan:

1. Measures for re-regulation, nationalization, neutralization of fictitious capital, combating speculation, plus bankruptcy procedures and the preservations of labor, plan, and equipment. This includes the deletion of toxic derivatives (rather than the criminal lunacy of buying them at public expense) and an end to adjustable rate mortgages and foreclosures (I called for this in October 2008 to no avail, see my own book, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)

2. Nationalize the Federal Reserve System and re-start lending and the credit system generally. [I stand with Ron Paul in calling for its elimination after an interim period of public control, I am certain the audit that is being planned will reveal high crimes and misdemeanors such that I would keep Guantanamo open just to hold the Fed and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and City-Bank executives, among others, until we reclaim their stolen wealth from the public. The author includes here zero interest loans for real physical production and construction.

3. Restart borrowing for production with a vast program of infrastructure development and science drivers for the modernization and recovery of the economy.

4. Emergency relief for the victims of the depression. I would note with Ron Paul that inflation is a tax, and stand with Thom Hartmann, whose book Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class – And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents (Paperback)) complements The Working Poor: Invisible in America and The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back. The hard-working normal average people have been ABUSED by Goldman Sachs specifically and Wall Street and the Fed generally. ENOUGH!

5. International economics and a new world monetary system. The author does not delve into Open Money or what Yochai Benkler calls The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Alvin Toffler Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives or first one to notice, Barry Carter, Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era but now is certainly the time to move forward with no logo, buy local, end of absentee ownership of land, end of corporate personality protection not intended, and so on.

The author itemizes $12.8 trillion in gift money from the taxpayer to the bankers at our expense, and this is a debt that I hope we not only renounce, but follow up with a confiscation of the overseas accounts where all of our money has been converted into foreign currencies so that the bankers can literally double their money–I am not making this up–when Obama declared a bank holiday and federalizes the police in late August or early September, and the US dollar devalues to half its current value (which is in turn half its value in the early 1970's).

Most of us do not need to read this book in its entirety, especially those of us on heart medication. This is a thoughtful balanced book that will make any intelligent person with integrity ANGRY. America remains a great Nation in its people and its land, but its leadership is criminally corrupt and has committed treason against the public since at least 1974 when Peak Oil was first briefed to the Senate and Exxon/Esso and the banks persuaded the U.S. Government's political leadership to ignore the research and carry on with Empire as Usual.

The re-issuance of this book validates and vindicates the author's research and integrity, and I for one, as the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, am more than pleased to stand alongside Webster Tarpley, pledging my sacred honor to the Republic–the sovereign people of American who created the federal government as a SERVICE. The federal government is NOT in charge, Goldman Sachs and the Fed are. It's time for a non-violent revolution, and I believe that books like this need to be in circulation among the two thirds of the eligible voters planning to kick the two-party tyranny out of office in 2010.

Webster Tarpley is an American hero in the tradition of Paul Revere.

See also:
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

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2009 The Ultimate Hack: Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer the World (Faculty of Advanced Engineering University of British Columbia March 2009)

Briefings & Lectures, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Leadership
The Ultimate Hack
Cover Only

Handouts (Their Site)

PPT (Our Site): 2009 UBC The Ultimate Hack Slides 2.0 FINAL, with Notes)

With a tip of the hat the University of British Columbia and Professor John Meech of the Faculty of Advanced Engineering, this is the latest briefing.  As with most of my briefings, planned words for brevity can be found in the Notes.

All graphics & full text below the fold.

Continue reading “2009 The Ultimate Hack: Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer the World (Faculty of Advanced Engineering University of British Columbia March 2009)”

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Review: Mobilizing Minds–Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organization

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

Mobilizing MindsWeak Five for HR Wonks, Distill to One Page for CEOs, July 2, 2008

Lowell L. Bryan

I was tempted to give this book three to four stars for lack of context and for lack of a solid literature review (the entire book is a McKinsey love fest and somewhat albino in its incestuousness) but because I read a Harvard Business Review article today on how HR is the new new thing for Harvard MBAs, and the book speaks very well to HR folks I rate it a weak five for HR, four for all others. The smart HR person will find a way to distill the book to one page for the CEO. The basic premises are not new, but they are valid.

My annoyance first (minus one star):
– Neither ethics nor the environment appear in this book.
– True costs and the triple bottom line do not appear in this book.
– Customer minds do not appear in this book [see BW “The Power of Us”]
– The authors make facile assumptions, e.g. Exxon and GlaxoSmithKline are top “performers” by their account, but the authors are–with all due respect–clueless about the fact that Exxon did not make $40 billion in profit, it externalized $12 per gallon and stole that money from the public commonwealth now and into the future; similarly, GSK is profitable because the US Government is not allowed to negotiate, 50% of the health system is waste (see PWC report), and they are allowed to charge 100 times what the same medications cost in any given Third World country (different lowest cost country for each of the top 75 medications).
+ The bibliography is marginal, a form of McKinsey pablum.
+ The authors make facile reference to “complex adaptive systems” and to Wikipedia as well as blogs, but fail to provide a proper bridge to the “wealth of networks” or to Generation 2.0/Digital Native mindsets and methods.
+ They significantly exaggerate and misrepresent the relative value of “distinctive” and proprietary knowledge in relation to giving employees access to public knowledge in the external environment as well as internal knowledge that is not secret (see images under book cover).
+ The publisher puts the lead author's Harvard MBA right after his name, while relegating the second author's degree to the last line of her bio. As an admirer of the book What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School: Notes From A Street-Smart Executive I found this substantially OFFENSIVE. I hate feminazis, but in this instance, if the second author would like the publisher fire-bombed, I'm there for her [metaphorically speaking].

My irritation aside, this is a good book and I recommend it. Let me start with a few quotes that captured my respect:

p 13 “The plagues of the modern company are hard-to-manage workforce structures, thick silo walls, confusing matrix structures, e-mail overload, and ‘undoable jobs.'”

p 24 “Surveys confirm the symptoms of the disease, which include e-mail and voice-mail overload, task forces hat go nowhere, pointless meetings, delays in making decisions because of scheduling conflicts, too much raw data and not enough information [or sense-making aka decision-support], and challenges in getting the knowledge one needs because of organizational silos.

p 26 “Interaction costs involve searching for information and knowledge, coordinating activities and exchanges, and monitoring and controlling the performance of others within the same firm.” [credit by the authors to Ron Course, 1937]

p 239 “Today, the most valuable capital that companies can use in the 21st century is not financial capital but ‘intangible capital.'”

Duh. Okay, a bit more of my irritation, but the book stays at four to five stars. Here are the books the authors did not read in reinventing the wheel:
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
The Knowledge Executive
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age

There are others, but I need to save four links for the close of this review. Now on to what I did find worthwhile, which is to say, at least 75% of the book (the negative reviewers dismiss this work too quickly).

+ Minds of virtually all employees are grossly under-utilized
+ In emphasizing human brains, authors run counter to the machine learning fad that permeates the meta-web crowd, and that is good
+ “Unproductive complexity is the common enemy”
+ Profit per employee is a useful measure [but I would emphasize, not in isolation, see my damnation of Exxon and GKS above]
+ Existing financial reports *block* internal collaboration
+ Economies of scale and scope undermined by complexity, HR and IT can help regain momentum
+ It's not enough to pick good people, have to change corporate context, capability, and the culture (collaboration instead of competition)
+ Informal networks cannot be *managed* [authors' emphasis, heavens!]
+ Decisions on not making numbers versus future-oriented investment need to be pushed to the top of the corporation
+ Few CEOs understand the legacy front line, need to interview and listen
+ Valuable pages for the HR wonk emergent on alternative performance measures and alternative economic incentive plans

9 ideas fully discussed in this book:
+ backbone line structure (3 layers instead of 7)
+ one company governance and culture
+ dynamic management (portfolio of risks)
+ formal networks
+ talent marketplace (HR as broker)
+ knowledge marketplace (internal wikis, blogs)
+ internal motivating economic incentives
+ role-specific performance management
+ organizational design as strategy: who you hire *is* your future

I put the book down satisfied that it was worth the time it took to read; that the points above are important; and that the CEO of the future needs to elevate HR to the high table.

By the same token, neither of these authors is at a CEO level of strategic holistic perception–everything about the world has changed, to include the establishment of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), and the emergence of global social networks capable of breaking the backs of companies that continue to export jobs, leverage sweatshops, import toxins, and generally steal from the commonwealth. The book reflects zero understanding of, to use my remaining four links:

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Bottom line: within their niche, worth listening to. They don't know what they don't know, and that is why CEOs have a job (in theory–most CEOs and flag officers receive biased, incomplete, late information, and could really use help thinking about trransformation in a transformative environment–this book is a fraction of the total, perhaps 20%).

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Review: The Bottom Billion–Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Humanitarian Assistance, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Stabilization & Reconstruction

Bottom BillionElegantly brilliant, incisive clarity, quite extraordinary, February 22, 2008

Paul Collier

I read a lot, almost entirely in non-fiction, and this book is easily one of the “top ten” on the future and one of the top three on extreme poverty, in my own limited reading.

The other three books that have inspired me in this specific area are:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

There is an enormous amount of actionable wisdom in this book, which is deceptively easy to read and digest. The author's bottom line is clear early on:

A. The fifty failing states at the bottom, most in Africa, others in Central Asia, are a cesspool of misery that is terribly dangerous to all others, exporting disease, crime, and conflict.

B. The responsibility for peace to enable prosperity cannot be expected from within–it must be provided as a common good from outside. In support of this point, toward the end of the book, the author posits a 15:1 return on investment from $250M a year in investment and aid, mostly technical assistance.

This book is a superb guide for regional authorities and international coalitions with respect to the value of non-military interventions.
The author provides compelling yet concise overviews of the four traps that affect the billion at the bottom:

A. The Conflict Trap
B. The Natural Resource Export Trap
C. Landlocked in a Bad Neighbors Trap
D. Poor and Corrupt Governance

The author describes the need for a “whole of government” approach, both among those seeking to deliver assistance, and those receiving it.
I have a note, a new insight at least to me, that AIDs proliferated so quickly across Africa because of the combination of mass rape followed by mass migration. There are many other gifted turns of phrase throughout.
A study on the cost of a Kalashnikov is most helpful. The author tells us that the legacy of any war is the proliferation of inexpensive small arms into the open market.

Across the book the author points out that the gravest threat to governance and stability within any fragile economy is a standing army.
Each of the traps is discussed in depth.

The middle of the book outlines nine-strategies for the land-locked who suffer from being limited to their neighbors as a marketplace, rather than the world as a whole.

1. Work with neighbors to create cross-border transport infrastructure
2. Work to improve neighbors' economies for mutual benefit
3. Work to improve access to coastal areas (the author points out that the sea is so essential, that landlocked countries should not* be* countries, they should be part of a larger country that borders the sea)
4. Become a haven of peace, providing financial and other services.
5. Don't be air-locked or electronically-locked (the first study of the Marine Corps that I led in 1988-1989 found that half of the countries of concern did not have suitable ports but all had ample C-130 capable airfields).
6. Encourage remittances
7. Create transparent investment-friendly environment for resource prospecting
8. Focus on rural development
9. Attract aid

Toward the end of the book I am struck by the author's pointed (and documented) exclusion of democracy and civil rights as necessary conditions for reform. Instead, large populations, secondary education, and a recent civil war (opening paths to change), are key.
$64 billion is the cost to the region of a civil war, with $7 billion being the minimal expected return on investment for preventing a civil war in the country itself.

Bad policies come with a sixty year hang-over.

Asia is the solid middle and makes trade a marginal and unlikely option for rescuing Africa UNLESS there are a combination of trade barriers against imports from Asia, and unreciprocal trade preferences from richer countries. In the context of globalization, only capital and people offer hope.

In the author's view, capital is not going to the bottom billion because:

A. Bottom of the barrel risk
B. Too small to learn about
C. Genuinely fragile

In terms of human resources, after discussing capital flight, the author concludes that the educated leave as quickly as they can. I am inspired by this discussion to conclude that we need a Manhattan project for Africa, in which a Prosperity Corps of Gray Eagles is incentivized to adopt one of the 50 failed states, and provided with a semblance of normal living and working conditions along with bonuses for staying in-country for ten years or more. As I reflect on how the USA has spent $30 billion for “diplomacy” in 2007, and over $975 billion for waging war, (such that the Comptroller General just resigned from a fifteen year appointment after telling Congress the USA is “insolvent”) this begs public outrage and engagement.

As the book makes its way to the conclusion the author's prose grabs me:

“We should be helping the heroes” attempting reform

We are guilty in the West of “inertia, ignorance, and incompetence.”

The “cesspool of misery….is both terrible….and dangerous.”

Several other noteworthy highlights (no substitute for buying and reading the book in its entirety:

Aid does offer a 1% growth kick

Aid bureaucracy, despite horror stories, adds real value in contrast to funds that vanish into the corrupt local government

Misdirection of unrestricted funds leads to militarization and instability.

The author touches briefly on the enormous value that industry can offer when it is finally incentivized to do so. DeBeers and its certification process are cited with respect, perhaps saving diamonds from going the way of fur.

The author stresses that top-down transparency enables bottom-up public scrutiny and the two together help drive out corruption (something Lawrence Lessig has committed the remainder of his life to).

There is an excellent section on irresponsible NGOs, notably Christian Aid, feared by the government and not understood by the public.
I put the book down with a very strong feeling of hope.

Other books I recommend, in addition to the three above:
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition

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Review: The Tao of Abundance–Eight Ancient Principles for Living Abundantly in the 21st Century

7 Star Top 1%, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Philosophy

Taa of Abundance5.0 out of 5 stars 7 Star Life Transformative Very Satisfying, Will Take Time to Fully Appreciate – Collective Intelligence Primer

August 1, 2007

Laurence G. Boldt

This has to be a preliminary review. This elegant offering has a ton of useful ideas and concepts and comparisons. My first time around I drew the following out of it:

1) System is the Ego. Escape the matrix by escaping ego.
2) Trust the innate intelligence of nature in harmony.
3) Money should not cost you your soul or everything else.

The best contribution I can make at this point is to point readers to a few other books that have inspired me as I expect this book to continue to inspire me, and a couple of DVDs.

Books:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

DVDs
What the Bleep Do We Know!?
The Last Samurai (Full Screen Edition)
Peace One Day

One last thought: Michael Hinton and Jean-Francois Noubelle have pioneered Open Money, and that is one of the things I talk about in my forthcoming opening presentation at Gnomedex in Seattle. My slides and notes can be seen in advance by finding “Open Everything” at my web site in the Archives, EIN Library. In my view, Open Money could be the single most revolutionary idea that is liberating immediately and scales without a problem. Combined with distributed search (Grub) and CISCO AON individually-controlled sharing of both information and CPU power, I see a world well beyond Google in which our brains and our information are under our control and no one can loot that abundance.

Peace! Prosperity! Power in us, not above us.

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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

Change HandbookUtterly 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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