Leadership – Page 11 – Public Intelligence Blog

Good Training Tool for the Fundamentals,

July 20, 2009

Kerry Patterson

This is one of two books being used in a U.S. Government mid-career leadership course, and I decided to look at both of them for insight. The other book is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series).

Both books adopt the story-telling mode that has been justly pioneered by Steven Denning at CKO of the World Bank, see his tremendous The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (KMCI Press), still the single best companion I have found to the still seminal 1960's book by Harold Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry).

For myself, after two decades of feeling both attacked for being right in 1988 about the future of both intelligence and warfare, and angry over the incapacity of leaders to lead in all that time, the core point in this book that resonates with me and is also consistent with the twelve spiritual principles adopted by Phi Beta Iota, the new honor society for public intelligence, is this: do not interpret attacks as anything other than a mixture of ignorance, fear, and concern. Respond to attacks (or their obverse, sullen silence) with respect, clarity, integrity, and an offer to have a SAFE dialog. I've been very strong on integrity, and very weak on offering safety, and for that alone, this book is helpful to me.

Early on (page 20) the authors' assure my attention by stating that the core “one thing” that results from all that they preach and teach is this:

“When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open.”

There you have it. The book covers obstacles to getting all the information on the table, and skills to overcome the obstacles and create safe environments for fulsome candid exchanges.

The essentials of the book are found in Chapter 7, where STATE is the acronym used to memorize

Share your facts

Tell your story

Ask for others' others' paths

Talk tentatively [others have told me I sound so assertive they hesitate to question my point of view or bring forward other views)

Encourage testing

The bottom line on this book, which is a simplified easily absorbed distillation of a great deal of research that was properly credited by the authors in their earliest work, is:

Learn to look (for signals from others and one's own signals)

Make it safe. This is the key, especially in a command and control environment where rankism prevails and the Peter Principle sees too many rise on the basis of time in grade rather than integral consciousness.

The authors pay special attention to “clever stories” that are used to cover-up what they call sell-outs and I call cop-outs, stories that allow for conflict and substance avoidance while playing out a story that justifies incivility, counter-attack, shunning, and so on. As one who was called a lunatic and an “agitator” for seeing the future in 1988, I can certainly say, while confessing my own sins, that the US Government is chock full of people at all levels who are in denial about reality and going through the motions of doing their jobs. They desperately need the kind of leadership this book discusses.

The authors stab at stakeholder issues by identifying four key questions:

Who cares?

Who knows?

Who must agree?

How many people is it worth involving?

On balance, I believe this book was very well chosen. It is perfect for rising executives who come to the class annoyed at being taken away from front line work in a time of war, simple enough to get the message across, and just right as a foundation for facilitated group discussion.

Here are seven other books I would have mid-career leaders digest:
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
The Knowledge Executive
Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century
Leadership Lessons of Jesus: A Timeless Model for Today's Leaders
Five Minds for the Future
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I published the last one myself, contributing two chapters. I have removed one star from this book because it presents itself as an immaculate conception. Our Native American forbearers were practicing Seventh Generation Leadership centuries ago, a style of leadership focused on achieving sustainable consensus that took the long view. Epoch B bottom-up (multi-cultural) leadership, appreciative inquiry, deliberative dialog, and human scale leadership have all been pioneered by Tom Atlee, Juanita Jones, Paul Ray, Peggy Holman, and many others, as have the literatures on integral consciousness and hearing the voices of the dispossessed while pursuing a pedagogy of freedom.

This book is perfect for facilitating a crucial conversation among rising leaders at any level.

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2009/07/202009/10/24

Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team–A Leadership Fable

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Leadership

Excellent Training Material, See Also the Workbook,

July 20, 2009

Patrick Lencioni et al

This is one of two books being used in a U.S. Government mid-career leadership course, and I decided to look at both of them for insight. The other book is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.

To obtain this book I actually had to go to Border's Bookstore, and while there I had a chance to go through both The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Participant Workbook (J-B Lencioni Series), which is outrageously priced at Amazon, half the price at Borders, and also Toxic Workplace!: Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power.

On balance, I prefer the workbook to the text. It was much easier to read, it provided for the development of dialog among participating team members, and in general struck me as more likely to produce the desired outcome.

Having said that in no way demeans the value of this primary text discussing the five dysfunctions:

01 Absence of Trust

02 Fear of Conflict

03 Lack of Commitment

04 Avoidance of Accountability

05 Inattention to Results.

I read this book a bit more critically than Crucial Conversations, in part because I have a continuing concern about the context within which we hire and manage people in the US Intelligence Community and the US Government at large–the hypocrisy, duplicity, and lack of strategic coherence at the top (see my article, “Fixing the White House and National Intelligence”).

I do not wish to lead–or mislead–individuals who work 60 hour weeks and more, only to be told that the Quadrennial Defense Review has already been sketched out by the Undersecretary for Policy, it will focus on China (space), China (maritime), and China (infowar), and no all-source intelligence is needed, thank you very much.

This books emphasis on individual accountability is one of its strengths, and long overdue in both government and the private sector Not only do we have too many employees going through the motions, but with all the money that has been invented since 9-11 and the financial crash of 2008, we now have TWO contractors for every government employee, and “the Borg” just keeps on growing.

Of the two books, this is harder to read and also the more rewarding if you believe that by leading your patch properly, this kind of open, effective leadership will spread upwards. I am not so sure.

There are several other reviews (be sure to read the reviews for the workbook as well) that go into detail, for me, even with the remediation provided by over a decade in the appreciative inquiry, deliberative dialog circles (see my recommended books below), the elements this book defines that I lacked in my days of seeking to slay dragons include:

01 Who you are is impacted by where you sit. Don't make it personal. Good people do bad things for reasons that have nothing to do with you personally, or their inherent nature.

02 Fear of conflict is natural, especially when rankism prevails, and it will be very hard, but by taking the first step in offering civil “full and open” dialog, you can change the game for everyone to the better. The opposite of this–my own mortal sin–is to seek and create conflict as a means of flushing the issue, which I now realize is counter-productive.

03 The book talks the talk about “cascading communications” but it lacks the information technology savvy to make this practical. It has been shown that Wikis reduce meeting times by half and email by two thirds (roughly). I see this as three things that must be managed in harmony: the top bosses must actually value openness and diversity as a foundation for effectiveness; the IT infrastructure must be geared to this (IntelWiki is far removed from the totality, and employees still spend a quarter of their time logging in and out of disparate systems, most of which are not geospatially-rooted for ease of access).

04 Accountability makes me crazy. We lack strategic coherence (what is our mission?) operational connectivity (who is doing what across the Whole of Government), and tactical effectiveness (do we really need to carpet bomb civilians instead of one man – one bullet precision?) I admire the various strategic plans that exist, but the higher you go the more surreal they get. Accountability for me means that the QDR will be intelligence-driven; that OMB and GAO will be full-partners; and that we will recognize that our own misbehavior is costing us vastly more than anyone attacking us could hope to achieve with kinetic weapons; and that we lack global situational awareness because we have over-invested in technical collection while neglecting human intelligence and processing. Yes, we need to hold individuals accountable, but I shy away from crucifying individual Marines for a handful of civilian casualties “mano a mano” when the Air Force takes out entire city blocks without a second of remorse.

I guess the highest compliment I can pay this book is that it set me off. It is a righteous book, and it is a superb book for getting rising leaders to think about leadership fundamentals: integrity, clarity, education, empowerment. The context in which our rising leaders do that is troubling, and so I put this book down with a sense of despair. Good people, all, trapped in a bad system. Who teaches “the system?” Can a “system” learn? These are my questions.

Other books I recommend (I do have high hopes for the common sense of the average citizen):
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential

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2009/07/152016/02/26

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

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)”

2008/07/212010/07/21

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Theocracy

00 Remixed Review Lists, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look

Theocracy

Review: America’s “War on Terrorism” (Paperback)

Review: American Theocracy–The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Hardcover)

Review: Blood in the Sand–Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (Hardcover)

Review: Dreaming War–Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta

Review: Foreign Follies–America’s New Global Empire

Review: Hegemony or Survival–America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)

Review: Losing America–Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency

Review: Obama–The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate

Review: Power Trip (Open Media Series)

Review: The Ambition and the Power–The Fall of Jim Wright : A True Story of Washington

Review: The Bush Tragedy

Review: The Price of Loyalty–George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill

2008/02/262010/01/05

Review: The Powers to Lead

5 Star, Diplomacy, Leadership

Superb Mix of Scholarship & Pragmatism,

February 26, 2008

Joseph S. Nye

Anything by Joe Nye stops my work and receives my undivided attention. This is an absolute gem of a book, a mix of world-class scholarship and world-class pragmatism. It goes to the top of my leadership list on Amazon.

The book opens with the observation that two thirds of US citizens believe their is a leadership crisis. The intellectual center of the book is its focus on “smart power” defined as a balanced mix of soft and hard power that is firmly grounded in “Contextual IQ,” a term credited to Mayo and Nohria of Harvard.

The author defines leaders as those who help a group create and achieve goals. He states that leadership is an art, not a science. I especially liked the early phases, “good contextual intelligence broadens the bandwidth of leaders.” He likens the relation of leaders and the led to surfers and the wave–can ride it but cannot move it this way and that.

Soft power, his signal contribution to the global dialog on international relations, is concisely defined as att5ractive power, yielding the power to ask instead of compell. He cites McGregor Burns in communicating that bullys who humiliate and intimidate are counter-productive, that “power-wielders are not leaders.”

There is a fine review of leadership styles, attributes, and a reference to female leadership rising (I have long said that women make better intelligence analysts because they have smaller egos and a great deal more emphathy and intuition). He provides a matrix for evaluationg inter effectivenesss and ethics in relation to goals, means, and consequences.

I was struck the emphasis on emotional intelligence and the needed ability to rapidly evaluate loyalty networks that might not be immediately obvious. He distinguishes between public politics and private politics.

The book concludes with a really extra-special and lengthy disucssion of leadership ethics and morality. The last two pages prior to top-notch notes and bibliographies are 12 take-aways on leadership (he had the wit to avoid making them the 12 commandments) consisting of a fragment that I list below, and explicative annotation that I do not–the book is worthy of buying for these two pages and the moral-ethical conclusion alone, but certainly this is an important book that should be read any anyone seeking to lead others.

1. Good leadership matters
2. Leadership can be learned.
3. Leaders help create and achieve group goals.
4. Smart leaders need both soft and hard power skills.
5. Leaders depend on and are partly shaped by followers.
6. Appropriate style depends on context.
7. Consultative style costs time, but has three major benefits.
8. Leaders need both managerial and organizational skills.
9. Leadership for crisis conditions requires advanced preparations, emotional maturity, and the ability to distinguish between operational, analytical, and political contexts.
10. Information revolution is shifting context of postmodern organizations from command to co-optive style.
11. Reality testing, constant information seeking, and adjusting to change are essential but (buy the book).
12. Ethical leaders use consciences, common moral rules, and professional standards, but conflicting values can create “dirty hands.”

I have just two nits with this book, neither of which is a buy-stopper:

A. On page 94 there is an annoyingly facile and superficial reference to the 9-11 commission citing cultural dissonance as one reason the FBI and CIA did not share information. As one who has both read and written extensively on this topic, not only have we all identified numerous examples of internal failures (e.g. the FBI rejected two walk-ins, one in Newark and one in Orlando, prior to the event; CIA sent line-crossers in and conclusively established there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but George Tenet parked his integrity on the same shelf Colin Powell used, and let the White House lie 935 times to the public and Congress). I have an edited book scheduled on Cultural Intelligence for 2009, this is an important topic, and merits better treatment from the author.

B. This book could usefully be expanded, or followed by another book, to integrate the books I list below, and the world-changing conditions they represent.
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization
The Knowledge Executive
The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Having said that, I consider this to be one of the author's top three immediately current and relevant books, and relatively priceless if we can get “Mr. Perfect” to read it (more than once), along with the author's two recent works, Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition); and The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.February 26, 2008

2008/02/132010/01/05

Review: The Keys to a Successful Presidency

4 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Leadership

Published in 2000, Essential Reference but Outdated and Incomplete, February 13, 2008

Alvin Felzenberg

I am spending most of my time, in the course of publishing three edited works and my own on “War & Peace: Seventh Generation Intelligence,” thinking about how to radically redirect the organization of both the Presidency and Congressional jurisdictions. I consider David Abshire to be one of the top thinkers on this subject.

The book covers, in fast easy to read fashion:

1) Achieving a Successful Transition

2) Running the White House

3) Staffing a New Administration

4) Turning the President's Agenda into Administration Policy

5) Enacting a National Security Agenda

6) Working with Congress to Enact an Agenda

7) Managing the Largest Corporation in the World

8) Building Public Support for the President's Agenda

Each of the above chapters has between three and five sub-chapters, none long, all drawing on substantive past performers.

Now here is what is NOT in this book:

1) How to achieve a deep understanding of a complex world in which nation-states are devolving and new assemblages including social business, social entrepreneurship, and bottom-up citizen social networks are self-governing, creating wealth, and policing corporations. In other words, there is not INTELLIGENCE chapter in this book. (search for <New Rules of the New Craft of Intelligence Chapter 15> for a free answer.

2) Chapter 4 neglects to discuss the role of the Office of Management and Budget, which dropped the Management part of its role sometime back in the 1970's as best I can tell. Since the Comptroller General has declared the US insolvent as of 2007, and the Bush-Cheney regime has put the country into a 9 trillion debt and a 40 trillion future unobligated deficiency, this should be the most important part of the next President's staff, and it better have someone at the top that understands the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and the spine to redirect money from secret satellites to open education; from a heavy metal military to waging peace; and from corporate subsidies to infrastructure and other homefront priorities. I recommend Colin Gray's book (or see my review), Modern Strategy and Tony Zinni's latest book, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose. Free online are my Army War College presentations and chapters on “Presidential Leadership” and “An Alternative Paradigm for National Security.”

3) The national security chapter is very disappointing. I will just list a handful of books that must be already in the mind of the National Security Advisor before Inauguration:

The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone

The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

There are so many other books that could be usefully distilled for a new president. Only Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, in my personal judgement, have minds open enough, and willing to consider that national security is, as Thomas Jefferson taught us, to be found in an educated citizenry. We need a transpartisan sunshine cabinet NOW, one that can propose a balanced national budget by 4 July 2008, and from there, We the People can have a national conversation about restoring America the Beautiful

I will, on the basis of all I have read, put this bluntly: McCain and Clinton are the last vestiges of the industrial-era spoils system that makes decisions in backrooms, by, of, and for the elite. The only way this country is going to resurrect itself is if we get a President who knows how to harness the collective intelligence of We the People, how to uncomplicate and sharply reduce the federal government, and how to create a national strategy that eradicates the ten threats within ten years (including an end to all dictators and our support for them( by harmonizing the twelve policies. This is not rocket science. All it requires is the framework, integrity, an open mind, and an ability to listen. We do NOT need a “war leader.” We need an Epoch B Swarm Leader.

None of that is in this book. What is in the book is first class. What is not in the book is fatally absent.

Two DVDs just for grins:
Why We Fight
The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

2008/02/022011/10/22

Review: The leadership of civilization building–Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Cosmos & Destiny, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Society, Leadership

Astonishing Powerful, Easy to Read, MUST Be Reprinted

February 2, 2008

Richard J Spady

This book was recommended to me by Joseph McCormick, former Army Ranger, world-class philosopher, and one of the founders of Reuniting America, 110 million strong and totally transpartisan in nature. We both agree with Peter Peterson's views in Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It. None of the political candidates today, with one possible exception, understand Epoch B Swarm Leadership (I cannot load images for out of print books, please see the four non-fiction images at this link: Managing the Nonprofit Organization), and even the exception keeps talking about one America, Democrats and Republicans together. This otherwise erudite man fails to understand that over half of the two parties' members no longer identify with the extremist spoils system; that Independents are fully unified as a third party; and that Libertarians, Greens, and Reforms are now a fourth slice of America that must be respected. This book is the ONE BOOK that I would recommend to anyone who wants to be a transpartisan leader and co-steward of America the Beautiful.

If you are completely unfamiliar with the broad literature on co-intelligence, wisdom councils, citizen councils, large-scale human collaboration, this one book is a superb overview and reflects over two decades of pioneering by the authors.

On the other hand, if you are fully or even partially familiar with the books I list below, this book is a marvelous tightly integrated yet smoothly presented stand-alone which won my immediate respect because of the thoroughness of the authors in respecting and citing other pioneers.

Since it is out of print, but I was able to get a perfect-condition signed copy from 6 Finches (5 stars, great deal), I want to point out that the hard-copy cover that does not appear on this Amazon page is world-class, and I believe this book should be reprinted in paperback and also offered free online.

The Foreword by Rev Dr William Ellington and William Cane of the Forum Foundation is alone worth the price of the book. It is a spectacular erudite and yet down to earth overview, and alone, captures the entire book.

This is a solution oriented book, one that represents the view that the meaning of life is social–interpersonal–the collective pursuit of happiness. The book calls for massive social innovation, and implicitly, addresses precisely how we need to deal with the fact that all three branches of the government are broken, the two political parties are craven and corrupt, and most of our other institutions, including the so-called forth estate of the media, are equally decrepit. To take just one example from another book, The New York Times wrote 70 editorials on Iraq, and never once mentioned international law or morality.

The book offers nine pages of quotes from others, and the first part of the book stresses–without any excessive verbiage–that the spiritual core of science was lost; that “science was not only not inevitably progressive but not even inevitably benign. Citing Eltron Mayo, material progress has retarded human collaboration. Further on: slogans, distorted news, and propaganda all undermine diversity of views and potential of human collaboration.

The book states clearly that the current top-down elitist system of government and corporate management is broken. Further on in the book they point out that authoritarian “rolism” denies and deprives the individual of the right to be heard; the right to participate in decisions about their life and the life of their community.

Throughout the book the authors stress that the ultimate source of power is the people themselves; that civic values and the ability to collaborate to discover and communicate and effect common good, is the heart of civilization.

They introduce the concept of Many-to-Many (MTM) communications, and the last half of the book is full of examples including protocols and forms that can be used for large scale deliberative democracy where human opinions are presented by machine and polarization-consensus visualized and returned to the human participants as feedback and inspiration.

This book is at root about enabling, leveraging, and effecting large-scale collaboration that is inherently moral and legitimate.

Below are concise snapshots of each of the main sections of the book.

Basic Attitude: respect, listen, accept or reject, modify.

Learning: damns our rote one-way (didactic) learning, calls for activating and challenging all children from the earliest age with social network and information sharing skills.

Leadership: decisions must be made at the lowest level at which BOTH sufficiency of information and sufficiency of resources can be combined. Centralization of leadership is BAD, dictators (we have 44 of them, 42 best pals of both Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney) will not prevail.

Authority: derived from the consent of the governed. Moral authority is the only authority impervious to legal authority that exceeds its mandate as Bush-Cheney and the doormat Congress have done these past eight years. Democracy in the ideal is inspired society in pursuit of happiness for ALL.

Politics: best if completely open, interactive, maximizing understanding, collaboration, and engagement across all boundaries at all levels. I agree, and this is one reason we need Electoral Reform legislation that puts both the Democratic and Republican party machines OUT OF BUSINESS.

Prophecy: Golden Rule, honesty, collaboration instead of pyramidal top-down mandate. Reuniting America uses the word “transpartisanship.”

Administrative (I prefer Stewardship): Diagnose, theorize, accomplish, and review.

Helping Professions: characterized by direct human interaction and the need to recognize and react instantly, build trust, communicate vision.

Zeitgeist: Spirit-of-the-Time, Group must find its soul and its collective understanding. Constant feedback, spirit of listening, vital. Must be impersonal in the good sense, symbolic dialog is rooted in moral authority. We must strive for common opinions, reflections, and interests. I am reminded of Native American councils focusing on total consensus (don't stop until achieved), seventh generation thinking, and the Great Law of Peace adopted by the Five Nations. The right to be heard, to participate in decisions affecting one, one's family, one's community. The ultimate challenge: how to activate and channel human responsibility.

Natural Factors: diagnosis improved, learning improved, peace prospects improved, power of values.

Civilization Theories: unified social field, social quantum mechanics, open societies herald a strategy for peace. Quote Wheatley, “Imagine ourselves as beacons towers of information.” Life is One; One from Many (Dee Hock's book title); Unity in Community.

MTM: communications up and down left and right, forward and back. This reminds me of Paul Ray's brilliant world on “The New Political Compass,” from which I derived a one-page summary of what some of us are now calling “the new progressives” (not to be confused with MoveOn.org's rather myopic assumption that the Democratic Party is the only source of progressive ideas. I certainly disagree, indeed my ideal ticket would be Huckabee-Obama trading places every four years for sixteen years; with Bill Bradley and Susan Collins and a transpartisan sunshine cabinet funded by Michael Bloomberg with Ralph Nader as Chief of Staff, all leading a national conversation based on an online balanced budget open to discussion by all.

Tools: the last part of the book is equally impressive, and the authors present Fast Forum for rapid large scale collaboration and deliberation; importance of mainstreaming reality; social resolution power, Symbolic Dialog as code for human opinions, machine visualization, feedback, and reentry into dialog. I note their phrase, knowledge is in books, wisdom is in minds. The end with hard but civil comments about a social conspiracy and bureaucratic inertia.

Applications: They outline, including illustrative documents and survey forms, how their ideas could be applied at the state, local, and social levels, and especially in education, where they recommend teaching social knowledge and networking from day one; gaming the curriculum with the students' active participation, exploring clean-sheet “how it might work,” and also exploring new forms of moral discussion in which “right or wrong” are set aside to allow for a full embrace of diversity.

There are a number of relevant appendices, the first of which discusses how government and corporate power today are neither responsive nor legitimate. There are conflicts of interest, and only a massive social innovation powered by citizens will break through into new modes of self-governance.

At the end I am introduced to the Dodd Institute for Social Innovation, and I am impressed.

This is a sensational book, and it should be reprinted or at least offered free online. Here are other books that I have found valuable. See also the four images from Earth Intelligence Network that I offer to help illustrate how the 24 co-founders of EIN have absorbed and now give back the kind of wisdom that this book represents. See also:

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
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

At Earth Intelligence Network, there are 52 tough questions with transpartisan answers; over 1000 book reviews sorted by threat, policy, or other aspects of achieving the goals that these two authors; and the first of three free books online, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

Category: Leadership

Review: Crucial Conversations–Tools for Talking When Stakes are High