Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 305 – Public Intelligence Blog

“Tipping Point” Book Vital to Government, Not Just Business,

January 22, 2005

Margaret J. Wheatley

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

This book is beyond five stars, and not just for business, where it is receiving all the praise it is due, but within government, where it has not yet been noticed. It was recommended to me by the author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and I now recommend it to everyone I know. If there are two books that can “change the world,” these are the ones.

Although the Chinese understood all this stuff centuries ago (Yin/Yang, space between the dots, the human web), the author is correct when she notes late in the book that the commoditization of the human worker (Cf. Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System) and the emphasis on scientific objectivity and scientific manager (Cf. Jean Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) were perhaps the greatest error we might have made in terms of long-run progress. Coincidentally, as I finished the book, on the Discovery channel in the background they were discussing how the leveeing of the Mississippi blocked the Louisiana watershed from cleansing the Mississippi naturally, as it once used to.

It's all about systems–the author does cite Donella Meadows' 1982 article in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly, but does not pay much heed to the large body of literature that thrived in the 1970's around the Club of Rome.

There are perhaps three bottom lines in this book that I would recommend to any government leader who hopes to stabilize and reconstruct our world:

1) Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. Blocking or controlling information flows stunts our growth and virtually assures defeat if not death. It is the optimization of listening–being open to *all* information (and especially all the information the secret world now ignores)–that optimizes our ability to adjust, evolve, and grow.

2) Command & control is history, block and wire diagrams are history. General Al Gray had it right in the 1990's when he talked about “commander's intent” as the baseline. Leaders today need to be disruptive, to look for dissonant views and news, and to empower all individuals at all levels with both information, and the authority to act on that information.

3) Disorder is an *opportunity*. We have the power to define ourselves, our “opponents,” and our circumstances in ways that can either inspire protective, constricted, secretive, “armed” responses, or inclusive, open, sharing “pro-active” peaceful responses.

The author is to be praised for noting early on in the book that “Ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in the relationship any organization has with colleagues, stakeholders, and communities.” I would extend that to note that social ethics and foreign policy ethics are the foundation for sustainable life on the planet, and we appear to be a long way from understanding that it is ethics, not guns, that will stabilize and fertilize…Cf Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

It also merits comment that the author essentially kills the industry of forecasting, scenarios, modeling, and futures simulations. I agree with her view (and that of others) that early warning is achieved, not through the theft of secret plans and intentions or the forecasting of behavior, but rather by casting a very wide net, listening carefully to all that is openly available, sharing it very widely (as the LINUX guys say, put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug will be invisible), and then being open to changed relationships. Trying to maintain the status quo will simply not do.

I give the author credit for carrying out an extraordinary survey of the literature on quantum mechanics, and for developing a PhD-level explanation of why old organization theory, based on the linear concepts of Newtonian physics, is bad for us, and how the new emergent organization theory, understood by too few, is let about the things and more about the relationships between and among the things.

This is an elegant essay and a heroic personal work of discovery, interpretation, and integration. While I would have liked to see more credit given to Kuhn, Drucker, Garfield, Brand, Rheingold, and numerous others that I have reviewed here for Amazon, on balance, given the academic narrowness of her Harvard PhD, I think the author has performed at the Olympic level. This is a radical book, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Hampden-Turner's book, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. which as I recall was not accepted by Harvard as a thesis at the time. Perhaps Harvard is evolving (smile).

For other key books that complement and precede this book, see my lists on information society, collective intelligence, business intelligence, and intelligence qua spies and secrecy in an open world.

A handful of other amazing books (am limited to ten total):
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
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

2005/01/152009/12/04

Review DVD: Tibet – Cry of the Snow Lion (2003)

6 Star Top 10%, Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Philosophy, Religion & Politics of Religion, Reviews (DVD Only), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Liberation through Knowledge: Absorbing,

January 15, 2005

Shirley Knight

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add other significant DVDs.

Halfway through this probing, sensitive, sharp, spiritual documentary film I thought to myself, “wow, this is what CIA covert propaganda *should* be able to produce” and then instantly corrected myself: David Ignatius of the Washington Post has it right: overt action is vastly superior to covert action, and in this instance, a loose coalition of kindred spirits have come together in time and focus to produce something remarkable, something much more threatening to Chinese behavior in Tibet than any military armada: a collage of truth-telling.

This is a world-class documentary, full of vivid images, well-blended historical and modern footage, and extremely good production planning and voice over editing. Early on I was struck by the similarity between the Tibetans, the Native Americans, and the Guatemalan Indians, all of whom share some basic moral precepts.

The portrait painted of Tibet as a nation committed to the concept of spiritual education, is a compelling one. One analogy offered up by one of those interviewed I found especially compelling: Tibet was spending 85% of its budget on spiritual development, with 10% of its population in monasteries–this being the equivalent of America redirecting its entire defense budget toward education.

The documentary will clearly infuriate the Chinese, for it carefully itemizes the many ways in which Tibet is uniquely Tibetan, including in its language, greatly distant from Chinese. Shown are Chinese torture instruments, including electrical cattle prods used in the vaginas of nuns and the mouths and throats of monks. The photographs are graphic.

Also covered are the genocide, the torture, imposed by the Chinese, as well as the loss of morality–625 brothels to serve the Chinese garrison.

The documentary carefully covered the death of 30 million Chinese and half the Tibetan population that resulted from Mao Tse Tung's order that Tibet grow wheat instead of barley–shades of the Soviet Union and its failed socialist agriculture.

6,200 monasteries destroyed–as one Tibetan government official in exile notes, this is not just places of worship, but places of scholarship and cradles of a specific civilization.

A section of the documentary focuses on CIA training of the Tibetan resistance, the conclusion of the Tibetans themselves that CIA was not serious, only providing enough support to enable harassment but not victory, and then the coup de grace–Henry Kissinger selling Tibet out for the sake of engagement.

A very powerful section points out that the US, with its 89 billion dollar a year trade imbalance with China, is in fact subsidizing Chinese repression and genocide, not only against Tibet, but against Muslims in China and other separatists elements. US business, according to this documentary, has sold democracy out in favor of profit.

As the documentary drew to an end, I found myself asking again: is this CIA propaganda, as the Chinese would have us believe? Or is the Dalai Lama is fact the representative of a group that may well be the soul of the world, a kernel of hope for non-violent resolution to all that ails us? I found myself wishing that we did indeed have a more effective People's Intelligence Agency (PIA), one that I could trust, one that we could all trust, to actually get the facts right, without political, economic, or cultural manipulation and distortion.

I was educated by this documentary. I had never really thought about Tibet as other than a spiritual oddity. This documentary very effectively points out that it can and should be a zone of peace, not least because it is situated between China and India, two of the most populous nations on earth, between them holding one half of the earth's population, and both of them nuclear *and* poor.

The documentary ends on a high note. It explicitly calls for liberation through knowledge and compassion, and one educator is very effective in pointing out that no one expected apartheid to end in South Africa, or the Berlin Wall to fall, yet both came to pass. Tibet, by this telling, is next.

This is an eye-opening, intelligent, visually-stimulating, and spiritually unnerving documentary. These people–both the observers and the observed–have served us all well.

2005/01/062009/12/04

Review: Enforcing the Peace–Learning from the Imperial Past

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Worthwhile but Stops Short,

January 6, 2005

Kimberly Zisk Marten

This book came highly recommended to me, but I now believe, after reading it, that is was recommended because it contributes to the tarring of America for being an imperial power in the present, while also documenting the almost certain failure of any imperial power in the present that chooses to a) act unilaterally and b) impose its values and form of governance on an uncooperative indigenous population.

On balance, I find the book worthy in so far as it draws parallels between the imperial occupations of the past and those of the present that focus on winning the war but pay no attention to winning the peace. Unfortunately, the book stops precisely where I was hoping it would start: it fails to address the two biggest aspects of winning the peace: a) inter-agency operations that mobilize *all* sources of national power and b) a deliberate concept, doctrine, manning, funding, and capabilities for stabilization and reconstruction, such as the Defense Science Board has recommended and the US Department of Defense is now implementing.

A few notes:

1) The author coins the term “complex peace operations” where the term is not needed–the author means to discuss peace enforcement missions;

2) The author is completely correct and helpful in pointing out that multilateral operations inspire legitimacy, while unilateral operations inspire counterinsurgency;

3) The author focuses on political will with respect to sustained occupation by military forces (we do not have it), but does not engage in what I regard as the more important discussion, which is the need for political will and wit to understand, as General Tony Zinni understands, that the fastest way to reduce violence and restore legitimacy is to introduce water, food, and medicine to the area;

4) The author very helpfully spends time discussing why the German and Japanese reconstruction models are irrelevant to today's failed states;

5) The author praises the military for being able to do humanitarian and other “operations other than war” when the military is well-led and carefully monitored, but misses the larger point that most military professionals and historians will gladly point out: one needs both forces–a big war force put into OOTW operations will lose its skill at big war within two years, while also being incompetent at small war/OOTW for the first two years it is thus engaged;

6) The author suggests, and I believe with good reason based on solid research, that the West is over-reaching when it seeks to impose Western values, Western forms of governance, and even singular governments on ethnic divisions that have stood the test of time–flexibility in accepting multiple forms of self-governance is essential;

7) Finally, and I have seen this myself in Viet-Nam and in El Salvador, and read of it in many other places, the author points out that any time the West intervenes and seeks to select leaders on the basis of its own criteria, it inevitably disregards local realities and ends up creating more friction than it resolves.

The author ends with the suggestion that we focus less on instilling liberal democracies, and more in simply assuring sufficient security such that commerce can be practiced and the arts can flourish.

This is an ably crafted and documented book, but it stops short. It urgently needs a companion volume that collects and integrates lessons from successful interventions. As the book went to press, Haiti was breaking apart for the second time, and I note with interest that the one force that might actually be effective there–the French-speaking French gendarme, is nowhere to be found.

Ten other books as good or better:
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
Security Studies for the 21st Century
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Modern Strategy
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
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
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It

2004/12/262009/12/04

Review: “Armed and Dangerous”–My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Undercover in Rebellion, Now Minister for Intelligence,

December 26, 2004

Ronnie Kasrils

I have just spent two days absorbing his book. Some highlights:

1) The big fights, the important fights, take 25 years or more. The transformative fights, the nation-wide or trans-regional transformations, take 25-50 years.

2) When any government seeks to repress discontent by suspending the due process of law, stand by for a revolution.

3) Fighting this revolution, without a friendly country adjacent to South Africa, and with South African mercenaries and forces all too able to strike at will across Africa, was very very hard. Bomb-making, communications, all hard.

4) Camaraderie should not be allowed to undermine operational security and counterintelligence. From day one, misplaced faith and lax checking of backgrounds was very costly, and the ANC was riddled with informers, many of them passed through the US and UK.

5) The Russians, East Germans, and Cubans all provided aid with no strings attached–indeed, the West's excessive propaganda against communism actually inspired interest in communism. This book is one of the best references I have found, as a US intelligence professional, with respect to the good done by the so-called “main enemy” in the specific case of South Africa.

6) I believe the author when he recounts discussions with Russians focusing on the defense nature of their military investments, and their longer-term strategic focus on beating US capitalism in a straight-up economic competition with socialism. I had to think as I worked through this section: if Ronnie Kasrils could have these discussions, how could CIA get it so wrong all those years?

7) Across the entire book is a full range of clandestine technique. These guys knew how to use newspaper ads, codes, changes in times and dates, pre-arranged blind meetings, brush passes, dead drops, the whole nine yards. They lived it–and unlike US spies, who get sent home, if they failed at undercover operations they paid with their lives or spent years–sometimes decades–in prison.

8) The United Kingdom gets high marks for its balanced reception of ANC officers, and Scotland Yard gets the best marks of all.

9) Key elements of the ANC victory, apart for the grotesque self-destructive nature of apartheid, were persistence, propaganda, infrastructure, and training. Their leadership was clever, strategic, and focused. The ANC also understood that politics was as important as tactical and technical training–the moral is to the material as 10:1 and all that good stuff.

10) Training as well as solidarity were well balanced with sports, music, and art.

11) The East Germans taught them how to do Vietnamese tunnels (see my review of the “Tunnels of Cu Chi.”) My first thought was Colombia and drugs–I suspect the Americans have no idea what's under the ground in the Andes.

12) They were not ready for air attacks, especially air attacks streaking in on them from South Africa within other nominally sovereign countries.

13) A major contributor to their eventual success was the over-all trend in the region, with victories in Angola and Zimbabwe chief among the contributing factors.

14) The revolution went through a mutinous and discouraging phase. I was reminded of Bill Moyer's “Doing Democracy” where he quotes Tom Atlee in saying that Stage 5 in any long-term movement toward democracy is inevitably the stage where there is a perception of failure.

15) In the final stages before victory, one of their biggest problems was quality control over incoming recruits and over captured informants and traitors.

16) Chapter 16 is a lovely discussion of their use of open sources of intelligence. He says: “The greatest proportion of intelligence comes from published material. Since South Africa is a modern, industrial country, we were able to acquire information covering almost its entire infrastructure. This included everything from road, rail and power networks to national key points and strategic objectives. Pretoria's predilection for propaganda provided rich pickings from a range of military and police literature.”

17) These guys ran a marvelous early warning system that got citizen conscripts, when called up, to call in to telephone answering machines.

18) They pioneered the integration of maps, telephone books, index cards, and brain power in charting all the unoccupied farms across the country, ultimately plotting routes from the border all the way to Pretoria.

19) When De Klerk legalized the ANC, they were initially taken in and got sloppy with security. The author does a fine job of showing that De Klerk, while bowing to the inevitable in the end, was much more duplicitous and hostile to the ANC after starting the reconciliation process, than most in the West realize.

20) The author (who is now the Minister for Intelligence Services after having been the Deputy Minister of Defense) appears to be skilled at understanding the value of the media, and the importance of detecting and fighting disinformation early on.

21) His chapter on his tenure at the Ministry of Defence could teach us something about transformation and how to accelerate it.

In the end, and over-all, I am left with four impressions:

a) Morality really does matter, as does mass. A mass of people with morality is more powerful than an elite with guns.

b) Torture and murder by minions can be forgiven and understood–it is their political masters who must be held accountable.

c) Women are the best. the most steadfast revolutionaries–and their men could not survive decades of hardship without the steadfast commitment of their companions.

d) South Africa is ready (he quotes Thabo Mbeki) to make its own history.

For myself, I am quite certain that Ronnie Kasrils is going to lead South Africa's intelligence community in a way that no other national intelligence leader could possibly understand: in the service of the people, harnessing and inspiring their collective intelligence, placing intelligence in the service of the people.

This is an exceptional person…the real deal.

2004/12/242009/12/04

Review: Counterculture Through the Ages–From Abraham to Acid House

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research

From Socrates to Brand, Sterling, and Rheingold: Good Stuff,

December 25, 2004

Ken Goffman a.k.a. R.U. Sirius

I found this book in an airport, and bought it for three reasons: 1) because Bruce Sterling plugged it; 2) because my 15-year old is well on his way to being part of the emerging counter-culture; and 3) because I do believe that “power to the people” is now imminent–not if, but when.

It starts slow, quickly improves by page 50, and as I put down the book I could not help but think, “tour de force.” This is both a work of scholarship and an advanced commentary that puts counter-culture movements across history into a most positive context.

Across the ages, the common currency of any counter-culture is the will to live free of constraints, limiting the impositions of authority. Indeed, it is very hard not to put this book down with an altered appreciation for hippies, war protesters and civil rights activists, for the book makes it clear that they are direct intellectual, cultural, and emotional descendants of both Socrates and the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

From Socrates to Taoism, Zen, Sufis, Troubadours, the Enlightenment, the Americans, Bohemian Paris, and into the 1950's through the 1970's, the author's broad brush review of the history of counter-culture in all its forms is helpful to anyone interested in how the next twenty years might play out.

The bottom line is clear: we need the counter-culture, and it is time for this century's culture hackers–of whom Stewart Brand may be the first–along with the author–to rise from their slumber.

Some side notes:

1) An underlying theme, not fully brought out, is that anything in excess or without balance can be harmful. Absolute dictatorship by religions is as bad as absolute secular dictatorship. Science without humanity, humanity without science.

2) The Jewish religion is favorably treated in this book as perhaps the most counter-cultural and individualistic of the religions. I found this intriguing and was quite interested in some of the specific examples.

3) I disagree with the author's attack on Roger Shattuck's “Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography,” and would go so far as to say that the two books should be read together, along with “Voltaire's Bastards,” “Consilience,” and a few of the other books on my information society list.

The author concludes somewhat somberly, not at all sure that there is much good ahead. He very rationally notes that before we begin the next big counter-cultural movement we should probably focus on fundamentals first: do we have enough water, energy, food, medicine?

I agree with that, and I agree with John Gage's prediction in 2000, that DoKoMo phones in the hands of pre-teens, and Sony Playstations at $300 with access to the Internet, are irrevocably changing the balance of power. Jonathan Schell is on target in “Unconquerable World: Power, Non-Violence, and the Will of the People,” and both Tom Atlee (“The Tao of Democracy”) and Howard Rheingold (“Smart Mobs”) as well as James Surowiecki (“The Wisdom of the Crowds”) all show us clearly that information is going to out the corrupt and restore balance to our lives. It is not a matter of if, but when. Collective intelligence–public intelligence–is here to stay.

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 Qur’an Translation

4 Star, Culture, Research, Religion & Politics of Religion

Print too small, looking for easier version to study,

December 12, 2004

Sayed A. A. Razwy

As a purely administrative note, with all due regard for what is surely a very fine translation, the print in this book is too small to support careful study. I bought this book, am glad to have it, but the publisher made a mistake in seeking to put too much small font print on each page. For a subject of this importance, what is needed is an 8.5 x 11 text with annotations and a syntopicon.

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: Leadership and the New Science–Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised