Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

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Review: World Class–Thriving Locally in the Global Economy

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Community and Commerce in the New Era,

April 8, 2000
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
This book sparked my understanding of “community intelligence” and the need for an integrated network of civic leaders, corporate leaders, academic leaders, and social or non-profit leaders all sharing the same “intelligence” on what the threat to the local community is in terms of losing jobs and remaining attractive as an investment. The author boils it down to each community deciding if it is a thinker, a maker, or a trader community, and then setting out to ensure that everything about the community supports that specific kind of business at a “world-class” level.
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Review: Banishing Bureaucracy–The Five Strategies For Reinventing Government

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great Thoughts That Did Not Take Root in USG,

April 8, 2000
David Osborne
Well, the Vice President loved it and the President bought into it, but it did not make a difference. The National Performance Review identified a number of substantive objectives for intelligence reform, and the intelligence bureaucracy was successful in ignoring the White House. I suspect it has something to do with one of the fundamentals: “Unleash-but Harness-the Pioneers.” The U.S. Intelligence Community can't stand pioneers unless they are spending billions of dollars on something really, really secret that has a high probability of failure. Reinvention boils down to uncoupling or deconstructing a whole bunch of stuff, and then allowing the pieces to compete. It requires managers that can “let go” and employees that can “take hold.” Above all, it requires openness and accountability….
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Review: End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Manifesto for Good People Trapped in Bad Organizations,

April 8, 2000
Gifford Pinchot

The seven essentials of organizational intelligence include widespread truth and rights; freedom of enterprise, liberated teams, equality and diversity, voluntary learning networks, democratic self-rule, and limited corporate government. It was this book, and the very strong applause that the author received from all those attending OSS '96, that caused me to realize that the U.S. Intelligence Community is just chock full of very good people that want to change, but are not being allowed to change by the organizational circumstances within which they are trapped-frozen in time and budget.

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Review: The Discipline of Market Leaders–Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Bottom Line, Hard-Hitting Focus,

April 8, 2000
Michael Treacy

There are three disciplines discussed in this book: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. The most important is customer intimacy. “For customer-intimate companies, the toughest challenge is to let go of current solutions and to move themselves and their clients to the next paradigm.”

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Review: A New Archetype for Competitive Intelligence

4 Star, Intelligence (Commercial)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent first step in migrating toward 21st century CI,

April 8, 2000
John J. McGonagle
The authors are serious professionals with several competitive intelligence books behind them, and try in this book to relate the requirements of competitive intelligence to the emerging opportunities of the Internet and information tools-what they characterize and trademark as “cyber-intelligence”™. It's a good book, worth reading.
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Review: HIGH TREASON

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Should be reprinted–a classic of enduring value,

April 8, 2000
Vladimir Sakharov
Not necessarily for students, this paperback from the Ballentine Espionage/Intelligence Library is sensational. I had already been a case officer overseas when I read it, and I read it with real admiration for the Soviet Division and the case officers who had the luxury of doing it “right.” From the overseas evaluations to the discreet subway signal of interest in Moscow to the follow-up that resulted in a recruitment in place and an ultimate exfiltration across the desert of Kuwait, this is a magnificent account of “the way it is supposed to be” in the clandestine service. It has a spy's kind of happy ending-really rotten treatment by CIA security blockheads during the resettlement program, a very long drunken period, hit bottom, and finally get clean and work your way free from the system on your own.
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Review: Wilderness of Mirrors

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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5.0 out of 5 stars

No Winners or Losers, Only Victims,

April 8, 2000
David C. Martin
This book goes a long way toward explaining CIA's intellectual and operational constipation in the 1950's through the 1970's. It follows James Jesus Angleton, who tied the Agency in knots and went so far as to privately tell the French that the CIA Station Chief in Paris was a Soviet spy, and William King Harvey, who literally carried two six-guns both in the US and overseas “because you never know when you might need them.” Included in this book are some serious details about the operations against Cuba, a chapter appropriated titled “Murder Corrupts”, and a good account of how Harvey, in perhaps his most important achievement, smelled out the fact that Kim Philby was indeed a Soviet spy. The concluding thought of the book is exceptional: “Immersed in duplicity and insulated by secrecy, they (Angleton and Harvey) developed survival mechanisms and behavior patterns that by any rational standard were bizarre. The forced inbreeding of secrecy spawned mutant deeds and thoughts. Loyalty demanded dishonesty, and duty was a thieves' game. The game attracted strange men and slowly twisted them until something snapped. There were no winners or losers in this game, only victims.”
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