5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Gift for Unemployed Smart People,August 31, 2012
I am a 60-year old unemployed smart person with no pensions, and received this book as a gift. It came to me as I am in the middle of writing what I hope will be a seminal work on the future of public governance, and to my enormous surprise, not only has the book been a “pick me up” of a read for me as the unemployed smart guy, it has also been relevant to my new book.
The author's core message is: the world is random, embrace that, seek out as much random as you can handle, be alert for “aha” moments, and act instantly to take advantage when such moments occur.
At the very end of the book the author says that one should use randomness to one's statistical advantage, which is to say, embrace the random, chase the random, respect the random, and your chances of “scoring” in some way will be better.
I am loading an image above that includes the word diversity, in part to highlight why I connected immediately to the author's story of how innovation is inspired by diversity, what some CEO's who have a hard time understanding Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) programs can instantly get: a side door for insights that do not occur to white, well-fed, preening males.
The author discusses very ably how “old world” is about rules and norms, this is a world where 10,000 hours of practice at anything will indeed make you a world champion, because the parameters are fixed and the rules don't change. In today's world, on the other hand, where a woman's slap can trigger a revolution in Tunesia and the downfall of Libya's dictator, not only are the “expedrts” wrong most of the time, but open platforms change everything–there are no binding rules (to which I would add, governments are so screwed up and ineffective that three fifths or more of the global economy now routes around government).
5.0 out of 5 stars Foundation Work Not Yet Appreciated,August 28, 2012
In 1992 I was the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and with the support of the Marine Corps, sought to get National Intelligence Topics moved from denied areas that were few in number and declining in importance, toward “low-intensity” threats and conditions in the Third World. The Marine Corps also tried to shift the US intelligence collection system from “priority driven” (collect over and over on the same limited set of targets) to “gap driven” (do a first pass on everything, then start over focusing on gaps). I've been thinking for a very long time about the deficiencies in US diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME) predispositions, bias, capabilities, and Achilles heels. I had more or less given up on the US Government specifically ever coming to its senses, when a bolt of lighting came out of the blue — Admiral James Stavrides, Supreme Commander for NATO, gave a TED talk about “open source security.” That is code for a complex range of things called Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Stabilization & Reconstruction (S&R), Public Diplomacy, and International Assistance, among other things. The US stinks at all of them, in part because we do not have a Whole of Government strategy, operations, intelligence, and logistics approach to anything — stovepipes, each badly managed and crossing wires, seem to be the standard. The “M” in the Office of Management and Budget is not just silent, it is non-existent.
While I have read many other books relevant to the ideal of creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, this book was recommended to me as a starting point for avanced thinking in non-violent peace and prosperity operations, as I like to think of them, along with the author's previous work, The politics of nonviolent action (Extending horizons books).
This is a practical book with very specific case studies and very specific itemizations (198 of them) that may replicate some of the author's earlier work, but easily make this one book a stand-alone reference work for advanced studies by diplomats, warriors, and policy wonks long isolated from the real world. This book is not a replacement for Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress or Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. The three go well together.
This is a multi-purpose volume. One can skip the case studies and ingest the beginning and the end, which is what I did, or one can use the volume as a distributed reading and research exercise–if I were using it each case study would be the foundation for a student paper on what never happened — the obliviousness of the UN, NATO, the US, etcetera, to the non-violent intervention points and the importance of NOT persisting with support to dictators and foreign military sales. As an aside, the dirty little secret of the CIA is that they are never serious about deposing evil, they just like to toy with dissidents on the margins — the best documentary on this long-standing fact is Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times.
I value the book for the brevity of its main point: non-violent power is real and practical and has many manifestations (most of them not really known to me in a coherent scheme before reading this book). State power is context dependent, and much — *much* — more subject to public will than most realize.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 for Intelligence & Integrity, 4 For Lacking Visualizations,August 28, 2012
As an intelligence professional constantly dismayed by the lack of both intelligence and integrity in the profession, and as someone who has specialized in “Information Pathologies” for the last 20 years, I have to rate this book into my top 10% across over 1800 books reviewed here at Amazon, it is beyond a 5, it is a six. This is a profound, provocative book that re-establishes the gold standard in ethical, holistic analytics.
The book is too important to leave it as is, a bland 300+ pages of text. While the index and footnotes are world-class, there is no annotated bibliography and not a single visualization (I am loading three images above but they barely scratch the surface). This book needs to be republished and to include a series of at least ten but ideally closer to twenty visualizations of both the reality of Jewish communities over time, and the intellectual genealogy of the Jewish myth.
As the leading Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories (access my Amazon reviews by category and star rating at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog), and as an academic, government, and commercial intelligence professional who obsesses on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I put this book into not just my top 10% (roughly 200 books in past decade) but in my top DOZEN books across my lifetime. The methodical, ethical, integrative, holistic, balanced manner in which this author has carried out his work is in my view the GOLD STANDARD for what any intelligence professional should be capable of aspiring to. Certainly this book is ideal as a foundation for a critical analytics course in which the students–including especially mid-career students that have gotten by on cutting and pasting and regurgitating crap by others–are forced to confront the multiple realities that include every Information Pathology known to man, including history books that are fiction, political statements that are outright lies, and a recurring pattern of war crimes that regardless of what they are called (e.g. settlements, isolation by ghettoization, etcetera) are war crimes.
As I went through this masterful work, the phrase “render unto Ceasar” kept popping into my head. The author develops his arguments, his proofs, and his critique of the historiography of others in a most compelling manner (but absent the visualizations which drove me crazy throughout).
At a time when the Catholic Church is grappling with secrecy versus the truth in dealing with the recurring global scandals of child molestation, and also grappling with theological truth versus scientific truth, this book could not be more timely.
If all of the very latest insights and innovations could be jumbled up in a blender with the history of civilization, this is what would come out once distilled to the essence.
The book strikes me as the answer to every Sunday crossword puzzle every invented, revealing the solutions to each one at a time in a manner seems totally perfect.
Potentially a paradigm / mind-set / game changer of a book.
A report to the CoR commemorating the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth, written by one of the four original authors. This broad forecast is “an informed guess tracing the big lines in what I see as the probable global evolution toward 2052…the most likely global roadmap to 2052 so that I would know what I am in for.” Since publication of Limits in 1972, “humanity remains in solid overshoot…and we can discern the early signs of the coming gradual destruction of the ecosystem.” (p.xv)
Five Big Issues toward 2052
“The big question is how fast the transition to sustainability will happen…the sustainability revolution has started, but is still in its infancy.” (p13) The transition will require fundamental change to a number of the systems that govern current world developments. The next 40 years will be strongly influenced by how we handle five central issues:
1) The End of Uncontrolled Capitalism: “slow and insufficient response to our challenges will dominate”; old-fashioned capitalism will survive in parts of the world, but will be strongly modified elsewhere;
2) The End of Economic Growth: continuing technological advance will come to our partial rescue, but lack of space and cheap resources will force solutions with a lower ecological footprint to fit within the carrying capacity of the planet;
3) The End of Slow Democracy: the fundamental question is whether democracies will agree on a stronger state and faster decision-making before we run into the brick wall of self-reinforcing climate change;
4) Intergenerational Conflict: the era of generational harmony will come to an end, leading to slower economic growth and a smaller pie to share;
5) The End of Stable Climate: negative impacts will be significant, but not disastrous before 2052; there will be more droughts and floods, and sea level will be 0.3 meters higher; “self-reinforcing climate change will be worry number one, with methane gas emissions from the melting tundra leading to further temperature increase, which in turn will melt even more tundra” (p47); the world will still be operational, but with higher operating costs and scary prospects for the rest of the 21C.
4.0 out of 5 stars An entire book without the words “corruption” or “paradigm failure”,August 19, 2012
I bought this book expecting it to be a six star special, and then was tempted to drop it to three stars for completely missing the point. I've settled on four. It is a brilliant work of scholarship that analyzes varying schools of thought without once connecting to either realities or fundamentals–ethics, for example. I do not mean to be cruel, nor hyperbolize for effect, but as I put the book down it occurred to me that this book is a most extraordinary discussion of the clothes not being worn by the Naked Emperor.
Since those who rave about this book are no doubt the norm — intellectual pedigrees without integrity in the holistic sense — let me preface by brief critical comments by bringing forth the importance of whole systems analytic models, and within those model, the importance of integrity. Integrity is not just about honor — one can be honest on the small things while totally lacking in holistic integrity or social integrity — the extremists within the two-party tyranny that has looted the US treasury certainly fall into this category. While this book speaks to the cost of cultural hegemony, and even the cost of class betrayal from the top down, it never gets to calling a spade a spade, a crook a crook, a failed paradigm a failed paradigm. Kuhn, Morgan, Fuller, and Ackoff would all be disappointed.
Chapter 1 Losing the Words of the Cold War seems oblivious to the military-industrial complex or the fact that both Kennedy and Khruschev had to deal with out of control generals as the greater threat, not one another. Alternative reading:
5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful to Most, Can Be Summed Up as Integrity & Clear Feedback Loops,August 17, 2012
There is no question but that this book is a major contribution to the current dialog, such as it is. As someone who reads a great deal, I have finally come to the same conclusion as Will Durant, Buckminster Fuller, and Russell Ackoff:
INTEGRITY is the one word that matters. If organizations, including political organizations, have INTEGRITY, the nation prospers. If they do not, poverty prevails. INTEGRITY is about much more than personal “honor.” It is about being able to see the whole, connect the dots, achieve rapid constant open feed-back loops among all elements of the complex system, and so on.
Nations fail when education is reserved for the elite, and the elite lose their INTEGRITY. When the burden becomes too great and the masses rebel, they can either re-create the corrupt system they are bringing down, or they can branch toward a system of systems where INTEGRITY prevails.
