Public Administration – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/11/302010/12/02

Review: Ideas and Integrities–A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Biography & Memoirs, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, History, Impeachment & Treason, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

cover ideas and integrities — Amazon Page

Buckminster Fuller

6 Star and Beyond–the Essence of Fuller, the Future of Humanity

November 28, 2010

I did not truly begin to understand the breadth and depth of Buckminster Fuller's thinking until I read this book as it deserves to be read, with full attention and detailed notes. This is one of those books that merits–and received from me, a Work Table of core concepts, definitions, obstacles, and solutions, posted online at Work Table [link live at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog].

Although I heard Fuller speak personally at Muhlenberg College and distinctly remember him saying that a housing foundation could support the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, it was not until this book that I understood in detail exactly what he meant: that we are wasting 90% of what we put into buildings. I have previously read and reviewed Critical Path as well as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it is my great privilege to know Medard Gabel, co-creator of the analog World Brain and sole creator of the new digital EarthGame (in concept pending funding).

CORE POINT: True wealth is cosmic energy and the creation of means to deliver to humanity unlimited free energy. Among many other things this creates the possibility of applying energy to create self-contained homes that are lightweight, fully self-contained in water and sewage, and totally green.

CORE CONCEPT: Capitalism and democracy have been perverted by money–those who manage money manage those who manage politics, and they both concentrate on optimizing the false God of money, an abstract concept hardly worth its paper representation, while ignoring–even subverting–the possibility of achieving infinite cosmic wealth on behalf of all of humanity.

CORE CONCEPT: Predatory capitalism on the one hand, and controlled socialism on the other, are both extremes and both fail to meet the needs as well as the possibilities of humanity. Fullerism is at root a non-zero equation.

PERSONAL POINT: This book answers the question I could not answer when a senior executive asked me “what do you do?” Now I know. I am a Comprehensive Global Architect whose objective is Prime Design: From Waste to Wealth (the title of my next book, inspired by this core reading from Buckminster Fuller). All my prior works, including my most recent, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, have been a preamble to what I now recognize is my life's work…I will try to earn another 25 years (I am 58, 58 + 25 is 83 — my family history suggests I will make it.). I am still looking for a country or global organization that wants to profit from doing this.

A few definitions up front:

QUOTE (142): WEALTH [is] the measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities, per capita, per diem.

Advertising destroyed public trust by pre-empting “industrial design” as code for airbrushing superficial changes to move products to market, rather than seeking integral improvements that could be shared with the consumer.

Design-improved livingry increases wealth.

Synergy is the delta between the sum of the parts and their anticipatable outcomes, and the actual outcome not anticipated.

CORE CONCEPTS

Architects deal with the externalities of man.

“At rest” science and understanding (Newton's paradigm) have been replaced by “constant change” (Einstein's paradigm).

Bad housing breeds bad humanity and bad science–the time/energy costs and the materials costs are too high, housing is the socio-economic “runt” of all the professions.

Challenge is IRREDUCIBLE.

Design is innovative re-assembly that adds value.

Design-preventable includes illumination and prevention of corrupt exploitation of materials for inefficient or unjustifiable applications.

Energy mass, energy radiation, energy gravitation (E3) times Intellect (E3I)

Good design would reduce the per capita consumption of building materials from nine tons per person to one ton per person [this is in the developed world–these reductions would allow the extension of the lower tonnage home designs to nine times more people and more–with mass consumption come mass efficiencies.]

Industry is *supposed to be* the organization and application of collective knowledge and action that produces synergy (added value) over the sum of the parts in isolation.

Individual freedom is ESSENTIAL to the expansion of diversity needed to enable collectives to see the whole.

Intelligence masters energy, increases energy, applies energy.

Total Thinking is the intelligent acquisition, ingestion, processing, and exploitation of all relevant information in order to produce efficiencies and effects beneficial to the mission objective.

Wealth is intellect plus energy combined to create capacity [with more free energy making more refined capacity possible].

Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.

OBSTACLES to advancing humanity include:

Advertising in place of genuine progress [should not be a tax-deductible expense in my own view]

“Credit” fueled the perpetuation and expansion of rotten housing at great cost.

Housing is the works of design, the worst of materials, and the worst of applied engineering

Housing as the sucking chest wound in economics [mortgages should not be tax-deductible, this both encourages waste of materials on housing, but also enables the growth of financial fraud]

Managers lack the over-all philosophical discernment to be effective at seeing the whole and building to the whole.

Politics is VERY wasteful, perpetuating inefficient industries.

Specializations are attracting the most gifted, and this leaves the less gifted dealing with integration if they think about it at all. [I always thought this was what business and public administration programs were supposed to do, but having graduated from such a program realize they do not.]

A HANDFUL OF QUOTES

p. 25 “My envisioned transcendental world design plan would be inherently nonpolitical, because it would be utterly independent of any need for authority beyond that to-self-by-self for initiation of its study and development.”

p. 95 In relation to the waste of heavy materials in housing, “…that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.”

p. 246 “The efficiency of the industrial equation is directly proportional to the numbers consuming.” [In other words, capitalism focused on the needs of the one billion rich is long overdue for a redirection of focus to the needs of the five billion poor.]

p.247 “Serve one hundred per cent will involve a world design revolution, not just design of end-products, but of the comprehensive industrial network equations including world-around-livingry-service systems, at regenerative occupancy rentals, mutually installed in anticipatory facilitation of total world enjoyment of individually respected total man.”

p. 249 “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet, who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his coordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”

SOLUTIONS

Energy investments will define the future.

Need a world housing industry. We do NOT need water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure. Distributed housing and small cities connected by high-speed rail should be the norm.

Harvesting of scrap is the next needed Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan.

A HANDFUL OF RELATED BOOKS

Radical Man
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
Human Scale
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The Knowledge Executive
Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2010/11/27

Review (Guest): Breaking the Phalanx

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Force Structure (Military), Priorities, Public Administration

Douglas Macgregor

5.0 out of 5 stars Real Transformation, November 26, 2010

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

In 1997, Colonel Douglas Macgregor provided a well thought out blueprint for affecting a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) within the U.S. Army, and to a lesser extent the entire U.S. Armed Forces. The blueprint, as detailed in this book, apparently served as an inspiration for the restructuring of the U.S. Army from an organization based on stand alone divisions to its current brigade structure. Yet apparently neither the Defense Department (DOD) nor the Army fully accepted Macgregor's remarkably prescient thinking. His goal in this book was to demonstrate the Army's strategic relevance in the 21st Century as force to counter the bewildering multiplication of threats to U.S. National Security that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Macgregor noted that “military strategy” really refers to the use of military power to achieve strategic goals, but how effective that military power would be is a function of force structure, tactical and operational doctrine, and training. He also persuavely argues that RMA is not a matter of mere technological innovation, but rather concerns the willingness of the armed forces to “devise new ways to incorporate new technology by changing their organization, their tactics, and sometimes their whole concept of war.”

Rather interestingly Macgregor adopted two of the then prevalent concepts of `Network Centric Warfare” (although he never uses this term) as the basis for his proposal to restructure the army. He argued that the newly conceived command system known as C4I [SR] (Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence [Surveillance, Reconnaissance] ) offered the means to build a new ground force structure based on smaller more flexible units which he calls “Combat Groups.” He also argued that the Army should adopt a `networked type' of organizational structure based on a C4I system that would have a much flatter command structure than the traditional army hierarchical structure. His argument was centered on historical examples that demonstrated that when command authority was dispersed to smaller units, warfare by maneuver and adaptable tactics leading to battlefield success became possible. This latter was probably one reason why the Army only adopted his force structure concept and not his C4I proposal.

Macgregor also argued that the perennially out of control DOD budget could be brought under control by the sensible method of tying force structure and weapons procurement to actual strategic needs based on a rational analysis of real and potential threats to national security. Although DOD would claim that it always does just this, the evidence suggests otherwise as demonstrated most recently F35 strike fighter.

A remarkable book that is as relevant today as when it was written and is for the shelf of anyone seriously interested in military reform.

2010/11/21

Review: Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Priorities, Public Administration, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Kent C. Myers et al

Beyond 5 Stars–a Foundation Work

November 20, 2010

In combination with the other books that I am reading this week, the first by David Perkins, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, the second by Curtis Bonk, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, this book I have read in galley form, by Dr. Kent C. Myers [strategist and process historian, a disciple of Russell L. Ackoff] with contributed chapters from a number of other individuals, gives me hope.

This is an extraordinarily diplomatic and measured book, a book that can nudge even the most recalcitrant of know-it-all stake-holders toward the “aha” experience that what they are doing [doing the wrong things righter] is NOT WORKING and maybe, just maybe, they should try Reflexive Practice (or at least begin to hire people that think this way).

This is *the* book that could-should lead to the first-ever Secretary General of Education, Intelligence, & Research, IMHO. THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, done with Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) was a proponency book. This book by Dr. Myers et al is a praxis book absolutely up there with the other 6 Star and beyond books that I recommend.

For a magnificent companion book, Will Durant's 1916 doctoral thesis, I strongly recommend Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition. The intermediate books would of course be Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path and Russell Ackoff's Redesigning Society (Stanford Business Books).

2010/11/052011/12/23

Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Matt Taibbi

6 Star Game Changer….Maybe

November 2, 2010

This is an extraordinary book, combining gifted insights and turns of phrase with serious research that has a point worth fighting for: Wall Street led by Goldman Sachs has ripped off the entire US economy, and they still have most people thinking that politics matters.

It merits comment that while Michael Lewis was first, with Liar's Poker, and was recently quoted as saying he had no idea Wall Street would get away with these obvious high crimes against the public for another 30 years, this author takes us all up another level, weaving in everything–politics, culture, sex, booze, LSD, and the occasional rabbid racoon.

The author is especially deft at observing, documenting, and describing the combination of lunatic ignorance and blessed righteous anger within the Tea Party, at the same time that he points out they have no idea that they have been funded and directed by the very people who have stolen their economy out from under them.

I am especially impressed by the author's understanding of how Wall Street has managed to co-opt the very people they are destroying by leveraging the “shared” view of excessive government regulation. I for one absolutely believe that states should start nullifying federal laws and regulations that impair state-based businesses (e.g. butchers and cabinet-makers). What the people being destroyed do not understand is HOW they are being destroyed by Wall Street, which is essentially eating out the foundation from under them.

QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.

Continue reading “Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America”

2010/10/292011/10/22

Review: Wingnuts–How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

John P. Avlon

Theater–Follow the Money to Understand

October 28, 2010

Unquestionable a great book, with one big missing piece: it does not follow the money back to Wall Street. Buckminster Fuller understood in the 1960's that the White House had become theater, I did not understand his meaning until the economic meltdown and my noticing that Goldman Sachs has provided the Secretary of the Treasury for the last six or so Administrations.

The Tea Party, a grand mix of idealistic individuals who really think they have a shot at making a difference, is funded by the Koch Brothers, and all the other wing-nuts this book discusses all have financial underpinning that serve a purpose: to create theater. They are the American version of a political circus that keeps people's eyes off the raw fact that the US is a two-party tyranny with election manipulation so embedded that we no longer qualify as a democracy according to international standards.

NOTE: To investigate funding yourself, just search, my preferred search portal is Duck Duck Go, for <Koch Tea Party funding>

Wing-nuts is an “order of battle” for the extremist fringe, but it does NOT explain why the US government and US economy are in the toilet. For that we need just one word: INTEGRITY (lost).

The wing-nuts are getting their time in the sun because the extreme wealthy that have hollowed out America, exported all the skilled jobs, allowed illegal immigration so they could pay even less for unskilled labor, are now nervous. Bush Junior did his eight, Obama gave Wall Street four more years, right now the best that Wall Street can think of is making the next four years a complete circus.

`All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing' (or words to that effect). Edmund Burke and Justice Brandeis are both cited on this one. It says a lot when two comedians make more sense and demonstrate more integrity than all of our Senators, Representatives, and Executive Branch officials. Perhaps it really does take a comic (or two) to save a Nation.

Just one of many books supporting my suggestion that this is all theater:

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

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) is also free online and provides a sane intelligent alternative to wing-nut theater and the two-party tyranny funded by Wall Street, led by Goldman Sachs.

You can find all of my non-fiction reviews sorted into 98 categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. I have also created lists of reviews (e.g. corruption, education) and two master lists. The negative list is everything that is wrong with America and the world, the positive one everything that is right or could be right. Both those lists are also at the Huffington Post. It's time to restore the integrity of our Republic, that must of necessity begin with Electoral Reform.

2010/10/242010/10/24

Review: Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Harrison Owen

Low-Cost Priceless Guide Worth Hundreds of Thousands

October 24, 2010

It's been my pleasure to know the author of this book ever since he hunted me down after my review of Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, and I have also had the benefit of being a participant in a number of Open Space sessions run by, among others, Peggy Holman, author of Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity and the older The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems.

I cannot over-state the value of this book to anyone who has a complex and expensive problem but cannot afford to get the author there personally. While the book is no substitute for the genius, the intuition, the experience, and the sheer “quiet energy” that the author can bring to any endeavor, it is not just a starting point, it is more than enough to get you through your first self-organized event, and the results are sure to astonish as well as excite about the potential benefits of having the author lead the next session.

Here is how it works in a nut-shell, and I put this into the review because I am not happy with the minimalist marketing information the publisher has provided but happy that Look Inside the Book is activated–use that feature!

1) Everyone who cares is invited to a meeting in a space large enough to accommodate the group. Many events will charge a fee to cover the space, the food, and the travel costs of the facilitators, some events can be free especially if internal. HOWEVER, the diversity of who is invited (i.e. including outsiders, clients, journalists, the lowest ranking maintenance people), THIS MATTERS….A LOT.

Continue reading “Review: Open Space Technology: A User's Guide”

2010/10/15

Review (Guest): Global Networks, Linked Cities

4 Star, Communications, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Economics, Information Operations, Information Technology, Public Administration

Saskia Sassen (Editor)

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost on the Mark, October 15, 2010

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

This book, edited by urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, takes a unique look at the phenomenon of globalization in terms of inter-connected cities held together by commercial ties, telecommunications, and commonality of interests. The book provides some important insights about the role of cities in globalization. Sassen and her colleagues appear to view globalization as creating a networked type of organization with cities serving as nodes and international telecommunication systems serving as connectors. This is a remarkable concept.

Yet the book is seriously flawed by the use of improper or imprecise terminology by its contributors. Terms like `networks', `nodes', and `architecture' are thrown about without much regard for what those terms actually represent. Their constant misuse in this book makes for very confusing reading and obscures the very valid points that the book strives to make.

Although the book was published in 2002 none of its contributors apparently have ever heard of the misnamed Global Telecommunications Network. This is the generic title for a compilation of independently owned and operated international telecommunication (carrier) networks. These networks incorporate domestic and international carriers each of which consists of transmission lines (largely fiber optic cable and satellite) coupled with relays, switching centers and various sub-stations. Nor do any of the authors understand the content carried by these networks is provided by various public and private service providers such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and SWIFT (a private banking service provider). Since the inter-connectivity between cities (and nations) pretty much depends on access to the Global Network, as does international commerce, this is a serious error of omission.

Also there are far too many statements in this book that simply make no sense in terms of telecommunications infrastructures. For example, Stephan Graham informs the reader that “the public, national telecommunication regimes that were ostensibly about throwing electronic networks universally across national space economies are being materially and institutionally splintered” and being replaced by “global strategies.” One can only guess that Graham is trying to say that national telecommunication networks are being absorbed into the Global Network. The seeming inability to use precise terminology leaves the reader confused.

To its credit the book becomes stronger when it moves from the theoretical to concrete examples in Part II (Cross Border Regions) and Part III (Network Nodes) with studies of specific cities. Yet here too one runs into puzzling use of terminology such as in the Beirut study by Huybrechts which he sub-titled “Building Regional Circuits.” `Circuits' in this context is meaningless when what he is referring to is re-establishing Beirut's import-export role as the principal international port in the regional economy.

In the end Sassen appears to have developed a valid way to describe globalization, but failed to establish either a standardized terminology or a valid model of a networked type of organization. As a result this book makes an unnecessarily weak case for globalization as best represented as a networked type of structural organization.