In the run up to Marine Gen. James Mattis‘ deployment to Iraq in 2004, a colleague wrote to him asking about the “importance of reading and military history for officers,” many of whom found themselves “too busy to read.”His response went viral over email.
Security Blog “Strife” out of Kings College in London recently published Mattis' words with a short description from the person who found it in her email.
General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, USMC (Ret)
Their title for the post:
With Rifle and Bibliography: General Mattis on Professional Reading
[Dear, “Bill”]
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
Officially, yes, it’s the biggest single product. But combined, the U.S. exports more scrap and waste to China than any other single product — $11.31 billion in 2011. Growth of waste exports has been quick and steep. In 1997, only $182 million worth of waste went to China. But expect that growth to come to a screeching halt.
[H]ints are emerging that American cities and the companies that sell trash are in for a rude awakening. A recent sign of this comes from Oregon, where truckloads of plastic are piling up at recycling depots because Chinese buyers cancelled their orders, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.
And it’s not just plastic from Oregon. American waste recycling companies are starting to panic. “What I’m hearing from folks in the industry, it’s that just that nothing is going,” the industry insider says. “[China's] not taking anything anymore. It’s a greenwall.”
Infopolicy: The United States Department of Defense has “claimed ownership” of CAD drawings of a plastic, printable pistol. In doing so, they apparently believe they can stop the files from existing. The result is obviously the complete opposite, which calls into strong question the judgment and ability of United States Government to set Internet policy at all.
This is not good news. And guess which country is number one in this category? Do you think this might be the result of the toxins and hormones in our environment, food, and water? This is exactly what one would expect to see in large animal studies designed to study the process of disease.
Additional unintended consequences of GMOS resulting from a view of the earth that values only profits, with no consideration as to wellness at any level. Click through to see the relevant charts. A fully referenced and illustrated version of this article is posted on ISIS members website and is otherwise available for download: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/login.php?location=GM_Crops_and_Water_a_Recipe_for_Disaster.php
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CMS Wire does a great job of providing a monthly update of the latest in CMS news and releases. In their latest edition for the month of May, open source software is taking the spotlight. Read all the details in their article, “Alert: What’s Coming Up for Open Source CMS in May 2013.”
Here is a portion of the many new releases, updates, and products they cover:
“Every month we like to serve up a little open source CMS roundup, and like most months in this busy segment, May is packed with interesting tidbits . . . Content, portal and collaboration expert Liferay has announced an integration with Tibco this week, and the two companies have developed a combined product that will itself integrate with multiple systems. Liferay Portal will begin offering several enterprise Connectivity Adapters that use Tibco’s ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks starting in the third quarter, the company announced.”
Liferay is definitely up to good things as they seek to round out their portal offerings. But the emphasis on open source offerings should encourage users with enterprise needs to explore offerings outside of the realm of CMS. For instance, LucidWorks offers all-encompassing enterprise search for organizations that need a solution ready to go, but can choose to do some customization as desired. The best part is that solutions like LucidWorks are built upon the best of open source strength (in their case Apache Lucene/Solr) but are fully supported with training and customer service.
By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits.
McKinsey & Company, April 2013
After the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly “invaded” the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.
Then they identified what they thought was a comprehensive list of factors that drive a unit’s effectiveness—only to discover, after parsing the data, that the most important factor wasn’t on their list. The critical factor wasn’t having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn’t having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.
Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues. These contributions helped analysts question their own assumptions, fill gaps in their knowledge, gain access to novel perspectives, and recognize patterns in seemingly disconnected threads of information. In the lowest-rated units, analysts exchanged little help and struggled to make sense of tangled webs of data. Just knowing the amount of help-giving that occurred allowed the Harvard researchers to predict the effectiveness rank of nearly every unit accurately.
The importance of helping-behavior for organizational effectiveness stretches far beyond intelligence work. Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.
