The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Great airplane book. The story of Jim Clarke, the only man to have created three billion-dollar ventures-Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and Healtheon. Documents the shifting of power from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and offers some wonderful insights into the culture. Does not, by virtue of focusing on the one really big success story out of the Valley, begin to address the human waste and carnage from all the failed start-ups.
This may be one of the top three books I've read in the last couple of years. It is simply packed with insights that are applicable to both the classified intelligence community as well as the larger national information community. The following is a tiny taste from this very deep pool: “Instead of fruitlessly trying to predict the future course of a competitive or market trend, customer behavior or demand, managers should be trying to find and deploy all the tools that will enable them, in some sense, to be ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-ready in the brave new marketplace in gestation, where information and knowledge are ceaselessly exchanged.”
This book had a profound influence on me, helping me to understand that the functions fulfilled by an employee dealing with “things” are completely distinct from the functions fulfilled by an employee dealing with “ideas”, and that completely different educational, training, management, and compensation models are needed for the new “Gold Collar” worker. From this book I realized that virtually everything we are doing in U.S. education and U.S. personnel management and training today is way off the mark and at least a decade if not two or three decades behind where we could be in human productivity management.
Mary Ellen, or MEB, is the online broker I turn to when I can't solve something in-house. Her book is a working desktop reference, covering the main commercial online services as well as major Internet channels.
