Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Seeing the world through fresh eyes Jean Boulay is a remarkable photographer. I find the idea of perspective fascinating - how is it that some of us "see" the world so clearly. Here is his wonderful site.   9:53:58 PM    comment []

War - the Lessons of History - Luttwak's brilliant book on Rome's Imperial Strategy Is the US an empire? I think so. Even if you don't agree with me Luttwak's brilliant book on how Rome held it all together and then lost it is worth a read. My italics in the review Intriguing, October 6, 2002 Reviewer: Glenn McDorman (see more about me) from Lisle, IL United States Edward Luttwak is the premiere scholar of contemporary grand strategy. In this book he brings his unique talents to the problem of Imperial Roman grand strategy. Luttwak has put together a fine and scholarly analysis of how the Romans kept their empire secure, and, how, ultimately, they failed to do so. The book is divided into three chronological sections. In the first Luttwak discusses the system under the early empire (or principate) from Augustus to Nero. He describes this system as being the "Republican Imperial system," by which he means that the system of empire used here was the old hegemonic system employed by the expanding Republic. Luttwak clearly praises this system for getting the most security at the lowest cost. (The Atom Bomb Threat of assured destruction by the Legions) Part two deals with the system from Vespasian to Marcus Aurelius. Luttwak describes the system in this period as being fundamentally different from that of the first. This system reflects the changed nature of the Empire from a hegemonic power to a state power. The chief object was no longer to defend Rome and Italy, but to provide complete security for every province of the Empire. (Is this where we are goiung post 9/11?) The third part is focused on the military (and general) crisis of the third century. In this section Luttwak looks at the cost of maintaining a defensive system in relation to the benefits of doing so. Ultimately, he argues, the Roman Empire had to collapse because the benefits the provinces associated with being a memeber of a larger state were not worth the cost. ( Surely a future if the US has to garrison much of the world?) It has been argued that Luttwak ascribes too much clarity of thought and purpose to the systems he describes. Other scholars have said that there is no evidence to support the thesis that the Roman Imperial machine ever sat down and planned a defensive system. Of course this is true, and does not counter what Luttwak is saying. Indeed, Luttwak himself says that the system was not necessarily planned as a whole, but evolved from responses to specific crises. (Is this not what is hapening now even though Richard Perle could be seen as an architect) He says, actually, that the lack of a "grand strategy" actually led to the collapse of the imperial system in the west. The primary evidence for this, as Luttwak argues, is that in the third period, whenever possible, the Romans reverted to the defensive strategy of the second period despite the fact that it was clearly outdated. Others have argued against Luttwak's analysis by claiming that the tactics used in one part of the Empire were dissimilar to those used in another. He does not make a claim counter to this, though. In fact, one of the strengths of this book is that it provides much detail on the different ways that the overall concept of a particular strategy was employed in the different regions of the Empire. Finally, the language Luttwak uses here is concise and clear, and definitely understandable by people unfamiliar with the jargon of the military and historical communities. In addition to this astute and understandable analysis are lots and lots of excellent maps and diagrams. They alone are worth the price of the book. Anyone interested in the Roman Empire or military history must read this ground-breaking work. As the debate on the policies of the Roman Empire continues, Luttwak's work will continue to be a prominent point of refference. 2:41:10 PM    comment []

The Airlines and the War Here is an excellent blog that follows the health of the Airlines - as we all fly it's good to know what is going on with them 2:23:37 PM    comment []

Just discovered Dave Pollard's site today - excellent material! Thanks to Seb A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS. In a previous post, The Weblog as Filing Cabinet, I proposed that business weblogs could be used to codify and 'publish', in a completely voluntary and personal manner, the individual worker's entire filing cabinet. The key advantage of providing such a capability is vastly increased access to, and sharing of, a company's knowledge. This post outlines a content architecture that could enable this to occur. This architecture would have two principal components: The Enterprise Content Architecture and the Desktop Content Architecture, which are illustrated below. The Enterprise Content Architecture would operate as follows: Rather than using a document submission process or enabling automated knowledge harvesting, as occurs in many organizations today, the individual would simply post to his or her personal weblog all of the documents that would normally be placed in the individual's filing cabinet or saved to the My Documents or Sent E-mails folder. An enterprise-wide interface would be developed to index and publish each individual's posts to the company's Intranet. This interface would allow posting of entire documents, or just document titles or links, and would allow the user to specify whether each post could be viewed by anyone in the company, or selected communities only, or (for confidential information) no one at all. The Intranet would then archive all posts by account, project and/or subject, using the enterprise's taxonomy or an automated taxonomization tool. Newsfeeds and articles purchased from external vendors could be similarly archived. The individual employee would be able to extract knowledge from the Intranet using a variety of tools:  By subject, using a browsable table of contents or catalogue By keyword, using a search engine By subscription to any additions to documents on a particular account, project or subject By subscription to any additions to another person's weblog By subscription to any additions in a specific category on the weblog of any person in a specified community. The knowledge culture change program of the company could be simplied to "Publish Your Filing Cabinet". The Desktop Content Architecture would operate as follows (many commercial weblog tools offer this functionality): The employee would author or amend documents, e-mails etc. using an HTML-capable text/document processor (most commercial weblog tools include one, and allow simple posting from most other processors). Rather than Saving to File or Sending documents, the employee would Post each document to his or her weblog. If necessary, documents could be indexed by the company's taxonomy, and access restrictions specified, at the moment of posting. The employee would access knowledge from the Intranet, Extranet, Internet, peers and external vendors from his or her weblog home page, using any of the following tools: Table of Contents of the individual's weblog, or the enterprise-wide Intranet (browsing) Search Engine to search the individual's weblog, the enterprise-wide Intranet, the public Internet, or the pertinent categories of all the weblogs of a particular community  The News Aggregator for automatic feeds of external vendor and public Internet news, publications, others' weblogs and new posts to the Intranet on specific subjects, to which the employee has 'subscribed' The BlogRoll, to link directly to others' weblogs or send an e-mail to canvass others in one's community The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever. Each employee thus defines his or her own taxonomy (the same way each employee currently decides how to organize and index his or her own filing cabinet and My Documents folder). Each employee defines his or her own communities (by who is included in the BlogRoll), so communities truly become self-organizing and self-managed. Culturally, these two features of a weblog-based content architecture are hugely advantageous, because they turn control over the management and sharing of knowledge to individual employees, allowing them to organize knowledge in accordance with their personal mental models (the way they think and learn), and allowing them to retain pride in and responsibility of ownership of their personal knowledge 'stocks'. The advantages of this architecture are therefore: Much more knowledge is codified and available for sharing (including sharing with customers via Extranets) Knowledge is kept more current and complete The context of knowledge is more apparent and hence richer Knowledge is easier to find Less centralized Intranet management and technology is needed Evaluation of individuals' contribution to organizational knowledge is easier to gauge Less effort is needed to persuade individuals to share knowledge Communities of practice can develop spontaneously and flexibly Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer (the most valuable kind in most organizations) is facilitated, and new knowledge is automatically 'pushed' to 'subscribers' on a timely basis As weblog tools become more powerful and flexible, open sourcing of weblog add-ons increases, and RSS and XML technologies advance and become standard, the justification for migrating centralized knowledge management systems to a weblog-based architecture will grow more compelling. In the meantime, leading-edge knowledge organizations need to be piloting and experimenting with such architectures, if they don't wish to be left behind. [How to Save the World] 9:36:21 AM    comment []

Creating change. From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda. [...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable: Establish a sense of urgency Form a powerful guiding coalition Create a vision Communicate the vision Empower others to act on the vision Plan for and create short-term wins Consolidate improvements  Institutionalize the change The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...] [Seb's Open Research] Good advice 9:28:06 AM    comment []