Monday, April 21, 2003

Iraq - The Intellectual trail behind the war - How 20 years of hard work have paid off Many business leaders are beginning to think about the lessons of the Iraq war. Some questions might be: How did the US Forces manage such coordination between the Army, the Navy (Marines) and the Airforce when we can't get any of our silos to talk to each other? How did they move so fast - when a "pause" was just a few hours - why can't we move that fast? How did they get the initiative and hold it? Why do we merely defend? How do they plan when so much is so uncertain? They surely have a bigger logistics and movement problem than we do but they were able to keep their flexibility when we can't. How have they been so successful in integrating new technology so well? Why can't we use ours - What do they know that we don't about collaboration? How come they have the leaders that I want but can't seem to find? How come Non Coms and enlisted men perform so well when my workers are so unmotivated? Here is a collection of powerful papers (some quite long which are best printed) that tell the story. The story begins in defeat and failure when a group of captains, Majors and Colonels came back from Vietnam determined not to put their Army and the nation through such an experience again. Our 20th century organizational model came from the success of the military in two world wars. Once again it will be worth looking at the intellectual underpinnings of the US Army and Marine Corps to see the network structures for the 21st century that have replaced the traditional Command and control system of the 20th. This is a browse, save and print collection for the real student The Genesis Paper of 1984 - This was written by Colonel Huba Wass de Czege. See how most of this has come to pass The Big Book - Hope is not a Method by Sullivan and Harper - the lead up to Desert Storm and the Downsizing of the Army The New Definition of War - Maj Don Vandergriff is the HR Basil Liddell Hart of our time Boyd - The Core Idea for Shock and Awe - Boyd is the single most influential thinker of the last 100 years on war Culture and the Evolution of Warfare - More by Don Vandergriff OODA Loops Time and Mind - Chester Richards on the Use of OODA in Business and War War as a Cyclical event - Mike Alexander on the Cycles of War OODA - Ken Good's outstanding piece - the Origin of Shock and Awe Shock and awe - The original idea - follow the links in thinking 3:13:43 PM    comment []

Sugar - The Tobacco of the 21st century? This would *kill* Dr Atkins -- Big Sugar wants 25% of diet to be sugar. Big Sugar is furious that the World Health Organization is proposing to officially recommend that no more than 10% of our diets should consist of sugar. They don't even want the notion discussed in public. The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar. "Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science." Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!) [Boing Boing Blog] Sugar, Pop and Fat - Are Soft Drinks the New Tobacco? At the turn of the century the average American ate two pounds of sugar. Do you know what it is now? 160 pounds, and for many of us it's probably twice that. The human body didn't evolve to handle that kind of input. The pancreas works overtime to flood your system with insulin several times a day, every day. By the end of each day, it's completely exhausted and your bloodstream is still jacked up with dangerously elevated levels of sugar. Eventually your pancreas functionality is borderline to failure and you've got adult-onset diabetes. Eventually it fails for good and suddenly you're a diabetic. A study about a year ago got a lot of press. It showed that a child who drank two cans of soda a day WILL be overweight. That's two cans of soda, not "lots of high fat foods." At the turn of the century something like 2 or 3 percent of people were dying from heart attacks and stroke. What is it now? 70% and rising? You don't go from 2% to 70% with a slight decline in lifetime physical activity. But what about a typical lifetime sugar (carbohydrate) consumption increase of eight thousand percent? What do YOU think the connection is? 12:30:11 PM    comment []

Weblogs and the Structural Environment in Organization - Lessons from the US Army and BP THE PHYSICS OF INFORMATION: This phrase has been rattling around my sub-conscious for a couple of weeks now. Ray Ozzie and I spoke at a government event a couple of weeks ago where I met JC Herz. JC was talking about the power of weblogs in organizations. She spoke of the power of weblogs to deliver organization-wide edge awareness, and more importantly, provide weak signal amplification of thoughts and ideas that would be lost without the medium. At several points in the presentation, she referenced the notion of the "physics of information" which caught my attention. JC is on to something here. The Physics of Information could be defined similarly to how we look at the physics of nature: Information is made up of matter, and when consumed by people, creates energy. The "matter" of information is data, and when information contains multiple data points, it delivers meaning. It's also clear that information yields energy. Larry Prusak convinced me several years ago that information is cool, but it's the energy that's created when it is consumed and shared by people that transforms organizational thinking and decision process. It's the collision of people and information that creates the energy which drives decision superiority and/or innovation, and it is borne from highly stochastic, collaborative interactions. But the real operational challenge is understanding the affect of information matter, and understanding what causes the resultant energy. While process improvement is quite interesting, understanding the physics of the information can make enterprise processes scream, thereby ensuring the maximum extraction of value because it can be directed at specific workgroups. Raw meta identification based solely on information matter is only half the job. Tagging the information with constituencies that will turn the information into energy is the missing link in many organizations. [Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog] I suspect that we need more than the technology of blogging to get the most effective"collision" that Michael talks about above. The US Army and BP have worked hard to shift the culture towards cooperation and to find the structural links between the tactical and the strategic that can be bridged with the technology. What does this mean in practice? At one of my clients, a major Family Restaurant chain in Canada, we are trying the following. At the restaurant level we plan to set up the process of using After Action Reviews (AARs) to capture the key experience-based lessons that occur at the work unit. How to deal with rowdy customers, how to take 5 minutes off the order time, what to do when short staffed etc. The Franchisee participates in the local AAR. The Franchisees will be linked with either a weblog or by Groove to each other and will be set up as a Community of Practice. Not only will the lessons from the front line be talked about here but also the strategic direction of the enterprise. Larger topics such as how best to open a new restaurant, new menu items, HR issues etc will be talked about here. I have had a lot of help in this design from Col Ed Guthrie, who worked for General Sullivan (Hope is not a Method) Ed was a key driver behind the Army's ability to learn and cooperate across the silos. The results have been showcased in Iraq. Ed has worked with a number of firms since his retirement including BP. Ed is one of the clearest thinkers on the topic of how you change the culture and install the connecting structures.   9:08:13 AM    comment []

SARS Travel Kit. New from our friends at the CDC: Guidelines for Persons Traveling to SARS-Affected Areas - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) If I go to Toronto next week .. I think I will pack one. (thanks to SARSWatch.org)... [Family Medicine Notes] A useful and comprehensive guide for those of us that will travel to a SARS site 8:43:38 AM    comment []

Sars - How deadly is it? Docs Wrangle Over SARS Death Rate. How deadly is SARS? The CDC estimates the death rate at 4 percent, but other researchers say the actual count may be much higher. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] "Instead, some say the rate should be calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the sum of the number of deaths plus the number of people who recovered, which would exclude those people who are still sick, resulting in a higher death rate. According to Niman's math, the death rate in Hong Kong would be 25 percent, in Canada 21 percent, in Singapore 15 percent and in Vietnam 10 percent. In China, the death rate would be only 5 percent." We still know so little about SARS - but if the death rate is in the 20-30% as mentioned in this article then we could face the type of challenge that the world faced in 1918. Here is an excellent short review of the Spanish Flu The Spanish flu did not come from Spain. It came as do most flu bugs from China. Why do dangerous viruses come from China? The issue is the type of food system in Guangdong. Intensely practical, the locals have a closed loop food system. Humans at the top who feed their feces to their pigs whose feces run off into ponds which feed fish and ducks. The humans eat the pigs, ducks and fish. In this loop animal virus can be altered by the inter species links. Pigs are especially capable of being a vector as they are omnivores and close biologically to the human system.  There seems to be something very dangerous about these types of feedback loops. Mad Cow disease was caused by feeding animal protein back to herbivores such as cows that should not have been eating animal protein. As well as working on vaccines for flu and SARS, should we not look at this process and stop this type of interaction at source. There is more for China to answer for than bad public health 7:53:14 AM    comment []