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INSIGHT INTO THE ENTREPRENURIAL MIND

As the resident tech wizard Critt has defined ” public transcript”today and Dave has published that kind of a limited sketch on his blog Thoughts Illustrated, I can now point to the recent permutations of a side project that I have been involved in for the last couple of months. What began as an idea Critt had for an online ” game” experience has certainly journeyed some distance.

Watching the creative business process unfold has been an education for me, particularly as it involved the IT field in which Critt and Dave are so well versed. Dave’s depth of experience and range of contacts are amazing; I recommend those readers, particularly those who, for academic or professional reasons, drill down deeply into intelligence, military and diplo affairs to the exclusion of other subjects, take a close look at Thoughts Illustrated. Dave regularly highlights emerging tech, trends and links worth knowing about, particularly in regard to networks.

Blogging Note:

More posts to come later this evening….

BEACON SOFT POWER AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY SERIES:DAY 3

For Wednesday’s segment of the series, Paul Kretkowski’s Beacon features a post by Dr. Nicholas Cull , the new head of the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy. A excerpt:

“Public Diplomacy Dateline 1940: The British Cultivate Edward R. MurrowMy all-time public diplomacy coup would be the British decision to cultivate Edward R. Murrow as a means to address the neutral U.S. in 1940. It paid off big-time, both drawing the U.S. into the Second World War and building lasting links between British and U.S. broadcasting communities. I also suspect that Murrow’s approach to public diplomacy was much influenced by his British experiences.”

Read Dr. Cull’s post in full here.

MORE ON UNIVERSALITY

Wiggins at Opposed System Desgn responded to my prior post with further insight into the difficulties of accurately estimating the potential outcomes of a given scenario, with his post “The Limits of Universality“. Commenting on the importance of examining premises, Wiggins writes:

“Albert Wohlstetter often said that the most important part of an analysis was the examination and choice of assumptions. More recently, I believe it was Ralph Keeney who pointed out that millions of dollars and years of effort can be devoted to analyses whose assumptions were decided upon in a superficial five minute discussion. Ed Paxson, who is often credited with creating the field of systems analysis, ran into this issue during one of his studies while he was at RAND. He created a remarkably complex analysis of nuclear combat, but based it upon a modified logistics model so that the goal was to “deliver” the maximum payload of bombs to a specified target list at the lowest cost per pound of bombs dropped (I think I got this account from Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, a solid secondary source but woefully thin on interpreting Wohlstetter). The Air Force dismissed Paxson’s results. “

It is important to note, regarding “ that millions of dollars and years of effort can be devoted to analyses whose assumptions were decided upon in a superficial five minute discussion” that quite often our first good idea about a given subject or problem is not always our best good idea. “Brainstorming” is an overused and much abused term, but done properly, and with an eye to starting a cognitive process rather than securing a finished result, brainstorming is enormously helpful in generating alternatives. Submitting those alternatives to a robustly critical examination before launching forward, is also a pretty good standard practice.

Minutes spent beforehand translates into thousands of hours saved afterward.

STAY TUNED

I have a number of topics today including Day 3 of the Beacon series, but I’m juggling a few projects at the moment. If you have emailed me in the last few days and not yet received a response, I sincerely apologize for the delay. I will be caught-up on my correspondence by late afternoon and back to blogging.