Recommended Reading

Fast Transients-Positioning for the melee 

Venkatesh Rao has another thought provoking post up at his Tempo blog. Go take a look and then come back here … Play close attention to his distinction between “planning” and “positioning” near the bottom of the piece.

Rao’s concept of positioning & melee moves seems similar to the military’s concepts of operational and tactical levels of war. Even more interesting for business — where these concepts of levels apply only by analogy — they appear to be closely related toshih, Sun Tzu’s framework for employing force or energy.  For those of you not familiar with shih, it’s the title of the fifth chapter of The Art of War and encompasses a variety of concepts including zheng / qi (cheng / ch’i). For an excellent intro, see David Lai’s paper “Learning from the Stones,” available from the Federation of American Scientists.

 The concept of positioning moves is inherent in shih, in creating configurations of great potential. Or, as Gimian and Boyce (The Rules of Victory) explain:

In employing shih, each action is one step in a process that changes the ground, reorients the relationship among things, and creates different possibilities. (p. 121)

A lot of this activity is zheng — according with the opponents’ expectations in order to set them up for decisive strikes. At other times, we may just be developing the situation, trying to create ambiguity and anxiety, and probing opponents to force them to tell us something about their intentions and capabilities (As Gimian and Boyce put it, “if you can’t get destination, go for direction.” p. 126)

If these activities don’t cause the opponent to give up or panic or otherwise quit providing effective opposition (and this is Sun Tzu’s ideal, of course), then we look for opportunities to release the potential energy we have built up in as short, abrupt, “fast transient” a manner as possible, as “when strike of a hawk breaks the back of its prey.” (Griffith trans., 92)

Wise advice from uber-diplomat, Ambassador Ryan Crocker.  No one will listen.

iRevolution –Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge 

CTOVision (Alex Olesker) –General Alexander’s Vision, the New DARPA Director, and More 

Russia blog –Congress Is Getting Ready for the Wrong Move, The Magnitsky Act and Magnitsky Act as a Test for American Democracy 

99.9% of the American public and I wager 90% of their MoC don’t know who Sergei Magnitsky was, why there is a bill in his memory or how it’s passage into law would shape US-Russian relations or that the State Department can already deny foreign officials suspected of human rights abuses entry into the United States. That probably includes some of the bill’s sponsors.

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