The books of Feb/Mar 2018
The Good Lieutenant (Whitney Terrell). Mr. Terrell embedded with ground units in Iraq and wrote a fictional book about life in a combat support company of an INF BN. His work centers around a Lt and how the officer led her unit and the changes she underwent during that time. We discussed the book with the author in my War and Fiction class at Stanford. His perspective of deployment experiences varied differently than the other veterans in the class.
The Square and the Tower (Dr. Niall Ferguson). Dr. Ferguson's latest work analyzes the role of personal networks and how they were more powerful than hierarchical structures. For example, is the connectivity to Dr. Kissinger more powerful than political parties. Will facebook and social networking supplant current nation states? Interesting piece would be to look at connectivity of AF leaders to subordinates vs. different career fields or commands.
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller). A historical fiction novel based on the incongruousness of members of bomber group in the European theater in WWII. This classic piece analyzes people's efforts to deal with unexplained situations. In the end, things will work out because "everyone has a share."
Cybersecurity Leadership: Powering the Modern Organization (Dr. Mansur Hasib). This quick read leverages Dr. Hasib's decades of experience as a CIO and looks at the proper place and roles of a CIO and CISO. Quick synopsis which begs the question, where does our AF put the role of the CIO and CISO?
--The CIO is a strategic level thinker. The CIO should never be subordinate to a CFO as all decisions will be based on money and not the strategic direction of the company. The CIO must understand where the organization is going and how best to leverage technology to enable that strategic vision. If a C-suite still uses the CFO-CIO subordinate model (comes from telecommunications days and subordination to CFO), that is a dead give away of future failure in the organization.
--The CISO is an operational planner. The CISO must understand the security vulnerabilities of the operations of the company. If the CISO is a member of the C-suite, then security will have a prominent place in strategic decisions. The lower and lower the CISO position is in an organization, the further removed security will be from decisions. Because CISOs are often the first individual blamed in a breach or leak, and their pay is seldom comparable to other C-suite members, maintaining talent is difficult. Organizations must pay and incentivize at a level to attract the best talent.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. Dr. Diamond analyzes the role of guns, germs and steel shaped our current world. How did a small country like England take over most of the world even with a small population. Why didn't large populations prevail? Uses his analysis from from personally studying areas of the Pacific. https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. Dr. Newport looks at the difference between deep work and shallow work in our lives. Uses examples of people in history that benefited from focused time to accomplish tremendous tasks in short time. This is countered by examples of people trapped in the minutia of e-mail and constant work infringement on downtime. He stated that one company determined that each e-mail cost over 80 cents to produce and the average member of the company sends 500 emails in a week with little actually value returned. Where is the Air Force with that same perspective? https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/
Underworld, by Don DeLillo (fiction). Mr. DeLillo's tremendous descriptive prose is on display in this long novel that links a homerun baseball from the World Series in the 1930s across time to the development of nuclear weapons to the use of retired B-52s as painting canvases in the dessert. Many parts of the book are unnecessary to the plot, but his ability to spend pages describing a scene allows readers to engross themselves in a story. https://www.amazon.com/Underworld-Novel-Don-DeLillo/
Cyberstorm, by Matthew Mather (fiction). Mr. Mather writes a piece on what would happen in Manhattan following a devastation cyber attack on the American power grid following global provocation. It is further complicated by two massive winter storms occurring at the beginning of the outage. Quickly, people that are used to the benefits of technology suffer as the power, information and life-sustaining needs are gone. In weeks, the city is unrecognizable and humans are different.
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