"Inventing Niagara" Tells Unique History of Cultural Icon

My parents honeymooned at Niagara Falls in 1955.  I visited once in the early 1980s.  I've always thought of it as a natural attraction surrounded by lots of tourist traps in a region struggling with its post-industrial economic fate.   Ginger Strand's "Inventing Niagara:  Beauty, Power and Lies"  gave me a comprehensive tour, including the seventeenth-century discovery of the falls by LaSalle and Hennepin, treaties and conflict with Native Americans, early landownership, tourist development, hydro-power development, massive industrial contamination, and contemporary economic renewal efforts.

Today, Niagara Falls, while still beautiful and popular, is at the beck and call of hydro-power operators.  Half to three-quarters of the Niagara River is diverted for electrical power generation, but the falls have been rebuilt so that they still appear vigorous and full.  They are actually turned up each morning during the peak tourist season and turned down each night to capture more water to generate electricity.

"The Bowery Boys" New York History Podcast Illuminates and Entertains

I have been a fan of New York history for a long time, and I recently discovered a podcast that I find somewhat addictive.  "The Bowery Boys", no, not the infamous New York Gang nor a group of  actors from the 1930s and 1940s, but two enthusiastic, quirky and friendly-sounding historians and commentators. So far, I have listened to their podcasts on Penn Station, some of the lesser-known islands surrounding Manhattan, and Robert Moses. Tom and Greg have a true gift for engaging their audiences. Their podcasts are holographic, in that each not only focuses on a particular topic, but tells the history of New York City, and often the United States,  from a particular perspective. The podcasts are therefore highly complementary, and can be enjoyed in any order. For more information, see The Bowery Boys blog or subscribe using iTunes or other podcast aggregators.

1995 Account of CIA Mole Yields Historical and Organizational Insight

Betrayal:: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy is a fifteen-year-old account of a generally incompetent, alcoholic and cynical CIA agent who, in the throes of an expensive divorce and remarriage, began passing highly classified information to the KGB, the Soviet Union's predominant state security and espionage organization.   In 1985, the first year of his treason, he exposed about a dozen Soviet double agents, condemning them to imprisonment, interrogation and death.  In few short years, his work led to the destruction of the entire network of Soviet CIA collaborators, each of whom had lost faith in the KGB or the Soviet system as a whole, and entrusted their lives to the CIA.

"Betrayal" is also a gripping recollection of the end of the Cold War, including the Iran-Contra affair, US support of the predecessors to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It also recounts the some of the intricate competition between the CIA and KGB.  For example, in 1986 KGB worked to divert CIA attention from Ames by arranging the seduction and compromise of  US Marine embassy guards Clayton Lonetree and Arnold Bracy in Moscow.

The most noteworthy part of the book is not the Cold War intrigue or Ames' perfidy, but rather the organizational inertia of the CIA, an elite organization with many highly-educated and well-connected employees.   Despite the carnage of intelligence sources and Ames' almost constant irresponsible, suspicious and drunken behavior, it was 1991 before the CIA began looking for a mole in its ranks, and 1994 before the FBI arrested Ames and his wife.  While the CIA is particularly burdened by the need for secrecy, most organizations and industries guard their internal affairs carefully.  Without effective external controls, reviews and cross-pollination, any organization or industry can enter a moral and perceptual reality of its own making.   Paul Krugman recently wrote that Wall Street requires adult supervision.  So does any other human endeavor.

"Deep Dive" Provides a Whirlwind Tour and Toolkit for Business Strategists

The book uses the pearl diver as a metaphor for the
strategist

Deep Dive: The Proven Method for Building Strategy, Focusing Your Resources, and Taking Smart Action is an engagingly written,  well-organized and shamelessly self-promoting  business strategy guide by consultant and speaker Rich Horwath.  The book, which also references scholarly publications extensively, is a quick, inexpensive and worthwhile business read.  It explains exactly what strategy is and how to develop and evaluate it.  While it is directed primarily at senior business leaders, it is also valuable for entrepreneurs, department and team leaders, as well as anyone developing their own career strategy.  

Horwath defines business strategy as "the intelligent allocation of limited resources through a unique system of activities to outperform the competition in serving customers."   Competition occurs within  industries, but also within organizations and between individuals.  Even within well-established enterprises, departments and individuals compete for responsibilities, influence and resources.

The book is replete with lists of definitions accompanied by supporting examples and diagrams.  For example, there are two "lenses" of strategy:  Performing activities that are different from those of the competition, and performing similar activities in a different way.   Doing the same thing in the same way, just better, does not yield competitive advantage.  In fact, Horwath uses a biological metaphor to advance a "Principle of Competitive Exclusion", that no two functionally identical competitors can co-exist.

Horwath identifies three disciplines of strategic thinking:

• Acumen: development of insights through careful research, analysis and thinking
• Allocation: making the trade-offs necessary to focus limited resources
• Action:  executing strategy to achieve goals

The book is full of graphical and tabular tools for strategy development and evaluation.  In fact, I purchased the book because it gave clear instructions for developing an activity system map, which is a high-level representation of business strategy.

While the book has an upbeat and engaging tone, it does not minimize the challenge of successful strategy development and implementation.  Not only does it require a lot of disciplined and collaborative work, but it is fraught with pitfalls such as group-think, confirmation bias and the desire to justify sunk costs.

At the end of "Deep Dive", there is, not surprisingly, a mini-chapter on how Horwath stands ready to help further, but this does little to diminish the overall value of the book, which could serve as a prelude to deeper engagement for business leaders and other strategists.

"The Ghost Map" Portrays a Triumph of Science over Stubborn Ignorance

 A variant of Dr. Snow's map, showing 1854 cholera cases in London
clustered around the Broad Street pump (click to enlarge)

Steven Johnson's 2006 book, selected for Portland's Everybody Reads 2010 program, is a gripping and rigorous work of historical nonfiction and interdisciplinary analysis.  It shares many urban concepts with Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution and David Owen's Green Metropolis, but approaches them differently.  "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World"chronicles the 1854 cholera epidemic that struck London, a vast city  overwhelmed by accumulations of human waste.  City leaders and physicians, deeply convinced of the notion that miasmas, or foul smells, cause cholera despite clear evidence to the contrary,  were ineffective and often counterproductive in combating the disease.   "The Ghost Map" tells the story of physician John Snow and cleric Henry Whitehead, who traced the source of disease to a neighborhood pump contaminated by seepage from an adjacent cesspool.    

"Welcome to the Urban Revolution" Navigates the Essentials of Successful Cities

By 2050, 70% of the world’s people will reside in cities, and the world’s population will likely peak at over 9 billion.    While people have been migrating to cities since the advent of agriculture the final phase of this migration will occur in the coming decades.  During this final phase, the world is organizing into networks of increasingly interconnected cities that are challenging nation-states for world influence.  By the middle of this century,  Jeb Brugmann envisions an interconnected Global City, which he explains in "Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World".  

What makes cities successful and migration from rural to urban areas so inevitable?   Brugmann identifies four urban advantages that attract migrants and drive prosperity:  density, scale, association and extension.  Urban enterprises that involve large numbers of people or goods in close proximity benefit from cities' density and scale.    Similarly, urbanites migrants have the opportunity to associate with a greater volume and variety of people relative to their rural counterparts.   The final urban advantage, extension, hinges on the superior urban communications and transportation infrastructure, along with familial and communal  relationships that persist through diasporas.  

City residents can combine the four urban advantages very powerfully through the organic or intentional practice of urbanism.   The citysystems that result are tightly coupled value networks that nurture and exploit the economic, social and cultural assets of urban residents.   Brugmann describes the migration of rural cattle herders to Dharavi, a suburb of Mumbai.   Urban migrants and their descendants use their familial and communal connections  to procure hides from the countryside. Dharavi leather industry workers produce high-quality goods in the dense, multipurpose neighborhoods in which they live and work, often in mixed use structures.  Their finished leather  goods find markets in the upscale stores of Mumbai, but are also distributed globally through Mumbai’s port facilities.  While this example of urbanism is organic, or unplanned, Brugmann sees intentional urbanism as critical to sustainable urban futures, and his book serves as a primer to aspiring urbanists.

Citysystems are robust, durable and adaptable, since they are owned, nurtured and governed by their residents.  But if the local establishment denies its communities

International Payment Card Processing Provides a Model for Aviation Security

Like many other bloggers, I have been contemplating the Christmas Day "crotch bomber" attack on Northwest Flight 253. President Obama, among others, has cited the failure of government agencies to properly share information. I'd like to propose a Global Transportation Safety System (GTSS) based on our international systems for processing credit and debit card payments.