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Education Reading Vietnam War

Latest Read: The Early Years

Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 by Ronald Spector. This is the first in a series by the United States Army’s Center of Military History regarding the Vietnam War. This publication provides a critical appraisal of America’s initial steps across Indochina.

In the early 1950s most Americans could not find Vietnam on a map. Ronald documents how lacking any plan for Indochina would eventually draw America into a generational confrontation.

However, The Early Years clearly provides an understanding of events pushing America towards Indochina prior to World War II.

Churchill’s March 1946 famous “Iron Curtain” speech (Full PDF) at Westminister College in Truman’s home state of Missouri set the stage. On April 24, 1950 NSC memorandum 64 identifies a new US position to contain communism across Indochina.

This US position was further solidified by President Eisenhower in 1953 with NSC 162/2. These efforts document well known mistakes and large policy shifts that resulted in our long war in Vietnam. The lessons certainly remain important to this day.

I can quote many sections of this book at length. Yes, this book is that well written. Stumbling right out of the gate, Truman viewed Indochina in an emerging Cold War confrontation.

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Education

’21 summer reading

My summer reading will certainly be an exciting selection of my favorite authors. How many people count an economist or recognized authors who have recently moved to podcasting to continue telling powerful stories?

I cannot recall anticipating three new releases by my favorite authors (plus Dan Heath’s Upstream) all at once. A short preview of each book is below:

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest Read: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. Nicole covers cybersecurity and digital espionage for The New York Times. Certainly this is one of the more anticipated books addressing a new cyber arms race. More than ever before, it is imperative to understand how a global market for Zero Day exploits began and today how it is certainly tipping the scales.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends The Cyberweapons Arms Race

Quite frankly, Nicole’s reporting will stun readers. This book will also surprise long time IT professionals.

As it seems so often in life, by chance, a ‘stumbling’ idea took hold. Initially a company in 2003 began buying exploits from hackers for as little as $75. Fast forward to today, a good iOS zero day commands over $3 million dollars.

Nicole begins her reporting role at the NYTimes by reviewing secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald.

This of course revealing the illegal spying on American citizens by the Bush Administration. At the same time, this project was tapping phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Guardian obtained copies via Greenwald who passed a copy to the NYTimes. This proved to be her introduction to the cyber world.

In addition, Nicole retells the hard lessons from Soviet spying (actually from within the US embassy) in Moscow back in the 1950s. This reveals a good baseline to today’s advanced attacks including the resources and dedication necessary to carry them out.

Cyber weapons for Board rooms

Chapter One’s Closet of Secrets is certainly mandatory reading for organizational leaders. It will become very apparent that organizations must reconsider their outdated understanding of information security. One cannot walk away from this book ignoring an often repeated message: your organization has already been hacked, or your organization does not yet realize it has been hacked. Thus, Nicole makes the case in her interviews with hackers that every computer, phone, network, or storage drive has been compromised.

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Education Innovation Reading TED

Latest Read: Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol. I am very impressed with the messages in this book. Majoring in astrophysics at Cornell, Ozan was also serving on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project. He really is a rocket scientist.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

Ozan went to law school and today teaches at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.

So, when did you first learn to correctly breath? Yes, breath. Can you recall learning how to think? Well, Ozan will teach, as the book title implies like a rocket scientist.

Likewise, you will certainly appreciate learning that scientific thinking can position you for success in life.

Ozan delivers the opportunity to improve how your approach, perceive, analyze, and act in our very chaotic, and complex world.

This book’s insights are across three sections: Launch, Accelerate, and Achieve. Each provides rich examples from a scientific mindset. This will provide new thinking for many.

Chapter 1 Flying the Fact of Uncertainty

Chapter 1 provides a great introduction to NASA thinking. Tackling the identification of uncertainties, Ozan introduces benefits of best-case and worst-case scenarios. This is great thinking for rocketry. In addition, this addresses risk mitigation via redundancies (and deploying margins of safety) that can easily be applied to many organizations.

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Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria. We are certainly living through a transformational period of human history. So, is the pandemic’s aftermath within American control? Regrettably this is unquestionably not a pressing American issue. Yet Fareed offers simple plain advice via a global historical lens.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Firstly, this is not another book about the pandemic. Fareed is focusing on how the global economy is shifting. COVID-19 is unquestionably light years from the 1918 flu pandemic’s impact on our economy.

Indeed America found itself confronting a truly horrific event in an analog world. Today’s impact is certainly global on a digital internet.

Secondly, he is addressing a post-pandemic world. Fareed sees common sense lessons from the 1916 flu pandemic. Can one even imagine responding to COVID during a world war?

America was just entering Europe’s battlefields as the great flu pandemic was also ravaging our country. On the contrary, today’s digital wars with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are aggressively playing out on internet-based battlefields. Yet, America’s initial response to COVID began presenting new challenges:

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

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COVID-19 is accelerating our responses to contain the spread. Fareed identifies key issues that are changing the fate of humanity as we learn of incredible infection rates across both emerging and third world countries.

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