Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
He writes a truly skilled strategist makes a careful study of a complex situation to ascertain the natural inclination of the system (that will make slapout happy), then uses this knowledge to put himself in a position of strength. They use a river analogy to describe: Identify how the river naturally surges and moves and then use these powerful forces. Once others seek to act further downstream, the flow of the situation and power of the river becomes irresistible.
Bill,

Appreciate your well thought out comment, and the river analogy.

So if we were to accept that the Army is a channelized river, and that much time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears were spent to make it so...what can we do to help our beloved river as we watch it silt up, become increasingly saline, experience decreased dissolved oxygen content, and experience volume reductions?

How to get it back to running wild and true?

Dismantling the myriad intellectual dams which choke it, might be a place to start. A damning/hoarding of ideas has obvious security benefits however it obviously leads to a intellectual stagnation cost. So far we have been able to a maintain a balance that allows for a hegemony that's in our nation's favor, but it's a common theme among many in the field - dissatisfaction with the status quo.

How about an American solution? IMHO Harvard Business Review is worth regular review. Business Model Innovation was addressed in the January - February 2011 edition and along the lines of dismantling intellectual dams the following articles were quite interesting:

  • When your Business Model is in Trouble, by Rita Gunther McGrath


  • Reinvent Your Business Before It's Too Late by Paul Nunes and Tim Breene


  • How to Design a Winning Business Model by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Joan E. Ricart


  • New Business Models in Emerging Markets by Matthew J. Eyring, Mark W. Johnson, and Hari Nair


  • The CEO's Role in Business Model Reinvention by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble


These particular articles are built upon the article, in the same issue, How to Fix Capitalism (Creating Shared Value) by Michael Porter & Mark Kramer. It's my sense that Davos, Washington DC and other concentrations of power are still discussing it....but that one has to go elsewhere to find people who are strong enough/concerned enough to try and implement the concept

If this looks like too much reading, underlining, highlighting, note taking, reflecting, and discussing with friends and peers how about a concept we learned all about way back in high school...one that the whole world uses to advance knowledge?

Peer Review by wikipedia

Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. Professional peer review activity is widespread in the field of health care, where it is best termed Clinical peer review.[6] Further, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical discipline, there is also physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review,[7] etc. Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting,[8] law,[9][10] engineering (e.g., software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even forest fire management.[11] In academia, peer review is common in decisions related to faculty advancement and tenure. Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives, particularly as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. This may take a variety of forms, including closely mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.[12]
It has been suggested that traditional anonymous peer review lacks accountability, can lead to abuse by reviewers, and may be biased and inconsistent,[39] alongside other flaws.[40][41] In response to these criticisms, other systems of peer review with various degrees of "openness" have been suggested.

Starting in the 1990s, several scientific journals (including the high impact journal Nature in 2006) started experiments with hybrid peer review processes, often allowing open peer reviews in parallel to the traditional model. The initial evidence of the effect of open peer review upon the quality of reviews, the tone and the time spent on reviewing was mixed, although it does seem that under open peer review, more of those who are invited to review decline to do so.[42][43]

Throughout the 2000s first academic journals based solely on the concept of open peer review were launched (see e.g. Philica). An extension of peer review beyond the date of publication is Open Peer Commentary, whereby expert commentaries are solicited on published articles, and the authors are encouraged to respond.