(RESILIENT BLOG) Government and Corporate Transparency Are Resilience Indicators

RESILIENT CORPORATION'S STOCK-IN-TRADE IS BASICALLY TRANSPARENCY IN THE SERVICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE.  Everybody talks about resilience, but few can agree on what it means because it's so inherently specific to any enterprise's goals and missions.  That's why we define resilience as an organization’s capacity to anticipate disruptions, adapt to events, and create lasting value.  That last bit about "lasting value" may strike you as a bit of a punt on our part - Shouldn't you be more specific? But if you're talking to the entire universe of public and private enterprises out there, you need to leave in that definitional space for them to individually declare what it is they're trying to protect in terms of their core enterprise functioning/service/goal . . .

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Dependency as Vulnerability Means the Best Cyberdefense is a Wicked Cyberoffense

NATIONAL SECURITY, AS A BUSINESS DOMAIN, IS DRIVEN BY THE MANTRA OF "BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.  When we're just talking among ourselves, the conversation remains professional.  But there's always that temptation to go all apocalyptic when you take those conversations into the public realm.  It's the old if you only knew what I know trump-card that any professional has a hard time not using.  We can currently blame this dysfunctional dialogue on the media (driven to sensationalism) and the Internet (nutcases galore), but we cannot dismiss the grounded reality at the core of these discussions, which is dependency as vulnerability . . . 

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Check it out: "The Past as a Prologue: The Future of the U.S. Military in One Graphic"

The author is Daniel Sukman -- strategist in the U.S. Army and a member of the Military Writers Guild. 

Interesting and ambitious look at US military operations since 1980, positing logical operational postures for the Combatant Commands on that basis.  Starts off with a fascinating world map, and then goes through the COCOMs individually.  Very nicely executed.

The conclusion caught Dave Emery's eye, so he sent it to me.

Conclusion

The New Map…The Non-Integrating Gap aligns with U.S. Operations over the past 30 years

Interestingly, this review of operations since 1980 confirms the Non-Integrating Gap theory proposed by Thomas Barnett in his seminal book, The Pentagon’s New Map. According to Barnett, areas of lesser development — Latin America, the Middle East, and areas of the Pacific — constitute this gap. Moreover, use of the military element of national power tends to occur in these areas. Nations outside of the gap tend to resolve conflict without outside intervention.

To address global requirements, Barnett introduced the concept of the Leviathan and Sysadmin force. In Barnett’s paradigm, the focus of the Leviathan force is major combat operations. The focus of the Sysadmin force is other missions ranging from humanitarian assistance to “Phase 4” nation building activities.

The creation of the Sysadmin and Leviathan force as envisioned by Barnett may not achievable in an era of fiscal constraints. However, the joint force should prioritize the ten missions outlined in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review per geographic area of responsibility. Using the past as a prologue indicates the feasibility of this approach.

(RESILIENT BLOG) Rating US Healthcare Systems On Infectious Diseases: Which US States Are Most Resilient?

IN THE ADVANCED WEST, WE'VE LONG AGO SHIFTED OUR THINKING ON HEALTHCARE FROM INFECTIOUS DISEASES TO CHRONIC OR "LIFESTYLE" DISEASES.    Why?  Vaccines, antibiotics, and better sanitation in general put most infectious diseases (and subset communicable diseases) in the West's rearview mirror, compared to the East and South. Plus, they've been our biggest killers for a long time, thanks to modernization. Moreover, the big medical gains that we've seen with globalization's spread include a strong shift from infectious to chronic diseases in the "rising" East and a similarly unfolding shift across the South.  Now, of the top-ten killers in the world, according to the WHO, seven are considered chronic problems  That's the good news ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) EU Leapfrogs US On Data Privacy Rules – And Punishments, Creating A Regulatory Disruption

THE EUROPEAN UNION FANCIES ITSELF AS A "RULES SUPERPOWER," meaning it creates new rules within its ranks and, by the power of its economic heft, they are effectively "exported" to other regions in a sort of regulatory osmosis (you do business with Europe, you adapt to those rules, those rules spread throughout your enterprise).

Fair enough, and certainly something the U.S. has been doing on trade for decades ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) How Climate Change Will Test Our Resilience On A Very Local – Even Intimate – Level

LIVING IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, ONE DOESN'T EXPECT TO CONTRACT ESSENTIALLY TROPICAL DISEASES LIKE MALARIA (see Lancet's chart on left), and yet, would you be surprised that, in the early-to-mid-19th century, Norwegian pioneers settling in Wisconsin - as a rule - feared malaria significantly more than cholera?  Malaria actually remained endemic in much of the United States (more in the South, obviously) through the 1940s, whereas today in a state like Wisconsin, virtually all cases that present themselves (roughly a dozen a year) feature travelers just back from tropical locations.  But that's changing, per a great WAPO in-depth story of a few days back ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Everybody Talks About The [Insert Gripe Here], But Nobody Does Anything About It . . . Without First Establishing Metrics

Resilient CorporationTHE ORIGINAL QUOTE, MISTAKENLY ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN, CONCERNED THE WEATHER, BUT WE COULD EASILY INSERT "RESILIENCE" TODAY - ALSO MISTAKENLY. It would be a mistake because a lot of people all over the world are working resilience, and yet, like any triumphant management buzzword (big enough to create a C-suite position trend), there's a significant range of thinking as to what the term actually means - hence the interesting blog post ("What is This Thing Called Resilience") by a Harvard academic last year on that very subject. The author, Eric J. McNulty, currently serves as director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard's JFK School ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Resilience Begins In Your Head – Or, You’re Only As Brittle As You Think You Are

Image courtesy of nattavut at FreeDigitalPhotos.netAGE IS WHATEVER YOU THINK IT IS.  YOU ARE AS OLD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE - MUHAMMAD ALI.

Well, a couple of new medical studies suggest that your lifelong attitude toward aging and cognitive decline may significantly shape your risk of suffering Alzheimer's Disease in your elder years:

In the first study, researchers looked at data from 158 healthy people without dementia enrolled in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). In order to find out how people in the study felt about age stereotypes, researchers used a scale with statements like “older people are absent-minded” or “older people have trouble learning new things.” People in the study gave these answers when they were in their 40s ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Globalization = Industrial Agriculture = Monoculture = Loss Of Resilience?

WHEN IT COMES TO THINKING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (TEOTWAWKI [tee-oh-tuh-WA-ki] as we used to call it during the Y2K build-up), science fiction films provide a great venue for projecting today's fears upon tomorrow's technological landscapes. But those fears shift over time. My favorite example:  I grew up with "Soylent Green" (so many people, we've got to eat them!) but settled into my middle-age with "Children of Men" (nobody's having babies anymore!). What happened between those two films was (a) China's one-child policy and (b) ultrasound technology reaching India and allowing abortions en masse (naturally in favor of males - just like China, which "exported" the surplus females via transnational adoption) ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Internet Censorship As An Inverse Indicator of National Resilience

FREEDOM HOUSE RECENTLY ISSUED ITS 2015 REPORT ON INTERNET FREEDOM, a timely notion given the ongoing debates about encryption, monitoring of social media, etc., in the wake of recent terrorist attacks ... 

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(RESILIENT BLOG) President Obama Calls Upon America To Be “Resilient” In The Face of Domestic Terror Strikes, But What Does That Mean?

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S ADDRESS TO THE NATION LAST NIGHT spoke volumes about how we as Americans view the ongoing worldwide struggle with violent extremist organizations, a category within which Islamic terror groups present the biggest immediate challenges.

He began with a description of the San Bernardino shooting, the perpetrators, and the national and local responses to the crisis.

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(RESILIENT BLOG) America's Strange Resilience In The Face of Mass Shootings: Is A Tipping Point Looming?

TRUMPETED AMIDST BLANKET MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE SAN BERNARDINO MASSACRE is this stunning fact: America has averaged just over one mass shooting (4 or more dead) a day for 2015 (see WAPO chart on left, clicking to enlarge).  That's right.  Mass shootings are now the norm in America.  Heck, San Bernardino was one of two mass shootings in America yesterday (the other one getting only three paragraphs of local newspaper coverage in Georgia).

If that makes you feel queasy, then you still have a conscience.

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Beepocalypse (Not So) Now: The Fundamental Resilience Of The US Beekeeping Industry

WHEN WE SPEAK OF ANY ENTERPRISE'S INHERENT RESILIENCE, we're often talking about its ability to regenerate capacity despite the intervention by some degredating external variable - e.g., an attack or disaster.  Typically, something's got to give, for some period of time, when it comes to your product or service provision:  quality, reach, frequency, price, sheer volume - something. Thus, one question for any enterprise when it comes to thinking about building up its capacity for resilience in the face of disruption is, Which "give" does the least amount of long-term damage?  Here, the simplest example would seem to be market share - as in, What did the event, relative to your resilience, cost you in market share?

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(RESILIENT BLOG) China’s RMB To Become IMF Reserve Currency, Crowding Out Aging Europe and Japan

YESTERDAY THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF) ANNOUNCED that China's renminbi would become its fifth designated reserve currency, joining the US dollar, EU euro, British pound, and Japanese yen.  The move comes in response to a several-year campaign by Beijing to have its currency thus credentialized.  For now, central banks around the world hold only about 1% of their reserves in RMB, but Beijing has created an outsized latent reserve currency presence (another 5%)  by concluding numerous significant currency swap deals with major trading partners.  The latter scheme was apparently enough for the IMF to finally move on China's strong desire.

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