Leadership Principles of Lao Tzu

Scholars debate whether Lao Tzu - author of the Tao Te Ching and considered by many the founder of Taoism - actually lived during the 4th century BC as a contemporary of Confucius, or was merely a synthesis of early Chinese thought. Whoever he was, his leadership principles are timeless and required reading for those who seek and hold power.

Show Me the Real Money!

Obama froze federal pay increases for the next two fiscal years, saving a few billion dollars. With the US in the hole for trillions, the pay freeze hardly matters. As usual with this president, he goes back to his playbook of offering little in order to appear a fiscal moderate.

Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results

Through numerous examples, efficiency expert Bill Jensen and hacker Josh Klein show why “hacking,” or working around the corporate structure, is crucial for increasing efficiency and maintaining an edge in the marketplace.


A bit too much ink is spent on getting manager buy-in to hacks, as even the authors concede that managers have a vested interest in their workplace tools. Also, this book would benefit from a more thorough explanation of how increasing complexity is flattening hierarchies and pushing critical knowledge to the periphery where the action is, and away from management. But these are minor quibbles.


Hacking Work is required reading for anyone wanting to work smarter and not harder.

Tanks in Afghanistan: Process vs Context and the Military Mind

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.”
Ferdinand Magellan

The approval by General Petraeus of a U.S. Marine tank company to Afghanistan, after nine years of combat operations, generated lots of media buzz, recalling the rusted hulks of Soviet tanks from that ill-fated adventure. It also seemingly ups the ante for U.S. involvement, clashing with the president’s desire for a near term withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, the real story is the retreat from counterinsurgency doctrine championed by General Petraeus and the attendant “process focused” mindset of military officers.

Colin Powell, Go Away

Colin Powell served as an advisor and division chief of staff in Vietnam and for that, he deserves our thanks.


His later career was almost entirely self-serving. Despite his well documented liberal tendencies, he's always called himself a republican. Early on, I suspect he believed that a black conservative, with a distinguished military resume, would have wide crossover appeal. 

Obama's Experience

This revisits my post from February 2009, right after "the One" took office. It holds up well. I did credit him with writing two books--he may have had help.


In his book Thank God For The Atom Bomb, Paul Fussell notes that those opposed to the bomb were distant from the front and unlikely to associate with any who served there: 

     "The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting in the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret in the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else's."