Strategy: Context and Adaptation is definitely a book about strategy, offering many useful insights and practical takeaways for anyone interested in the field...But its greatest value is its function as a time capsule for the SAASS method of teaching timeless ideas, providing a method for the exploration of a subject area that by its very nature can never be formally captured or simply defined. In its essence, SAASS is not about hard-to-find classrooms,or groups of instructors and students stretching from the past and present. Like the classical methods that inspired it, SAASS in its essence is not the physical location where it resides...but rather the living method by which its graduates collaborate to view, investigate, question, shape, and ultimately act in ways that create continuing strategic advantage and serve the vital interests of our nation and its allies.
#Monday Musings: Dave Lyle
Reflections on Memorial Day — Past and Present
Re-grading the Army’s #Human Dimension White Paper
Reflections on the new U.S. Army #Operating Concept: What’s in a Name?
When critiquing high level conceptual documents like the U.S. Army Operating Concept, it’s important to remember what they are and what they are not. They are an attempt to steer already ongoing group conversations into specific directions that the leadership feels are needed to prepare the group for future success. They seek to reinforce or clarify some ideas, discount or refute others, and, most importantly, provide direction on how the organization will address both new challenges and existing unresolved problems. They seek to provide common starting points for the discussion and set the parameters for future debate and exploration.
The Cognitive Domain: A Personal Theory of Power
Complementary mental models hold the social world together. It’s not the lines painted on the road that keep us from careening into each other on the highway, as we sadly find out too often. Paper money has no intrinsic value on its own, unless you like the pictures and holograms, are trying to start a fire, need a bookmark, or have just run out of toilet paper. Online credit purchases do not even require the plastic card anymore, and only work because we collectively believe that strings of ones and zeros — stored electronically in computers that we’ll never see — equal our right to receive services and things from other people, and keep them. In all of these cases, it’s not about the symbolic artifact. Our agreements about what those artifacts represent, and our willingness to act on those beliefs, are what keep the wheels of society turning.