Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Bureaucracy

Riding the Wildfire: Opportunities for Transformation and Growth During COVID-19

Riding the Wildfire: Opportunities for Transformation and Growth During COVID-19

When a wildfire tears through a forest, attention immediately focuses on the negative—how many acres burned, the impact on the environment, and above all the tragic loss of life. What rarely goes noted, however, is the critical benefit wildfires provide. In many respects, wildfires are the most effective way for many ecosystems to rid themselves of the overgrowth that strangles out and prevents new plant life from thriving. If the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a wildfire, the Department of Defense's bureaucracy is the forest.

Keeping off the Grass

Keeping off the Grass

When we change the way we design, but not the way we execute what we've designed, the resultant systems might work well for all users and contexts initially anticipated, but it is simply not realistic to expect those to be the only conditions for our systems' employment. To account for this, execution itself must also be imbued with the values of the system, so every discrete employment is another test of the design of the system.

Max Weber & Groucho Marx Walk Into A Bar: #Reviewing Victor in the Rubble

Max Weber & Groucho Marx Walk Into A Bar: #Reviewing Victor in the Rubble

Simply, Victor in the Rubble is a delight. It produces that same sense of glee that comes from opening an MRE to find a pop tart perfectly whole rather than smashed into a gazillion crumbles. Alex Finley, a former CIA officer, has crafted a magical satire of the Intelligence Community post-9/11, Iraq, and the 2004 intelligence reforms.

#Reviewing A Passion for Leadership

#Reviewing A Passion for Leadership

From the autumn of his lifetime in public service, Gates offers a final lesson for reformers. When the ideas for change stop flowing, leave. “The reality of reforming bureaucracies is that when a leader thinks he is done, he probably is done.”  This is a straightforward statement, but its implications are radical: leadership is reform, and reform should be constant.