Dissent of the Earth Messengers
Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation's economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable. The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds.
Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions. That year the DoD's Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that "climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked. Also in , the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of " large scale economic breakdown " in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain "domestic order amid civil unrest.
Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget: Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:.
The exercises were part of the US Army's annual Unified Quest programme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that "ecological disasters and a weak economy" as the "recovery won't take root until " will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between "resource-starved nations. According to Booz Allen's Annual Report , the corporation has overseen Unified Quest "for more than a decade" to help "military and civilian leaders envision the future. The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on "detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical 'roads to crisis'", including "homeland operations" resulting from "a high-magnitude natural disaster" among other scenarios, in the context of:.
At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective. It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups. Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community.
Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.
Cracking down on dissent in Ilham Aliyev's Azerbaijan
A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability. Indeed, Kennedy's case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as " domestic extremists " targeting "national infrastructure" as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.
Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit Nectu , confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was "getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks.
The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA's global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.
And How to Save It among other books.
Earth and Moon from MESSENGER
Edmondson sums up the mental calculation this way: In the corporate world, Detroit's V-8 car culture was long unable to entertain the notion that a large segment of consumers might prefer automobiles that were safe and fuel-efficient. Coca-Cola ignored evidence that "New Coke" would fizzle and launched it anyway.
Companies in the mechanical-watch and analog-photography industries refused to heed the messengers and the message that adaptation and change were necessary if they were to continue to exist. Challenges to the conventional wisdom can be upsetting to individuals and organizations alike, and for that reason are often suppressed or discouraged.
Says Bazerman, "Executives sometimes complain to me that their sales force is sacrificing profitability for revenue by lowering prices to make more sales. So I ask them, 'On what basis do you compensate them? They're not fully listening, they're cutting people off, or they have a preconceived notion of where they're going. In fact, many times leaders prefer an orderly shop and aren't actually looking for dissent.
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From the Oval Office to the boardrooms of Detroit and everywhere in between, "fundamental but highly controversial issues often are not surfaced," former Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense, Ford Motor Company president, and World Bank president Robert S. The reason, McNamara explained, is that such issues are deemed too threatening to organizational harmony or to individuals' career advancement. As a result, the validity of a principal U. Ironically, some eight decades ago, Detroit had a notably powerful advocate for dissent and disagreement in decision-making.
Developing disagreement and "high-contention" decision-making at the loftiest levels of the organization were things that HBS professor Bill George of the Organizational Behavior unit insisted on when he took over as CEO of Medtronic, the medical-devices company, in It was a lesson that George took to heart and would later draw upon during his own business career.
To reverse that, we established a system that had a COO in charge of line operations along with a vice chairman of equal power who was responsible for quality, for being alert to any possible problems, and for raising questions about them. You need a team at the top where high contention is demanded and rewarded.
If it doesn't start at the top, it will not operate in other places.
During the decision-making process, George explains, this means asking probing questions and insisting that managers present each situation in objective terms, rather than with a positive spin. You try to create tension inside because the outside challenge is so great. HBS professor Michael Tushman of the Organizational Behavior unit also sees an aware, open, and inquiring senior team as critical to sound decision-making.
Trump travel ban: Diplomats register dissent - BBC News
Tushman has been focusing his research on companies that can "be both big and small, be centralized and decentralized, live in the future and the past, and 'exploit and explore,' all at the same time. That's a relatively rare accomplishment," he says. How do firms achieve that level of performance? Tushman says they need an overarching aspiration for a watch company, it might be "We're going to tell time," without being wedded to any particular technology.
Also required are internal architectures that honor both the past and the present and a senior team or CEO who can embrace these contradictions and make trade-offs to accommodate them. Adds Tushman, "Some groups 'exploit' and some 'explore,' and you don't want to mix them.