Strategy

The Speculator's Edge is the first book I have read which explains who takes "the other side" of a stock tranaction, and explains why. As a study of the psychology of investors and the market, the book has few peers. Pacelli states the original of this book came from a boast that he could write the best book available on the subject of speculation (and investing) because most books were worthless. He succeeded.

After the armies facing each other had become locked in siege warfare in the west by the end of 1914, the Brithish high command along with the French, sounght to destroy the German line and achieve a breakthrough to open a war of movement once more. What followed over the next three years was was a series of battles, neither of which had any degree of sucsess in breaking through only costing the Allies tens of thousands of lives. The Generals where often ignorant or not avare of the real situation on the battlefields, sending time after time thousands of soilders to their deaths in devastating frontal assaults against German trenches who shot them in the open with machine guns. Heavy bombardment, often lasting for weeks, had some effect in weakening the enemy or cutting the wire, but it turned the battlefield into a sea of mud making any large movement impossible.

THis book is mostly concerned with the leader's point of view, especially the Brithish. If you looking for personal experiences of the individual soldier this book is not for you. But if you are interested in the tacticts, answers and the background stories to infamous military disasters such as the 'Somme' this is your book.

I found this book very revealing, eventhough it tends to throw to much information at the reader in short passages from time, making it hard to keep up. Information is well researched and the maps are good to.

Things I liked about this book:

This book talked about day-to-day personal issues you have to deal with when you are job-hunting - anxiety and stress, getting disorganized, losing your confidence, losing your motivation, forgetting your goals, getting tired of being rejected, lack of support from people around you, losing your social circle when you are unemployed. And lots of other personal issues that I hadn't even realized could affect the image you present when you go for interviews and how successful your job search can be.

It was really practical. I get frustrated with those books that talk about a lot of ideas but don't tell you how to actually do anything. With this book, there were step-by-step instructions, exercises for me to fill out, quick tips in boxes, etc. There were lots of handy suggestions - even for basic things like how to get relaxed before and during an interview or what to tell that pesky relative who keeps nagging you about not having a job yet.

It wasn't condescending or phony. There were examples of job-hunters' stories and I could really relate to some of them. I felt better about myself and what I was going through after I read about other people's experiences.

It takes you through different parts of the entire job search process - from being unemployed, to job-hunting, to landing a job. It even talked about how to deal with getting a job and finding out that you don't like it.

What I didn't like about this book:

It's hard to stop reading. Here I am at 6 a.m. all excited about job-hunting with no place to go.

Stop Living Life Like An Emergency is truly a practical gude for what to do to overcome self destructive ways with down-to-earth strategies on how to make productive and effective changes.

I must thank Diane Sieg for writing this book and sharing her self-care strategies in such a refreshing way - this is not your ordinary self-help book. It is fun to read, makes a whole lot of sense, and helps old stubborn gals like me see just how easy change can be.

5 Stars for the tools and exercises she provides to help us all find more fulfillment in life!

This is a really excellent collection of advanced reading on strategic denial and deception, and it makes the vital point that denial and deception are at the core of 4th generation warfare and asymmetric offense and defense strategy.

The two contributing editors are the best-qualified experts possible. Roy Godson's work in the 1980's and 1990's on intelligence requirements, carrying on today with his advanced thinking on restoring covert action and counterintelligence as well as the synergy among these and collection with analysis, makes him the premier policy-scholar in this arena. Jim Wirtz, author of the very insightful "The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War," and now chairman of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School where very advanced work is being done on the new craft of intelligence (both human and technical, both secret and open), adds a combat practitioners perspective.

While there are some similarities among a few of the contributions, on balance each one is sufficiently unique. Two key thoughts that jumped out:

1) Most of the lessons learned come from World War II. The authors were hard-pressed to find modern examples. The one used from the Gulf War (an amphibious feint) is in my recollection false--we were planning an amphibious attack, and it was only at the last minute that CINCCENT was persuaded to do a Hail Mary end run, prompted in part by some exceptional work from the Navy's intelligence center that showed the beach obstacles in great detail.

2) Two perennial lessons learned are that policy makers do not want to hear about possible hostile denial and deception--they want to stick with their own preconceptions (which of course make denial and deception easier to accomplish against us); and second, that intelligence experts tend to be under great pressure to cook the books in favor of policy preconceptions, while also being generally unwilling to believe the enemy can deceive them or accomplish slights of hand that are undetectable.

All of the chapters are good, but two struck me as especially helpful today: J. Bowyer Bell's "Conditions Making for Success and Failure of Denial and Deception: Nonstate and Illicit Actors," and Bart Whaley & Jeffrey Busby, "Detecting Deception: Practice, Practitioners, and Theory." The latter, building on a lifetime of study that included a review of eight strategic cultures as well as the cost of major deceptions (D-Day deceptions that fixed German forces cost less than 1% of the assets and could have saved the entire force), examined 47 seven different kind of "detectives" from scientists and bank tellers to biographers and private eyes, and creates nine categories of "detectibles", concluding with the Law of Multiple Sensors, something that most stove-piped intelligence communities simply will not grasp for at least another decade.

This is both a serious work of scholarship, and a very valuable policy reader.