Here are some of my sources for great recommendations:

• The prolific Zenpundit’s Recommended Reading posts.
• The “Addtional Reading” section on Steven Pressfield’s website.
• Seed Magazine always has interesting books to recommend.
• GoodReads – a social network for readers. I’ve tried several others, but I’ve settled with GoodReads.
• Various blogs that I follow – too many of those to list, but there’s always the odd gem there.

Your turn – your recommendations please!

The session in question was one by Jamil Qureshi, a sports psychologist & author of The Mind Coach. He had been billed as a hypnotist, a magician, a former cricketer and a practitioner of performance-enhancing psychology – intriguing enough for me to attend!

He began with insights about success, failure and change – concepts adequately and eloquently covered in his book, before proceeding to this fascinating anecdote about the Rogue Monkey.

The Experiment

So a group of researchers conduct an experiment. They place 3 steps inside a cage. The 2nd step is hooked up to an electric shock, the 3rd step has a bunch of bananas, and there is also a cold shower overhead. A monkey is introduced into the cage.

The monkey sees the bananas and thinks, “Bananas!”. He jumps onto step 1, jumps onto step 2, gets a shock and before he has recovered he is showered with cold water. No bananas for him!

A second monkey is then introduced into the cage. “Bananas!” he thinks. But he is blocked by Monkey #1, who bites, kicks and scratches this monkey into submission.

Monkey #3 is introduced into the cage and makes his way for the bananas, but this time, both Monkey #1 & #2 bite, kick and scratch him until he gets the message. Note how Monkey #2 who has not directly experienced the shock or the shower is equally violent as Monkey #1!

More monkeys are introduced into the cage, all of them bitten, kicked and scratched by the preceding monkeys. Meanwhile, unknown to the monkeys, researchers quietly switch off the shock and the shower.

And then, one more monkey is added to the melee. This particular monkey is also scratched, bitten and kicked, but he does not submit. This monkey jumps onto step 1, jumps onto step 2, jumps onto step 3 – and claims the bananas. He is the Rogue Monkey.

The researchers then concluded that 1 out of every 53 monkeys is a rogue monkey. Qureshi closed on that note, challenging us to understand the meaning of the story ourselves.

What have you understood?

So here are a few links about John Boyd and the OODA Loop:

1. The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot at FastCompany.com – a quick introduction to John Boyd & his ideas.
2. The Original OODA Loop Diagram – at Wikipedia.
3. The Full Boyd @ The Commitee of Public Safety – Read the originals. Highly recommended.
4. Social OODA Loop – a complex version of the OODA Loop by Curtis Gale Weeks
5. OODA Loop @ The Committee of Public Safety – Some great posts that refer the OODA Loop. One of my inspirations for this blog.
6. The Mind of War - by Grant T. Hammond – A biography of Boyd’s ideas.

Nicholas Nickleby is the earliest book I can remember reading – or was it those Noddy comics? In school, we had a “library class” every week. I would borrow a book, finishing it in a day, from the time I boarded the school bus home until dinnertime. And then I’d languish, tortured and frustrated until the next week when I was permitted to exchange books. Awful system!

I read The Famous Five, The Three Investigators, Adventure novels, graduating later to Cold War thrillers by Forsyth, Ludlum and a host of other spy novelists. I even found a taste for proper literature as I approached the O’Levels. Our English curriculum nearly damaged me, but Dylan Thomas, D.H Lawrence, Ted Hughes, and nameless others saved me.

The Solitude of Reading and The Pleasure of Discovery

I read books alone, I shut out the world and dive in. If the book doesn’t take hold of me, I tend to switch on and off, and it can take ages to finish.

But if the book grabs me, I’ll finish it in a few sittings barely doing anything else in between lunch and dinner, breakfast and lunch, showers and work, arrivals and departures. I will not rest until I’ve reached the end – and then I’ll want to start again.

I tend to start several books at once: cycling through them whimsically. But if it’s a non-fiction book, I try to stay with it as I find it difficult to regain the thread.

But while reading is a solitary pursuit, discovering books remains a social experience.

I have discovered some great books through sweet accidents, recommendations from friends and blogs that I follow; a quote that leads to a writer who speaks of another writer; movie adaptations; interesting blurbs and covers; and lately, the Twitter Book Club – or TwitBookClub as we character-challenged Tweeters abbreviate it.

#TwitBookClub

We meet every third Saturday of the month in Dubai – yes, we are real people who meet in real life – and while my attendance hasn’t been the best, soaking up the atmosphere of gushing book lovers has been a welcome experience.

It’s a great place to generate book suggestions: we choose 4 books a month, with members typically selecting one to read. A satellite group also goes off to discuss a single book in the traditional way, reporting on it at the next TwitBookClub meeting.

We’re also present on GoodReads, cataloging/comparing our shelves and discovering new titles. I confess I have more books on my to-read shelf than my read shelf as a result of the past few months, a travesty I must address!

There’s an F in the OODA Loop – its best kept secret. Perhaps John Boyd omitted it out of fear of being mistaken for a culinary maestro (FOODA, anybody?). Well, to be serious, it is present in the official diagram.

OODA -> F -> OODA

The F is present when an  OODA Loop ends and another begins: Feedback.

So what is Feedback and why is it so important to the OODA Loop? The OODA Loop is an empirical construct. A user cycles through the loop, ending with Action, but they must begin the next loop by Observing the result of their Action in the Environment.

The Importance of Being Fed Back

Imagine a business providing a service for its customers, but ignoring their feedback. How can they satisfy their customers without listening to them?

I used to be averse to self-styled self-help gurus spouting cheesy advice, until I stumbled across Jamil Qureshi, a sports psychologist cum author, at the 2009 Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. His book, The Mind Coach, contains an epic passage that I have whole-heartedly embraced:

Turn Failure into Feedback

We tend to perceive our actions as either failures or successes. This is one reason why you may not see life as the learning opportunity it is. As soon as we see things as a failure, we take things personally. The learning opportunity gets lost in a fog of self-doubt and bad feeling. However, being turned down, rejected or refused doesn’t mean you’re inept, incapable or bad. It simply gives you feedback about how to do it better next time.

In fact, there is no such thing as failure, only feedback.

There Will Be Friction

In the absence of proper feedback, the second OODA loop will be operating on inaccurate Observation and its Action will therefore be out of tune with what was actually required by the environment. There will be Friction: a mismatch between the environment and the user’s mental conception of that environment.

It boils down to these points:

1. You must observe accurately.
2. You must be willing to accept the input you get. There’s no such thing as bad feedback or good feedback. Feedback is Feedback.
3. You must Observe again to see if your Actions effected any change in the Feedback you get in the next OODA Loop.

Feedback will be your mantra. Feedback, Feedback, Feedback!

Let us begin with this extract from a speech by Arthur Koestler:

Since the earliest days, the teachers of mankind have recommended two diametrically opposed methods of action. The first demands that we should refuse to see the world divided into black and white, heroes and villains, friends and foes; that we should distinguish nuances and strive for synthesis, or at least compromise; it tells us that in nearly all, seemingly inescapable dilemmas there exists a third alternative which patient search may discover. In short, we should refuse the choice between Scylla and Charybdis and rather navigate like odysseus of the nimble wit. We may call this the “neither-nor” attitude.

The second, opposite advice was summed up two thousand years ago, in one single phrase: “Let your communication be, Yea, yea, Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these, comes from evil.” This we may call the “either-or” attitude.

Nuance in Machiavelli

For a supposedly simple work, The Prince has been a source of diverse interpretations among scholars, even up to the present day. Some consider it a satire, others think it evil, still others see it as straightforward advice by a courtier to his prince.

The most interesting interpretation comes from Leo Strauss, who proposed that ancient writers wrote esoterically, hiding their true meaning so as to escape retribution from the difficult times they lived in. The argument is complex enough that Strauss wrote an entire book on Machiavelli, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and another, Persecution and the Art of Writing.

The question arises in the amateur mind as to how Machiavelli could write such a slim volume with seemingly straightforward advice, peppered with some inconsistencies and self-contradictions, and still generate such confusion regarding his intention and meaning! But to the careful reader, The Prince is anything but straightforward.

In Machiavelli’s Virtue, Harvey Mansfield looks at Machiavelli’s puzzling use of the word virtù:

In the eight chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli considers “those who have attained a principality through crimes.”

[...]

Machiavelli’s example from ancient times is “Agathocles the Sicilian” who became “king” of Syracuse while always keeping to a life of crime at every stage of his career. In considering this criminal Machiavelli says that “one cannot call it virtue to kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion” – all of which Agathocles was or did. Yet in the very next sentence Machiavelli, doing what he said one cannot do, proceeds to speak of the “virtue of Agathocles”.

[...]

What is one to make of this? Machiavelli seems to deplore the need for a prince to be evil, and in the next breath to relish the fact. He alternately shocks his readers and provides relief from the very shocks he administers: Agathocles has virtue but cannot be said to have virtù.

A surface reading of Machiavelli with an either-or attitude will leave readers confused. We must open our minds and look for a third way.

In The Machiavellian Enterprise, a chapter-by-chapter commentary on The Prince, Leo de Alvarez describes Machiavelli’s technique:

The wickedness of advocating that one, especially the prince, be vicious is among those things that have given Machiavellianism its dark reputation. Machiavelli understood the importance of appearances [...] Why, then, does he permit himself to say that one must learn to be wicked and do vicious things? To act according to necessity is to be neither good nor wicked, but instead of presenting a decent surface for a harsh teaching, he seems to take a certain delight in saying what no one has dared to say.

In Thucydides, and classical writers generally, the harsh teaching is always concealed under a decent surface. Machiavelli’s surface is an indecent one. He speaks of indecent things in his own name. Why does Machiavelli bring shocking things to the surface? [...] At the same time, Machiavelli conceals a far more moderate teaching beneath the shocking surface…

Some will be horrified by the surface teaching; these will be the disarmed. What of those who will be attracted by the surface teaching? What such blood-thirsty ones will miss and will not see is the concealed moderate teaching. The blood-thirsty will destroy themselves because they will not be prudent. But this is the most dangerous course to follow, for cannot such men do great harm as they are tempted to extreme and violent deeds?

This, therefore, is one of Machiavelli’s techniques. He presents two extreme choices and then subtly hints at a third, often moderate, way. The reader is tempted to choose either-or, but the real meaning may lie in the way of neither-nor. His true meaning is therefore available only to the prudent reader, patient enough to look for the third way.

Sources

• Koestler on Nuance at the Photon Courier blog by David Foster.
• Machiavelli’s Virtue by Harvey Mansfield.
• The Machiavellian Enterprise by Leo Paul De Alvarez.

1. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. This book, which has been criticized in many circles for being “immoral”, introduced me to a variety of characters, key among them Machiavelli, John Boyd & Napoleon. I can single it out as the book responsible for my interest in politics. It also led to an increase in my non-fiction intake.
2. The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. Again, this served as a rich introduction to fascinating examples of strategy from ancient and modern history. Sun Tzu, Musashi, Napoleon, Boyd.
3. Studies in Classic American Literature by D H Lawrence. Funny, scathing, intense and never boring, Lawrence, in his inimitable way, sparked a love for literature (and poetry) in a teenager who until then had read mostly spy novels.
4. The Mind of War by Grant T. Hammond. An introduction to John Boyd’s thought. Enough said – you’re reading this at oodalooper.com!
5. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. A dense work in a simple form, which I continue to study with help from works by Alvarez & Mansfield.
6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.  I learnt how much of everyday life may just be “dictionary of misunderstood words”. I learnt to let it go, to let a river flow on its course, to take it easy, to take it hard. Weight & Lightness.
7. Global Brain by Howard Bloom. Complex adaptive systems, memes, diversity generators, inner judges, conformity enforcers, resource shifters, etc. A fresh look at evolution through the lenses of “group” adaptation.
8. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Such stories should never end. Give me several thousand pages more!
9. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. “Man can be destroyed but not defeated”. Pure Huevos.
10. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Although I can’t bring myself to enjoy his other books, Fight Club changed my perspective of  How. Writing. Could. Be. Awesome. Don’t talk to me about the movie.

How about you?

Update: In response, Sally Prosser has posted Top 10 cook books that have influenced me.
Update: Aedan Lake has started a blog & posted Books that have influenced me.
Update: Marcus shares his list – most interesting!

Deep within Charlie Wilson’s War, the search for a “silver bullet”, a single weapon that will decisively turn the Afghan war against the Soviets, is not going well. They have looked at various weapons such as the Swiss Oerlikon, the British Blowpipe, and have the Israelis working on the “Charlie Horse”, but various obstacles remain. The protagonists are: Gust Avrakotos (CIA man), Mike Vickers (Weapons expert), and US Congressman Charlie Wilson:

“As with everything else, Vickers did not miss a beat when Avrakotos asked him what they should do. He said that Wilson was thinking about the solution to the problem the wrong way. Rarely, in war, is the battle won by a single weapon. It wasn’t necessary to find the perfect weapon. Once again, the answer lay in the broad concept of the weapons mix.

[...]

Vickers explained that it was not necessary to look for a single new weapon to serve as a “silver bullet”. The way to defeat Soviet air power was by introducing a symphony of different weapons that, when put together, would change the balance in favor of the mujahideen. He then painted a verbal portrait of the melange of weapons he was urging Gust to deploy to bring down the Hind.

[...]

It was like having his own intellectual hit-man, and Gust could feel Charlie’s excitement, as Vickers concluded by conceding that none of these weapons individually would be that effective, but the whole whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. It was their collective impact that must be considered, because all they needed to do was to convince the Soviet pilots that this mix of diverse anti-aircraft weaponry existed and was in the hands of the guerillas. Every Soviet pilot would then know there was no one diversionary tactic they could rely on. [...] once the weapons mix was in place, they simply wouldn’t know what the mujahideen might have coming up at them.”

This is an example of a symphony of solutions (here weapons) that chip away at a complex problem (combating Soviet air power), loosely orchestrated by a strategist. The solutions in this case are resources decentralized in the hands of “clients” (Afghans). The grand strategy is to win the war; the immediate objective is to deter Soviet Air pilots from their aggressive tactics.

With the iBookstore, the iPad may attract people to reading, but it will not pull readers away from the comfort of an e-paper based reader. Serious readers who want to read more than blogs will be attracted to the eye-friendly, battery-efficient approach of the Kindle, the Sony Reader, and similar e-ink devices.

Where Apple scores marks is giving Publishers the freedom to price their ebooks; compare this to Amazon’s bare-knuckle approach of setting a maximum price of $9.99. But Apple is not a bookseller, yet.

How will Amazon respond to the iPad?

One possible strategy they may pursue is to release a Kindle application for the iPad that allows users to purchase books from Amazon – whether Apple will approve such an application is another guess (refer to the Apple-Google wrangle over a Google Voice app for the iPhone). A Kindle application is already available on the iPhone.

What is Apple? They sell computer devices – indeed, they are marshaling the transition from computer devices to consumer devices. But Apple is not a bookseller; Amazon is.

What is Amazon? They sell/distribute books, they publish books for sell-published authors, and they sell an ebook reader. They’re a combined bookseller, publisher, and distributor. Their focus is on digital content. What they’re really doing, long-term, is competing with the publishing industry as a whole (which explains their relative disdain for the ISBN), but they’ve pre-empted the war with a battle over price, and this is where Apple and other companies with large consumer bases see an opening. By allowing Publishers to set their own prices, they have offered a way out for a bewildered industry.

What Amazon needs to do is calibrate their present grand strategy of introducing an alternative publishing eco-system to current circumstances. How they can do this without making publishers redundant, I’m not sure. Perhaps publishers will become mere filter houses for quality content – an interesting question for another post.

Where does Google fit in?

Google Editions, a web-based bookstore, is around the corner – reportedly, in the 1st half of 2010. This fits in nicely with the iPad. Google goes toe-to-toe with Amazon as a competing book publisher, bookseller and distributor (indeed, the 3 terms will become indistinguishable in the future). Will they invest in an Android-based tablet? Or will they wait for the Google Settlement to pass?

Given the rapid rate of change, it’s impossible to say what exactly will happen, or even if the ideal equilibrium will be achieved. As a wise man said, we shall see.

The author, an avid reader, is a “technologist” working for a chain of bookstores in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Public Desire in Democracies

Ideally, in a democracy a politician serves the interests of his constituency, his people. Often, however, the public’s desire conflicts with the objectives of his government or party. Because a government cannot risk opposing its people head-on, politicians resort to the manipulation of public desire. A successful politician is one who is able to align the desire of his people with his objectives. It may be argued that a government should satisfy public desire, but that is increasingly rare, these days; governments and politicians have their own agendas.

Sometimes, public desire intersects with the government’s objectives, in which case the politician stokes desire. This is why the “Moral High-Ground” is an important aspect of conflict, it allows the government to stoke moral outrage in a public which is naturally bound up by its ethics.

Public desire is over-sensitive, clumsy, and easily manipulated. And yet, this may not always be a bad thing. When the public has impractical or counter-productive desires (e.g war against a stronger nation), the politician attempts to shape it to the will of the government or the “intelligent elite”.

In all of this, the Media is a tool for both politicians and the people. The politician utilizes the Media to feed the public with information that may shape their desire, whereas the public uses it to express its desire and thereby influence itself. Things are further complicated by the fact that the Media pollutes what it filters, to varying degrees. Thus, it both compresses and generates desire, albeit imperfectly.

Public Desire in Monarchies/Dictatorships

On the other hand, Dictatorships and monarchies have it easy. The government’s desire is served by the people. The Media becomes a mouthpiece of the government. It is much simpler and permits the government great agility in its actions. A benevolent, intelligent monarch (a rare occurrence) has great chances of success.

However, the danger here is that if the government is unable to control public desire, it is generally overthrown. Hence, public desire is kept in check by distractions, misinformation, or raw power.