Navy Taught Isaac Asimov How (Not) to Write

Review by Bill Doughty

What was Isaac Asimov doing around this time, 75 years ago? Writing – in accordance with the Navy style guide – a "report on seam-sealing compounds."

"Every sentence had to be in the passive," Asimov notes (in passive voice) in "It's Been a Good Life" (Prometheus, 2002, edited by Janet Jeppson Asimov.

Working for the DOD: L. Sprague DeCamp, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein

Asimov and Robert Heinlein, among the founders of American science fiction, worked as Navy civilians at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during the Second World War. They were part of homefront support efforts, and in 1944 Asimov had to write that report on seam-sealing compounds.

Describing correspondence and reports written in Navy-style at the time: "There had to be a heading of a certain kind, and then an 'in re' with a coded letter-number entry. Each paragraph had to be numbered," Asimov writes.

"Specifications had to be written Navy style also. Every paragraph had to be numbered; so did every subparagraph and ever subsubparagraph. The main paragraphs were listed as I, II, III, and so on. If anything under a particular paragraph had to be enumerated it was A, B, C ... If A included enumerated items it was 1, 2, 3 ... Under any of these was a, b, c ..., and under these (1), (2), (3)..., and so on. Furthermore, if any on sentence you have to refer to another sentence, you located the referred sentence in its position in the specification, as, for instance, II, C, 3, a, (1). Generally, there weren't too many indentations, or to many references back and forth, and the specifications, while rather tortuous, could be understood – given several hours of close study."

Multi-tasker Asimov at work.

Long and short, Asimov wrote his seam-sealing compounds report "with absolute clarity" and in full compliance with the Navy style guidelines. "I nevertheless managed to break everything down into enumerations, getting all the way down to [(10)] and even [(a)]. I further managed in almost every sentence to refer to some other sentence for which I duly listed a complete identification," he writes.

"The result was that no one on earth could have plunged into it and come out unscathed. Brain coagulation would have set in by page 2." 

Asimov admits the joke was on him; his bosses loved his report and used it as an example for others to emulate.

Fortunately, seventy-five years later, smart Navy leaders embrace simple, clear communication and active voice.

Asimov poses with some of the books he's authored or edited over the years.

Of course, Asimov wrote from both sides of his brain. Asimov, after all, was a Renaissance writer, specializing in fiction, nonfiction, anthologies, poetry and more.

This "found" haiku comes from "Asimov's Guide to the Bible," quoting Exodus 22.21:

Thou shalt not neither vex

a stranger, nor oppress him;

for ye were strangers...

Humility: Asimov sent copies of each of his books, including the Bible book, to his father, who lived in Florida. "He would show it to everyone he knew but would not allow them to touch the books. They had to look at it while he would not allow them to touch the books. They had to look at it while he held it. He must have made himself, and me, so unpopular."

Asimov gave us the blueprint for the AI age. Artificial Intelligence = iRobot.

His fiction may come across as old-fashioned, stodgy and dusty, but his ideas and nonfiction continue to be enlightening. 

There's an interesting revelation in this book about Asimov's confrontation with anti-Semitism, including at the at the Navy Yard and a confrontation with Heinlein. But, in "It's Been a Good Life," he puts prejudice in the perspective of history and his own advantages and privilege.

"It struck me, however, that prejudice was universal and that all groups who were not dominant, who were not actually at the top of the status chain, were potential victims. In Europe, in the 1930s, it was the Jews who were spectacularly victimized, but in the United States it was not the Jews who were worst treated. Here, as anyone could see who did not deliberately keep his eyes shut, it was the African Americans. For two centuries they had actually been enslaved. Since that slavery had come to a formal end, the African Americans remained in a position of near-slavery in most segments of American society. They were deprived of ordinary rights, treated with contempt, and kept out of any chance of participation in what is called the American Dream. I, though Jewish, and poor besides, eventually received a first-class American education at a top American university, and I wondered how many African Americans would have the chance. It constantly bothered me to have to denounce anti-Semitism unless I denounced the cruelty of man to man in general."

Here's a great Asimov quote from this collection: "The whole world seems to live under a banner: 'Freedom is wonderful – but only for me.'"

And here's another, more hopeful, quote from the master: 

"Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness, and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved."

Read on! Write on!

John S. McCain Controversy, Legacy

Review by Bill Doughty

Midshipman John S. McCain, 1906

He earned demerits but the respect of his peers at the Naval Academy. He was a risk-taker, known for making controversial decisions and for his courage under fire. And, he knew how to work closely with Congress in support of the military.

In William F. Trimble's new biography, "Admiral John S. McCain: And the Triumph of Naval Air Power" (Naval Institute Press, 2019), we get a fascinating history of the rise of carrier-based aviation during World War II through the life of the McCain patriarch, warts and all.

Among the blemishes, "Slew" McCain's "inexplicable and inexcusable administrative and judgmental oversight" and lack of attention to detail and communication" in the aftermath of the Battle of Savo Island, according to Trimble.

Also, McCain – but more-so Halsey – was tarnished by his apparent indecision in the face of Typhoon Cobra. "Survival was the priority for many that afternoon as the wind and waves hammered the fleet, and radios crackled with one emergency call after another," Trimble writes. "McCain blundered badly."

Nevertheless, McCain's triumphs as a warfighter and innovator make his failures small by comparison.

He was considered "an airman's admiral," Trimble says. "In his typical manner, McCain boosted morale by talking to as many airmen and ground crews as he could, assuring them that he would do all he could to back them up..." He was loved by officers and enlisted Marines who admired his fighting spirit.

As Commander, Aircraft, South Pacific (ComAirSoPac) Forces, McCain was recognized for his "innovative thinking, initiative, resourcefulness and commitment, all of which are vital to operational command."

McCain practiced balanced and empowering leadership, surrounding himself with good people – never "yes-men" – and delegating responsibility to them. Key among his team was Jimmie Thach, hero of the Battle of Midway and naval aviation strategist in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Ed Valigursky's depiction of the Battle of Philippine Sea, 20 June 1944. (Courtesy of "Popular Mechanics" Magazine, NHHC)

Trimble offers this controversial assessment comparing those big battles of WWII:

"One cannot overstate the significance of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. It was a decisive victory, the great fleet engagement in the western Pacific that both adversaries had planned to fight for almost fifty years. This battle, and not Midway two years before, was the pivotal battle of the Pacific War. Neither McCain nor anyone else at the time knew that they had been part of the greatest carrier battle of all time and that there would never be another encounter of this type or scale. Nor were they aware that Japan's carriers had been effectively eliminated as a fighting force."

A third huge air battle came as U.S. forces moved north from the Philippines. Trimble writes: "A savage spectacle of naval air power, the ferocious engagement over Okinawa and Formosa was comparable to the climactic moments of the Battle of Britain and the epic Battle of the Philippine Sea."

Halsey and McCain share a lighter moment and respite in 1944.

While Halsey's decisions in the battles of Leyte and off Formosa were called into question by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest J. King, "McCain, on the other hand, received nothing but praise for his actions." 

McCain's task group, TG-38.1, was a major factor in virtually wiping out Japanese air power on Formosa and Luzon before the landings at Leyte." He received praise from Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Chester Nimitz, even as Nimitz became concerned with the physical and mental health of his senior leaders under the stress of war.

In the western Pacific, McCain and Thach developed successful strategies to counter the effects of devastating kamikaze attacks by Imperial Japan during the closing months of the war. McCain was recognized for his aggressive willingness to take risks and "brilliant tactical control of fast carrier forces."

Understandably, most of this meticulously researched book (60 pages of notes and bibliography) focuses on McCain's role during the war in key leadership positions, including as part of Halsey's 3rd Fleet as Task Force 38 commander. "McCain's Task Force 38 was the principal offensive component of Adm. W. F. Halsey's mighty Third Fleet."

Three generations of John S. McCain

But we get some important insights into the development of naval aviation culture, including the hurdles McCain had to overcome as a "Johnny Come Lately," as an older flag officer who had been a latecomer to the aviation community. McCain helped bring about a new age of warfare, in which "the airplane, naval aviation, and more specifically the aircraft carrier transformed from a tactical into a strategic weapon."

This book presents several other controversies as well as surprises, such as McCain's advocacy for recruiting women in support roles, his embrace of joint operations, his enthusiastic support for Navy public affairs, and his relationship with Adm. Marc A. Mitscher, Adm. Lockwood and other colleagues.


As Navy readers know, McCain died just days after Imperial Japan's surrender. Trimble describes the end with poignancy but barely mentions the patriarch's personal legacy as father of another Navy admiral and grandfather of a heroic POW and U.S. senator.

Adm. John S. "Slew" McCain is remembered as "a fighting admiral and a man who in the end made the ultimate sacrifice for his Navy and his country."

Headstone of U.S. Navy Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain Sr. in Section 3 of Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, August 30, 2018. Born August 9, 1884, McCain graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1906. He served as the engineering officer on San Diego (ACR-6) during World War I until May 1918. He went on to command Aircraft, South Pacific and South Pacific Force, during the 1942 Solomon Islands Campaign. Later, he commanded TF-38 during the drive into the Philippines, the capture of Okinawa, and the surrender of Japan. For this command, he received the Navy Cross. McCain died September 6, 1945 as a vice admiral but was posthumously promoted to admiral the same year by a joint resolution of Congress. He is buried in Section 3 in grave 4356, the same section as his son, U.S. Navy Adm. John Sidney “Jack” McCain Jr., who is in grave 4001-A. (U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser / Arlington National Cemetery / released)

Accelerating Change: How to Survive and Thrive

Review by Bill Doughty

The Navy operates in an age of acceleration in a "post-post-Cold War" era. Scientists show we're moving headlong from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, where human population growth, globalization, climate change, and loss or biodiversity are forcing change at exponential speed, and where the United States, China and Russia continue to compete for influence and resources. Meanwhile, Islamist extremists like ISIS coalesce and threaten thanks to social networking and cell phone technology.

That's some of the scene Thomas L. Friedman sets in his latest, "Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Friedman is author of "From Beirut to Jerusalem," "The World Is Flat," "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," and "That Used to Be Us."
Globalization affects the interconnected economies of the world. Carbon (now above 400 ppm) causes changes in the atmosphere and biosphere. And Moore's law explains how technology grows exponentially. Combined, these forces bring us to either a precipice or a new beginning – a chance for the United States and the world to "reimagine how we stabilize geopolitics," according to Friedman.

Three-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Thomas Friedman speaks to a packed auditorium
 in Ingersoll Hall, Naval Postgraduate School, June 24, 2016. (Photo by Michael Ehrlich)

"It's important to remember that America is such an important player on the world stage that even small shifts in how we project power can have decisive impacts. And it's this combination of shrinking American power in one part of the world plus the reshaping of the world more broadly by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore's law that defines the era we are in today, which I call the post-post-Cold War world. It is a world characterized by some very old and some very new forms of geopolitical competition all swirling together at the same time. That is, the traditional great-power competition, primarily among the United States, Russia, and China, is back again (if it really went away) as strong as ever, with the three major powers again jockeying over spheres of influence, along golden-oldie fault lines such as the NATO-Russia frontier or the South China Sea. This competition is propelled by history, geography, and the traditional imperatives of great-power geopolitics, and is reinforced today by the rise of nationalism in Russia and China. It's contours will be determined by the balance of power between these three big nation-states."

As evidence of exponential acceleration of change, Friedman presents the work of Will Steffen published in Anthropocene Review, March 2, 2015, that concludes, "We are now in a no-analogue world." The danger is in how we've (1) breached, (2) almost breached or (3) are about to breach "nine key planetary boundaries": climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, geochemical flows, ocean acidification, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosol loading, introduction of novel entities, and stratospheric ozone layer.


The latter boundary – ensuring the ozone layer is appropriately thick enough to reduce the threat of harmful UV radiation – is a success story and a sign of hope, according to Friedman. "After scientists discovered an ever-widening ozone hole caused by man-made chemicals – chlorofluorocarbons – the world got together and implemented the Montreal Protocol in 1989, banning CFCs, and, as a result, the ozone layer remains safely inside its planetary boundary of losses not greater than 5 percent from preindustrial levels."



Both Mother Nature and humankind can innovate and be highly adaptive, Friedman contends. Nature evolves through natural selection. Humans have the capability to learn, control and adapt their behavior if they have the knowledge, wisdom and will.

In growing acceleration within societies, we see examples of rapid changes. Typewriters are antiques (to be collected by Tom Hanks). Cassette players are now used as a quaint plot devices in movies like "Guardians of the Galaxy." The Confederate Flag came down in South Carolina after the shooting in Charleston in 2015. In recent years the U.S. military changed its attitude about lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people and their rights to equality. The future will reward resiliency and entrepreneurial adaptability.

Those who will survive and thrive during and after the great acceleration are those who embrace innovation, science and education, based on a bedrock of truth and trust, says Friedman. The future belongs to lifelong learners willing to constantly better themselves and unwilling to accept the average or mediocre.

"We have to make our newfound power of one, the power of machines, the power of many, and the power of flows our friends – and our tools to create abundance within the planetary boundaries – not just our enemies. But organizing ourselves to use them that way will require a level of will, of stewardship, and of collective action the likes of which we have never seen humanity display as a whole. Every day there are new breakthroughs in solar energy, wind power, batteries, and energy efficiency that hold out the hope that we can have clean energy at a scale and price that billions can afford – provided we have the will to put a price on carbon so these technologies can rapidly scale and move down the cost-volume curve. As environmentalists have often noted, we have been great at rising to the occasion after big geopolitical upheavals – after Hitler invaded his neighbors, after Pearl Harbor, after 9/11. But this is the first time in human history that we have to act on a threat we have collectively made to ourselves, to act on it at scale, to act before the full consequences are felt, and to act on behalf of a generation that has not yet been born – and to do it before all the planetary boundaries have been breached."

While Friedman is optimistic, he's also realistic. Rapid acceleration and globalization is a double-edged sword.

"Globalization has always been everything and its opposite – it can be incredibly democratizing and it can concentrate incredible power in giant multinationals; it can be incredibly particularizing – the smallest voices can now be heard everywhere – and incredibly homogenizing, with big brands now able to swamp everything anywhere. It can be incredibly empowering, as small companies and individuals can start global companies overnight, with global customers, suppliers, and collaborators, and it can be incredibly disempowering – big forces can come out of nowhere and crush your business when you never even thought they were in your business. Which way it tips depends on the values and tolls that we bring to these flows."

Recent headlines and scandals about online misbehavior show the challenge to leaders in the accelerating world Friedman describes.

"It turns out that social networks, cheap cell phones, and messaging apps are really good at both enabling and impeding collective action. They enable people to get connected horizontally much more easily and efficiently but they also enable individuals at the bottom to pull down those at the top more easily and efficiently – whether they are allies or enemies. Military strategists will tell you that the network is the most empowered organizational form in this period of technological change; classical hierarchies do not optimize in the flat world, but the network does. Networks undermine command-and-control systems – no matter who is on top – while strengthening the voices of whoever is on the bottom to talk back. Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution."

A U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowler refuels in Operation Inherent Resolve mission March 20, 2017,
an extended fight against ISIS. (Photo by Senior Airman Joshua A. Hoskins)

Speaking of double-edged swords and "collective destruction"... Misplaced values in the name of what some call a deranged interpretation of Islam and the Koran is at the heart of radical extremists like Daesh/ISIS/ISIL and similar groups that form a "diffuse movement," one that can best be defeated by other Muslims standing up to the death cults, Friedman shows. Till then, the rise of the terrorists has created a "new balance of power."

"During the Cold War, if you wanted to assess the global balance of power you would likely look at the annual survey "The Military Balance," published by the London-based International institute for Strategic Studies, and self-described as the most 'trusted military data on 171 countries: size of armed forces, defense budgets, equipment.' That book would tell you the relative strengths of their armies, navies, and air forces (their hard power), and their 'soft power': the relative strengths of their economies, their societal appeal, and the degree of entrepreneurship in their culture. And if you added up all those numbers, you would have a rough measure of the balance of power between different nation-states. Not anymore. Assessing today's balance of power requires a much wider lens."

Trees grow tall in suburbs in Minnesota, anchoring Friedman's optimism.

Getting to that wider lens requires us to not act like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled and lulled into unconsciousness (put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out; put it in cool water and gradually raise the temperature, and the frog might not act till it's too late). "We are hardwired to consider nature limitless because for so many years nature seemed so limitless – and we were so relatively few and so relatively light a force upon it; how could it be that we cannot devour as much as we want." 

Friedman tells a great story about his encounter with a parking lot attendant (and blogger) at the beginning of "Thank You for Being Late." Throughout the  book he enlightens us with topics as diverse as in Syria, artificial intelligence, Madagascar, Hadoop, generative design, and Brandi Carlile, among dozens of others.

He concludes this book with a personal and heartfelt story about his "anchoring" roots, symbolized in the trees he remembers in his hometown of St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

"Those trees and I had both grown up and out from the same topsoil, and the most important personal, political, and philosophical lesson I took from the journey that is this book is that the more the world demands that we branch out, the more we each need to be anchored in a topsoil of trust that is the foundation of all healthy communities. We must be enriched by that topsoil, and we must enrich it in turn."

During a recent visit to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, geobiologist and author Hope Jaren ("Lab Girl") invited us to think about how plants – seeds, roots, trees, etc. – are depicted and reflected in books. Of course that came to mind in reading the last few pages of Friedman's latest must-read. Highly recommended.

For more on how the Navy must operate in a rapidly accelerating world, branch out and read the CNO's "Design for Maritime Superiority."

What Ron Garan Saw in Space

Review by Bill Doughty

Former Air Force pilot Col. Ron Garan was one of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery as former Navy aviator Capt. Mark Kelly maneuvered and docked the craft with the International Space Station (ISS) in the spring of 2008.

A few days later Garan stepped into the "vacuum of space" after listening to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

What Garan found and what it means for the rest of us is revealed in "The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles" (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015)

"As I looked back at our Earth from the orbital perspective, I saw a world where natural and human-defined boundaries shrank. I saw a world becoming more and more interconnected and collaborative – a world where the exponential increase in technology is making the "impossible" possible on a daily basis. Thinking about the next fifty years, I imagined a world where people and organizations set aside their differences and their destructive competitive inclinations – such as striving to maximize economic growth at all cost, or pillaging society for the personal gain of a few – and instead work together toward common goals. After all, we are all riding through the universe together on this spaceship we call Earth. We are all interconnected, we are all in this together, and we are all family."

For most of history, people generally thought that stepping onto the moon was impossible. But Navy veteran President John F. Kennedy challenged Americans in September 1962 to "look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond."

Under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon (both also former naval officers), JFK's challenge was achieved within seven years. As to who "won" the space race, Garan makes a case that the world won and is still winning.

The International Space Station. NASA.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have worked closely in space: Apollo/Soyuz, Mir/Freedom/Atlantis and now the International Space Station.

Fifteen nations collaborated to build and support the ISS, which is as big as a football field and surely one of the great human-built wonders of the world. ISS became a reality because of an agreement in June 1992 signed by President George H.W. Bush (another Navy veteran) and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

How did cooperation overtake competition in space?

Both sides replaced attitudes of superiority, condescension and belligerence with humility, respect and understanding. Trust, openness and a willingness to learn led to "extended empathy" and "effective collaboration" – ideals Garan examines in this book.

"Collaboration begins with mutual understanding and respect ... One major problem in the early U.S.-Soviet/Russian collaboration was misunderstanding on both sides. Whether it was a language barrier, an unfamiliar way of doing things, or an underestimation of the other side's abilities, overcoming such misunderstandings required both sides to move outside their comfort zones and to really absorb another culture. There was a need on both sides to understand a style of communication that sometimes was very different, in addition to the language itself, and to respect others' limitations in these areas."

Photo by Col. Ron Garan, NASA.

Different, he says, does not mean inferior.

Does Garan's optimism sound naive? Not if you've seen the world from his "orbital perspective."

"To say the view was breathtaking would be an understatement. The first thing that struck me was how thin the atmosphere appeared, as if the entire planet were wrapped in a paper-thin blanket. And in that moment, I was hit with the realization that this delicate layer of atmosphere is all that protects every living thing on Earth from perishing in the harshness of space. So, although this was an incredibly overwhelming visual experience, it also was much, much more than just a visual experience. For me, it was a profound feeling of detachment, with a simultaneous connectedness. I felt a visceral, physical separation from the only world I had known since birth, while at the same time i was able to see that world with my own eyes."

Years later, Garan's friend Wasfia Nazreen climbed Mount Everest as a part of a campaign to raise awareness of women's rights issues. Her perspective – an overriding feeling of gratitude – was one Garan shares: "immense gratitude" that leads to a sense of responsibility to act responsibly as part of a collaborative community: "a community of trust working together with a shared purpose – and a philosophy of contribution."

The goals are tangible and interrelated: clean water, renewable energy and elimination of poverty, which in turn reduces regional conflicts. The tools include innovation, communication, education and empowerment.

Garan, an avid photographer, caught a Perseid meteor shower from above. NASA.

Garan gives examples of how people can work together to achieve a common goal, including in crises. Orbital perspective can be achieved from above, on or beneath the Earth.

When 33 Chilean miners were trapped for 69 days in 2010, the world focused on a common goal: rescue. Campo Esperanza ("hope") was set up, and NASA and the international community responded. The Chilean navy – with help from NASA – designed the extraction device.

"In all cases, people rallied around the common cause. The overarching goal united people from around the world into a community with a shared purpose and motivated diverse groups to work together systematically and selflessly toward the rescue of the men. In short, the effort represented collaboration from an orbital perspective."

Garan's experience with ISS inspired him to start Impact CoLab to help "propel the good that others are doing."

Astronauts Scott Kelly, Ron Garan and Mark Kelly.

"The Orbital Perspective" follows in the path of works by Buckminster Fuller and Carl Sagan, both of whom are quoted by Garan. Can we see the "big picture," work together and find hope for the future of our planet? Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus (who received the prize with Malala Yousafzai) writes the preface of the book and challenges readers to use the perspective and commit to solving seemingly impossible problems.

At one time it seemed impossible to go to the moon or to prevent another World War. Today it may seem impossible to prevent the effects global climate change, deal with terrorism by radical extremists, or colonize Mars.

But as JFK said in September 1962 – speaking of space: "... we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding."

Reading China's Big Changes in 'Little Rice'

Review by Bill Doughty

Shanghai at night.

Like his landmark "Here Comes Everybody" (Penguin Press, 2008), Clay Shirky begins "Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream" (Columbia Global Reports, 2015) with a story about searching for a phone.

This time Professor Shirky is the one looking. What he finds in a Shanghai subway station mall – and the discoveries it reveals – are captured in this slim book about China, a country "open to business but closed to criticism."

Xiaomi (pronounced "show" as in "shower" and mi as in "me") makes smartphones and is compared by some as the Apple of China. How do smartphones, social media and access to information mesh in the "Middle (Central) Kingdom"?

Using Xiaomi and the phone as a platform, Shirky writes about China's evolution especially since the passing of communism and rise of autocratic capitalism. "Beijing wants a country whose citizens enjoy a high degree of economic freedom, a high degree of personal freedom, and a low degree of political freedom."

Using the market, Deng Xiaoping led China away from the devastating policies of Mao Zedong, in which tens of millions of Chinese died from famine. Poverty "plummeted in a single generation, from 84 percent in 1981 to 13 percent by 2008," from "bare subsistence to broad comfort."

President Xi Jingling during a summit visit to Washington D.C. in September 2015.

In the face of growing wealth and income inequality President Xi Jinping oversees the current Chinese Dream, Shirky writes. The dream is tied to better communication, transportation and housing, "very much like the American one," where "if you work hard, your life will improve, and that improvement will include material comfort of a home and a car."

"This market-supported bargain has worked better than almost anyone expected, but the days when the rising tide really did lift all boats, and where the economic tide was rising consistently quickly, are now ending. The Chinese Dream is Xi's attempt to deal with the end of the easy growth. The moderately prosperous society he is proposing to (comprehensively) build is a way of trying to deflate the rising expectations of the middle class for both marked economic and political improvement. These are all entries in his longer-term goal of bringing China's single-party system into some sort of self-governing norm, while at the same time convincing the Chinese masses to accept a slowing economy and significant income inequality."

Clay Shirky at a TED Talks presentation.

Shirky's "Little Rice" (the literal definition of Xiaomi), follows insights he revealed in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity In a Connected Age" (Penguin Press, 2010) about collaboration, innovation, intrinsic motivation and civic engagement.

Shirky riffs on human nature, a new drive for quality and innovation in China, and the role of smartphones in society.

"Xiaomi also means something for how the world will get connected. Mobile phones are the most broadly desired category of complex goods in the world, beating out their only rivals, cars and televisions, by a country kilometer. The mobile phone is also becoming the universal source of connectivity for most of the world's population, increasingly the gateway to every form of content other than paintings, and to every form of commerce other than haggling. Thanks to the mobile phone, the developing world, and therefore a majority of the human population, has gotten connected in the last twenty years. In the next ten, a majority of them will move from simple phones to real networked computers. Though Apple invented the smartphone, and Samsung spread it, it is Xiaomi who showed the world how to create a defensible market between luxurious and crappy, and to scale up to meet the rising demand of the rapidly expanding and increasingly global middle class."

New York University library in Shanghai.

Shirky, who teaches at New York University, Shanghai, says we are experiencing a "golden age of writing about China." He provides a list of "further readings" at the end of "Little Rice."

Evan Osno's "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China" (FSG, 2014). "This is simply the best book on China today."

Peter Hessler's "Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present" (Harper, 2006) and "Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory."

James Fallows's "Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China" (Vintage, 2008) and "China Airborne" (Pantheon, 2012).

Ezra Vogel's "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" (Belknap Press, 2011).

Jonathan Spence's "The Search for Modern China" (Norton, 1990).

Harvard University's ten-part online class by professors Peter Bol and William Kirby, and narrated by Christopher Lydon, "China" available at www.edx.org/xseries/chinax.

Shaun Rein's "The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation, and Individualism in Asia" (Wiley, 2014).

Edward Tse's "China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies are Changing the Rules of Business" (Portfolio, 2015).

Susan Shirk's "Changing Media, Changing China" (Oxford University Press, 2010).

'Invisibles,' Led Zeppelin and Loving Your Job

Review by Bill Doughty

Led Zeppelin both opens and closes this remarkable book about "the power of anonymous work in an age of relentless self-promotion" (subtitle of "Invisibles," a 2014 book published by Portfolio/Penguin).
You'll want to crank up "When the Levee Breaks" when you read about the role of sound engineer Andy Johns, who is responsible for the sound of John Bonham's drums, Eric Clapton's and Van Halen's sounds, and the Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers."
Johns is one of several invisibles profiled – people who work behind the scenes and find satisfaction in what they they do and create, not in fame, fortune or recognition. 

Invisibles are new master craftsmen who value artisanal workmanship over the limelight. Think of some of the best staff non-commissioned officers, executive officers and assistants, boatswain's mates, and special operators. Their focus is on team success and quiet competence.

David Zweig, author of "Invisibles" quotes a former Navy SEAL who said he prefers the anonymity of the early 90s – prior to the explosion of the Internet – over the "seemingly incessant fascination with the SEAL Teams."

Zweig evaluates three traits of Invisibles: ambivalence toward recognition, meticulousness in their work, and a savoring of responsibility. He shows how "flow" – "the trance-like state mental that occurs when a person is completely immersed in an activity" – brings them joy, satisfaction and pride.

"If you have a pride and confidence in what you do, as Stumpf so clearly does, the rewards you reap come from within, which are, perhaps, the only true and lasting rewards. In this regard pride – and I'm not talking about the biblical connotation of pride as sin, but pride as respect for yourself, your work, your effort – is just an extension of the Invisible core treat of drawing fulfillment from the work itself, not outside acknowledgment of it."

Author David Zweig

Zweig's eclectic examples of Invisibles include a New Yorker magazine fact checker, airport wayfinder, U.N. interpreter, cinematographer, perfumer, architect, guitar technician and piano tuner. He makes references to Homer's "Iliad," Susan Cain's "Quiet," David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," Alice Marwick's "Status Update," Adam Grant's "Give and Take," and Jean Twenge's "The Narcissistic Epidemic," as well as other texts and literature. And he takes the reader to Atlanta, New York, Shanghai and places in between.

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Taking a global perspective, Zweig compares the United States, where the focus is on the "vertical individualist," with much of the rest of the world, where the emphasis is on the overall collective, the entire team.
In the "so-called Confucian Belt" (which includes Korea, China, Vietnam and Japan and other nations in the region), self-promotion and attention-seeking are frowned upon and seen as immature, Zweig reports. The Japanese phrase en no shita no chikara mochi means, loosely, what's beneath the stage has great strength or power. Those behind the scenes make those on stage successful.
Zweig's insights would be useful to any student of innovation, and "Invisibles" would fit nicely on the book shelf of supporters of Secretary of the Navy Mabus's new Task Force Innovation. Zweig shows how countries that shy away from flashy individualism value soft power and quiet influence over aggressive bullying. 
His insights generate questions:

John Paul Jones met by President Obama after Kennedy Center Honors in 2012.

Is narcissism at the root of moral decay in society? Does extreme individualism fuel the wealth gap and crush the middle class? Could growing self-promotion and the need for more election money be damaging the political system and preventing consensus-building? What happens when the levee breaks?

Zweig has his own epiphany while writing this book, finding joy in the work and not in the accolades.

He wraps up with an unintentionally ironic mention of John Paul Jones – not the flashy, flamboyant and forlorn hero of the early American Navy, but the creative British bass player who, along with John Bonham, backed up Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

Innovation Reverberation How/Now

Review by Bill Doughty

Imagine what it's like to crawl inside the head of a dead sperm whale for days ... Look into how mirrors were the original selfies ... Feel how a ice cubes were harvested before  there was refrigeration ... Hear how sonar and ultrasound became a reality.

These and other insights are presented in Steven Johnson's "How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World."  It's helpful to know how far we've come as we chart where we are going.

That crawling around in a whale's head thing? Johnson describes whaling for spermaceti, a white oily substance that was used by early Americans, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington even before 1776, in candles that produced a strong white light without offensive smoke.

"Extracting the spermaceti was almost as difficult as harpooning the whale itself. A hole would be carved in the side of the whale's head, and men would crawl into the cavity above the brain – spending days inside the rotting carcass, scraping spermaceti out of the brain of the beast. It's remarkable to think that only two hundred years ago, this was the reality of artificial light: if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale's head for an afternoon."

Spermaceti whale of the Southern Ocean, 1833-1843, engraving by Sir William Jardine

Soberly, Johnson reports that about 300,000 whales, "majestic creatures," were slaughtered in roughly a century. "It is likely that the entire population would have been killed off had we not found a new source of oil for artificial light ..." That would be petroleum-based fossil fuels.

This book is built around six areas of innovation and invention: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.

The first chapter reminds us of the importance, versatility and strength of glass – in various lenses, including in powerful microscopes and in the biggest telescopes at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and in fiberglass, fiber-optics, smart phones and computer monitors. Glass supports the entire Internet and networking. And, Johnson shows, glass is at the heart of art.

Author Steven Johnson takes a mirror "selfie."

"It's easy to make fun of our penchant for taking selfies, but in fact there is a long and storied tradition behind that form of self-expression. Some of the most revered works of art from the Renaissance and early modernism are self-portraits; from Dürer to Leonardo, to Rembrandt, all the way to van Gogh with his bandaged ear, painters have been obsessed with capturing detailed and varied images of themselves on the canvas. Rembrandt, for instance, painted around forty self-portraits over the course of his life. But the interesting thing about self-portraiture is that it effectively doesn't exist as an artistic convention in Europe before 1400. People painted landscapes and royalty and religious scenes and a thousand other subjects. But they didn't paint themselves. The explosion of interest in self-portraiture was the direct result of yet another technological breakthrough in our ability to manipulate glass."

Johnson goes into the history and even some "bizarre sacred rituals" surrounding mirrors. It makes for an interesting story on which to reflect.

Sawing ice for harvest

Johnson's combination of art, science and history shows how belief, commitment and perseverance can pay off in his story of Frederic Tudor of New England, who had the idea in the early 1800s – seemingly crazy at the time – of harvesting ice from lakes in New England in the winter and taking it by sailing ship down to the Caribbean and over to Asia.

Ice trade, as depicted by F. Ray, Harper's Weekly, 30 August 1884

Tudor's insight, Johnson shows, was an understanding of the science of energy in a changing world economy.

"Tudor's triumphant (if long-delayed) success selling ice around the world seems implausible to us today not just because it's hard to imagine blocks of ice surviving the passage from Boston to Bombay. There's an additional, almost philosophical curiosity to the ice business. Most of the trade in natural goods involves material that thrives in high-energy environments. Sugarcane, coffee, tea, cotton – all these staples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commerce were dependent on the blistering heat of tropical and subtropical climates; the fossil fuels that now circle the planet in tankers and pipelines are simply solar energy that was captured and stored by plants millions of years ago. You could make a fortune in 1800 by taking things that grew only in high-energy environments and shipping them off to low-energy climates. But the ice trade – arguably for the only time in the history of global commerce – reversed that pattern. What made ice valuable was precisely the low-energy state of a New England winter, and the peculiar capacity of ice to store that lack of energy for long periods of time. The cash crops of the tropics caused populations to swell in climates that could be unforgivingly hot, which in turn created a market for a product that allowed you to escape the heat. In the long history of human commerce, energy had always correlated with value: the more heat, the more solar energy, the more you could grow. But in a world that was tilting toward the productive heat of sugarcane and cotton plantations, cold could be an asset as well. That was Tudor's great insight."

Galileo looks into the Cosmos

Johnson references people and groups as diverse as Jack the Ripper, Joe Biden, Ella Fitzgerald, Aristotle, H. G. Wells, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Ike and Tina Turner, and Led Zeppelin.

Of course most of the focus is on innovators and inventors such as Galileo Galilei, Thomas Edison, Lee De Forest, Ellis Chesbrough, Reginald Fessenden, Jacob Riis, Lufkin Dennison, and Augusta Ada, Countess Lovelace.

Johnson tells the story of music ethnographer Iegor Reznikoff from the University of Paris, who discovered new sound revelations in the Arcy-sur-Cure caves, where you can hear seven distinct echoes of your voice if you utter a sound while standing under Paleolithic images. "Reznikoff's theory is that Neanderthal communities gathered beside the images they had painted, and they chanted or sang in some kind of shamanic ritual, using the reverberations of the cave to magically widen the sound of their voices."

Where Neanderthals once stood and created art – visual and aural?

Johnson says there's a hopeful lesson in the story of the science of sound and story of development of sonar and ultrasound, "which is how quickly our ingenuity is able to leap boundaries of conventional influence."

"Our ancestors first noticed the power of echo and reverberation to change the sonic properties of the human voice tens of thousands of years ago; for centuries we have used those properties to enhance the range and power of our vocal chords, from cathedrals to the Wall of Sound. But it's hard to imagine anyone studying the physics of sound two hundred years ago predicting that those echoes would be used to track undersea weapons or determine the sex of an unborn child. What began with the most moving and intuitive sound to the human ear – the sound of our voices in song, in laughter, sharing news or gossip – has been transformed into the tools of both war and peace, death and life. Like those distorted wails of the tube amp, it is not always a happy sound. Yet, again and again, it turns out to have unsuspected resonance."

This book, which is filled with great photos and art, is a companion to a PBS Special that aired in late 2014 and continues to reverberate. Author Walter Isaacson, author of "The Innovators," said, "Steven Johnson is the Darwin of technology. Through fascinating observations and insights, he enlightens us about the origin of ideas."