Terrorism fighters study small-business tactics Del Jones USA Today http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070103/BUSINESS/70 1030324/1046/BUSINESS
The U.S. military is studying small companies such as 24-employee Craigslist to see how the online bulletin board has all but terrorized the newspaper industry by eroding it of classified advertising. Such research may unearth ideas that will help the United States fight the war on terror. It may seem a stretch that within the chaos of capitalism are the secrets to fighting al-Qaida. But the military and business have long borrowed leadership lessons and competitive tactics from each other, this being but the latest example. In the past, sharing between military and business has been largely a one-way street. The Art of War by the ancient Chinese general Sun-Tzu remains a must-read for corporate CEOs, and most great lessons have been learned the hard way on the battleground before migrating into commerce. For example, CEOs have come to embrace the idea that it's better to act quickly on an imperfect plan than to introduce a perfect plan too late, a lesson first learned the hard way in the fog of war. But this time the military is paying closer attention to business than business is paying to the military, because the world of geopolitics has discovered itself to be on the same road that business has been on for some time. That road is flatter, more networked and more decentralized than ever. Large companies are groping for strategies to fend off disruptive competitors, including YouTube, Kazaa, Skype and Wikipedia, companies that are giving away video, music, long-distance and information while eroding the revenue stream of companies that charge for it. The 16 employees at YouTube, a Web site where users swap millions of free videos, have created anxiety throughout the giant industries of film and TV. The Wikimedia Foundation has no plans to bring Western civilization to its knees, but the organization that provides a free Web-based encyclopedia has done as much to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some 100,000 readers comb Wikipedia entries for errors. Two of those volunteer editors wouldn't recognize each other if they passed on the street. But they are joined at the hip by an ideology and can inflict pain upon a company that has been around since 18th-century Scotland. Sound familiar? How large, traditional companies fare in this fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaida. That's why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organi-zations. It was written strictly for a business audience, but military strategists are reading it. "This is the best thing I've read that applies to counterterrorism," said Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department director in international affairs. The premise of The Starfish and the Spider is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer decision making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back. When Starfish co-author Rod Beckstrom arrived at USA Today for an interview in November, he said he had just come from meetings with representatives at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the Washington "intelligence community." He said he was contacted "out of the blue" in September by one of the highest-ranking officers in special operations, and more recently by a high-ranking special operations officer at Fort Bragg, N.C. Next week, Beckstrom will present a "high-level briefing set up for a dozen members of different intelligence groups in D.C.," he said. Fighting terrorism The Starfish and the Spider co-author Rod Beckstrom recommends three strategies against terrorism: * Change the ideology that fuels it. For example, he said the West should help fund public schools in terrorist hotbeds where parents now send their children to radical madrasahs because they feed and educate their children. For now, parents have no alternative. School choice and other strategies aimed at the ideology take a generation or more, but Atallah said he, too, has decided that blunt military weaponry is not enough, and success depends on winning hearts and minds. * Centralize the decentralized opponent. An example of this would be to let Hezbollah go ahead and govern in Lebanon. Hezbollah is defined as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Israel. But it is more centralized than al-Qaida and is funded by the centralized government of Iran. Centralized governments are easier to persuade and/or defeat than independent cells, Beckstrom said. * Decentralize yourself. The obvious military example here is to expand special operations and give small units the freedom to complete missions without oversight and second-guessing from command and control. (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. 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