The Department of Defense has released details on major defense acquisition program cost, schedule, and performance changes since the September 2005 reporting period.

DoD News: DoD Releases Selected Acquisition Reports

The authors of the article warn of the dangers of our natural over-optimism. “Almost all of us,” they write, “believe ourselves to be in the top 20% of the population when it comes to driving, pleasing a partner, or managing a business.” This applies to managers making strategic decisions, including decisions whether to acquire or merge with other companies. Over-optimism, for example, leads to the underestimation of the technical challenges involved in large infrastructure projects, or the time needed to complete them – hence the extraordinary frequency with which such projects over-run their budgets and their deadlines.

The article also warns of the risks of “sunflower management”, the tendency of all heads to turn in the same direction as that of the boss. The authors say that managers should become more aware of how biases can affect their decisions, and then take measures to counter them. But don’t almost all of us think we are doing that exceptionally well already?

Don’t exaggerate | Economist

Sun's chairman and chief executive thinks slogans are a substitute for strategy

Still changing the subject | Economist

A new breed of paternalists is seeking to promote virtue and wisdom by default. Be wary

The state is looking after you | Economist

In this week’s magazine, George Packer reports on what American soldiers have learned about battling the insurgency in Iraq, and whether those lessons have come too late. Here, Packer talks to Matt Dellinger about the situation, accompanied by a portfolio of photographs by Samantha Appleton.

Small Victories | The New Yorker

In “Why?” (Princeton; $24.95), the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. In the tradition of the legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reëxamine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.

HERE’S WHY, by MALCOLM GLADWELL | The New Yorker

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

Hersh on Iran | New Yorker

Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world. Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction.

Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006

"What we're witnessing now in Europe—I would point to the riots in France, the [French] "no" vote of the [European] constitution, the efforts of countries to protect their national industries from takeover by companies from other EU nations—is a quite worrisome nationalization of political and economic life in Europe," says Kupchan, senior fellow and director for European Studies. "And it's taking place in a way that I think is presenting Europe with its greatest political crisis, probably since the end of World War II."

French Demonstrations Symptoms of ‘Greatest Political Crisis’ in Europe Since World War II

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