I was on Slate.com the other day and a review of the recent book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb jumped out at me.

I'd first heard of the author from my friend Michael Sperger a year ago when he was chairing the SCIP conference in New York and was shortlisting keynotes, having read Taleb's earlier book, "Fooled by Randomness" (Michael chose Jim Surowiecki instead).

Now, I'm not much of a determinist myself but the central notion that highly improbable events through history are the ones that have shaped modern civilization and the inherent unpredictability of these events in the future makes the work of intelligence in business a good deal tougher. In fact, as pattern recognizers, we must help to manage the risk of threats emerging that look like threats we've seen before; but what happens when it's something entirely new and equally as devastating as, say, the 9/11 attacks were on the national psyche? (read more)

The new George Tenet memoir that launches today was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times yesterday in a piece called "An Ex-C.I.A. Chief on Iraq and the Slam Dunk That Wasn't".

Kakatuni called it both "withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous" and "is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members."

The book describes a White House entitled to its own set of facts as the former director of central intelligence lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Elsewhere in the book, Tenet defends his now infamous "slam dunk" comment about the case for going to war in Iraq. I found the Sunday TIME Magazine interview that runs down his side of the story plus a few other choice tidbits:

TIME: Slam Dunk? What were you thinking? (read more)