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We will make this point again and again: Amazon has faced many of the same problems all companies face. The difference is that Amazon has come up with novel solutions that deliver a significant competitive advantage, and this is true of its approach to hiring. The Bar Raiser process was one of Amazon’s first and most successful scalable, repeatable, and teachable operational practices.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
The fact that this was “hard” intelligence based on actual photos was what is now called sensitive compartmented information (SCI), higher than Top Secret. Access to it required a Keyhole (K) clearance, higher than Top Secret, which I didn’t have at the time. The existence of clearances higher than Top Secret was in those years itself a well-kept secret, along with the nature of the information each of them covered and the actual information itself. It was extremely unusual for anyone holding such a clearance to give any hint of these secrets to someone who didn’t have the special clearance. The penalty for a security breach of that nature was to be dropped immediately, within minutes of the discovery of the indiscretion, from the computer listings of those with access to the special clearances. That meant exclusion from the list of those who counted in national security discussions within the government—those who had access to this information and could talk freely among themselves. That sanction helped keep those secrets very, very well. Leaks to the press were nonexistent, either about the clearances, the intelligence means, or the contents of the information. Breaches of discipline, either deliberate or inadvertent, even to close colleagues who hadn’t been specially cleared, simply didn’t occur, with few exceptions.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
Chinese civilization is the experience of the nuclear family writ large, and just as extended families are expected to look after their own survival, China has long felt that it ought to be self‐sufficient.
What's Wrong With China
Paul Midler
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