Organizations are commonly thrust into hostile operating environments where they are required to make strategic decisions that involve significant and costly tradeoffs. Such hostile environments may be endemic such as an economic recession or idiosyncratic such as a predatory action by an adversary. Many features of such hostile environments parallel those of living organisms that also demonstrate fine-tuned strategies to improve their survivability under adverse conditions. How can organizations use these “bioinspired strategies” to survive, and even potentially innovate? This book shows that the same three capabilities essential for the survival of living organisms in harsh environments – efficiency, resilience, and prominence – are also critical for organizations in their process of navigating through their own hostile environments. Throughout the book, the authors provide organizational executives with a systematic framework for thinking about strategic decision-making in a hostile environment leaning on analysis of real-world cases to draw out ontologies and methods for guiding their teams through disruptions, change management, innovation, and process improvements. In the first part, organizations are provided with a systematic approach to analyzing three survivability influences – forces, resources, and observers and their interrelationships. While all three influences are active across all organisms (and organizations), the exact nature of their interrelationship and the significance of each influence are unique to every organism (or organization). The framework helps organizations nail down the specific features of their operating environment that can help or hinder survivability by analyzing the three influences. Organizations can respond to external influences by developing three-pronged capabilities – efficiency, resilience, and prominence (ERP) – that respond to the three survivability influences. Organizations often struggle with identifying the appropriate strategies to apply under different conditions. Fortunately, nature provides several mechanisms that can be analogically applied to guide business strategies. The book contains many illustrations and examples of strategic principles observed among living organisms that can help an organization develop ERP capability. Finally, the book introduces seven strategic design heuristics – Combination, Elimination, Separation, Segmentation, Replication, Dynamics, and Maximization – observed in a living system that can be flexibly utilized to generate ideas to achieve strategic ends.

'Art? What has art ever done for us as a family?' In the First World War, artist-soldier Joseph Gray drew and painted scenes of battle, his illustrations appearing in the popular press and his canvases sold to museums. But after struggling through the next decade and facing the threat of another war, Joseph had found a secret new calling: the art of camouflage. As he went from representing reality to disguising it, Joseph’s growing interest in camouflage concealed another, deeper subterfuge. He was leading a double life, and would eventually leave his family for the woman that he loved. Joseph Gray’s Camouflage is a multi-layered story of art, war, love and deception. Beyond attempting to pin down the image of a man who eludes us at every turn, it also traces the development of camouflage between the two wars and shines a light on the unlikely band of artists who made it happen. Though private letters, diaries, archives and interviews Joseph's great-granddaughter Mary Horlock pieces together the truth that was once lost, and brings his far-from-ordinary life back into focus.

... dedicated to the advancement and understanding of those principles and practices, military and political, which serve the vital security interests of the United States.

Published in 2004, Military Deception and Strategic Surprise! is a valuable contribution to the field of Military and Strategic Studies.

This book examines the relationship between wartime conflict and theatre practices. Bringing together a diverse collection of essays in one volume, it offers both a geographically and historically wide view of the subject, taking examples from Britain, Australia and America to the Middle East, Korea and China, and spanning the fifth century BCE to the present day. It explores the ways in which theatre practices have been manipulated for use in political and military propaganda, such as the employment of scenographers to work on camouflage and the application of acting methods in espionage training. It also maps the change in relationships between performers and audiences as a result of conflict, and the emergence of new forms of patronage during wartime theatre-going, boosting morale at periods when social structures and identity were being destabilized.

In 1940 a group of artists, sculptors, film makers, theatre designers and set painters came together to form the Camouflage Unit. They were so successful that in August 1942 Montgomery ordered them to to hide the preparations for the Battle of Alamein. In six weeks two entire divisions were conjured from the sand, while real units, stores and men vanished into thin air. Then, right in front of the German's eyes they made 600 tanks disappear and reappear fifty miles away disguised as lorries. Rommel had been bamboozled by an army made of nothing but string and straw and bits of wood.

Second World War British Military Camouflage offers an original approach to the cultures and geographies of military conflict, through a study of the history of camouflage. Isla Forsyth narrates the scientific biography of Dr Hugh Cott (1900-1987), eminent zoologist and artist turned camoufleur, and entwines this with the lives of other camouflage practitioners, to trace the sites of camouflage's developments. Moving through the scientists' fieldsite, the committee boardroom, the military training site and the soldiers' battlefield, this book uncovers the history of this ambiguous military invention, and subverts a long-dominant narrative of camouflage as solely a protective technology. This study demonstrates that, as camouflage transformed battlefields into unsettling theatres of war, there were lasting consequences not only for military technology and knowledge, but also for the ethics of battle and the individuals enrolled in this process.

The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 brings together art, design, fashion, and a much neglected concern for its spatial realities. The spaces and places of fashion have often been overlooked in the writing of fashion history and visual culture. More often than not, however, these environments mitigate, control, inform, and enhance how fashion is experienced, performed, consumed, seen, exhibited, purchased, appreciated and of course displayed. Space, as this volume attempts to illustrate, is itself a representational strategy on par with and influencing the visibility and visuality of fashion. Innovative and challenging, the essays in this volume explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional with paintings, illustrations, and photographs to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality. The volume also navigates various sites (both permanent and temporary) of production, circulation, exhibition, consumption, and promotion of fashion that define meaning and knowledge about a culture or individual by providing for a bond between embodied consumers/spectators and fashion objects. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 is a compelling project with a thematic, theoretical, and historiographic approach that is at once both focused yet far-reaching and original in its implications. The volume engages with questions attending to the ‘modern condition’ by seamlessly weaving interdisciplinary discussions of the visual with material culture to explore the spatial dimension(s) of fashion. Some of the essays explore new and exciting spaces while others offer compelling revisionary analyses of relatively known sources