Strategic Analyst

What does a strategic planner, thinker, analyst do?

I spent a lot of time in the book trying to describe my career path, in part because I would have killed to have a book that actually explained what it was like to work in my field. I had the most naïve assumptions about going to Washington and becoming somehow a diplomatic type person in the State Department, or CIA, or I had a vague understanding of Defense, but I thought that was pretty much a military-dominated thing, and I had absolutely no understanding that there is a huge research complex that has been built up around the military over the Cold War, and there is a tremendous private sector operations research industry.

If I'd had any knowledge of that, I think I would have taken a different course, to be honest. I probably would have gone into statistics more, or would have taken more international economics. I probably would've taken more military courses, and I would've very seriously considered a ROTC situation, just to get a little taste of that experience. But when I got down there and discovered what it was, it was first and foremost, as anything is in the private sector, a business. It's not just "What do I want to research, what might I do?" It is "You've got clients, clients have problems, clients want solutions and they will pay a certain amount to have that solution enunciated to them."

Since I was somebody who'd gone through my dissertation with a real discipline in terms of time, I adapted fairly well to it, and yet it was still a huge learning curve. It wasn't just the notion of doing things on a budget and on a timeline, it was the notion that the answers couldn't just be nifty, or theoretical, or clever, or even right. They had to be practical, they had to be actionable. If they weren't actionable to decision makers, then you were wasting their time and they would stop you five minutes into the brief -- which was another thing which set in motion my career, this new form of communication. Yes, you did the written report, just like a research paper, but the real method and mode of transmission of ideas inside the Pentagon was to walk into the office of the sponsor, often a flag-rank officer, a general or an admiral, and deliver what at that point was still on acetate BU graphs, we called them, which you put on an overhead [projector], but quickly segued with the advent of the PCs and the Macintoshes to PowerPoint and the electronic display.

What I realized was that I had a real facility for marrying up images and conceptualizing very complex things that decision makers needed to have conceptualized so they can simply get the lingo down and get the sense of the universe down. With the rise of information technology across the military, just helping people understand the concept of an internet, an extranet, an intranet, and marrying these up with political change concepts, or concepts as to how the global economy works. To be able to display that visually and explain it over and over again to large audiences, and even to very small audiences, was a particular niche that I could carve for myself that dovetailed nicely with the desire to be not just a horizontal thinker but a strategist.

You've talked about this again and again, which is horizontal thinking. I want you to touch on that a minute. It's getting out of that narrow box and looking at things broadly, and in your case, globally. The other note I made in reading your book is interdisciplinary thinking, that you're bringing things together in a new and different way. I'm oversimplifying here, but one of your achievements has been to bring globalization to the Pentagon's way of thinking. Is that fair?

Right. That's a very good description. In fact, that's how I've often described myself.

It was hard for me to understand, [coming from] Harvard where we were taught game theory and all these neat theoretical constructs to describe, in the billiard-ball fashion, how things bump up against one another. Whereas, when you get down to Washington, you realize it's a hugely complex, ever-evolving debate with a lot of different positions. How you get ahead in terms of these intellectual conflicts and these policy debates, typically, is to become what I call a drill-down expert. You are the guy who knows everything about this one weapons system or this one tank.

Or the Romanian military.

Or Social Security, or pension plans. Your primary function in amassing all that information is your ability to be wielded like a knife in a fight against opposing ideas, and your primary function then is to argue against comprehensive packages by pointing out the flaws.

I found that kind of thinking, one, very constraining, and two, very negative. I spent all my time not creating ideas, or packages, or visions, but destroying other peoples' work. That was very much in the mode of the inter-service rivalries. I spent a lot of time dismembering the Marine explanation for the world, and the Air Force explanation, the Army explanation. An emptiness and a sense of negativity associated with that came to a crux for me when I decided I simply didn't want to be about that anymore. I wanted to be about something else.

Next page: Synergy of Ideas and Opportunity