Analysis Paralysis: the Intelligence-Policy Divide, Revisited

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 was released earlier this year (you can find it here).  In that context, it is worth mentioning an important point that Wikistrat‘s Thomas P.M. Barnett made earlier about previous NIC’s forecasts in his 2005 book, The Pentagon’s New Map.  Barnett’s key point in the book for our purposes is that the US Intelligence Community believes that it must only do analysis, and never engage in “advocacy” of any particular policy.  This epistemologically naive point of departure poses a number of problems.

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Personal Genetic Testing Companies – an Update

Last week, I again attended VALUEx.   If you’re a Value Investor, this is no more interesting use of your time – it is an extraordinary gathering of intelligent, talented and fun people.

Like me, many people at VALUEx avoid investing in technology firms.  On the other hand, many participants know that it’s important to follow the evolution of what I call the “3 GRAIN” technologies (3D printing, Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Information Technology, and Nanotechnology).  Each of the 3 GRAIN general purpose technologies will have an increasing impact on the creation of value in the years ahead.   Moreover, how they will combine to produce social changes is something that Philippe and I think about a lot.
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Our new Forbes piece: Lady Gaga World President by 2030? Why the forecasters so often get it wrong

Our latest post on Forbes is a reflection on the limits of forecasting after the publication of the National intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 report is available here. In short, don’t predict, construct.

Previous Forbes pieces:

 

Forecasting World Events – Call for Participants

We may be looking for you.

We may be looking for you.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably the sort of person that the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is looking for:   IARPA is now looking for new participants for its online research study, Forecasting World Events.

The Forecasting World Events study involves making predictions about current issues that you select from various categories, like international relations, global politics, economics, business, and other areas.  If you’d like to try to participate, click HERE.

Once you sign up at the website, they will send you a background questionnaire.   After you complete the questionnaire, they will send you an e-mail to let you know if you have been selected.  The initial questionnaire only takes about 20 minutes, and the prediction study itself is really interesting and quite quick to do every few weeks.

PS To understand the methodological background of the study, we recommend Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment:  How Good Is It? How Can We Know.

PPS If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our blog?  Thanks.

The Four Drivers of Geostrategy : 1) Demographic change

In a previous post, Milo argued that strategic thinking should begin at the level of Geostrategy (See Start with Geostrategy or call it tactics). Geostrategy looks at how geopolitical factors inform, constrain, and affect business over the long term.  For convenience, you can place these geopolitical drivers into four categories that interact, evolve and change over time:  Demographics, Geography, Technology, and Culture.  It is “climate change” at the level of these geopolitical drivers– and especially the interaction among them – that create the economic and political “weather” of your firm.  These are often same forces that fund managers harness to generate “alpha” for their funds.  It is at their level that true strategy begins.   In this post, we’ll look at the first one, Demographics.

The Foundations of Lasting Strategy

The Foundations of Lasting Strategy

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New Forbes Entry, “Market Armageddon Postponed”: Why Technology and the Price Mechanism will Prove the Scarcity Cassandras Wrong

Our latest post on Forbes, an update on ruminations about commodity scarcity that you’ve seen on this blog before, is now available here. The future isn’t bleak, even if fear sells.

Is Your Company Heading For a Cuban Missile Crisis? Steps to Make Sure Big Data is Working For You, Not Against You

Big data evidence hiding in plain sight

The rise of big data – the ability to gather massive amounts of information about both environment and operations – rests on the assumption that having more data gives organizations better control and the ability to avoid nasty surprises. It doesn’t. To understand why, consider the Cuba missile crisis that started exactly 50 years ago today.

Read more on our latest Forbes piece here.

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Crafting Non Predictive Strategy, Part III: Acknowledge the Nature of the Problem

Despite formidable developments in business strategy over the last fifty years, organizations keep being disrupted by events they should have seen coming, but didn’t, or by events they saw coming but were unable to avoid or take advantage of. In 1971, NCR was surprised by the rapid rise of electronic cash registers and lost its leadership of the market. In 2007, Nokia was unable to react to the launch of the iPhone, an event the Finnish firm dismissed as minor, and is now struggling to survive. In 2011, the Arab uprising came as a complete surprise to everybody, not just business and governments but the people involved as well. And the list goes on:  if strategy is about addressing the key challenges an organization face, then the general lack of preparedness (if not prevention of) the economic and political crises that the world has been facing since 2008 is a massive failure of strategy. Hence it’s no surprise that in a survey conducted in 2011 by consulting firm Booz, fully 53% of senior executives did not think their company’s strategy would be successful. Houston, we have a problem…with strategy. Continue reading

Crafting Non-Predictive Strategy, Part II: Start with who you are

In the first part of this series, Milo and I examined the complexity of nonlinear environments and tried to show how, when confronted with such an environment, energy spent on a deep understanding of the present beats attempts at predicting the future.  Hence our call for a non-predictive approach to strategy.

Nonlinear systems can be found in nature, but they are particularly common and problematic when they involve human issues.  While such human nonlinear systems can display regularities over long time periods, most major political, economic and business issues are essentially nonlinear and permeated by social facts.  What such human-centered, nonlinear systems have in common but which is often overlooked is that one cannot deal with them as if they were natural science problems.  For one thing, and as we have argued in a recent Forbes article with the example of Usama bin Ladin, how you define the issue you’re dealing with depends on who you are.  This is also the reason that “genius” fails.

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Our Latest Forbes Piece: What a Caveman Can Teach You About Strategy

I have a strategy lesson for you

Read our latest piece on Forbes here.

In it, we argue that how an organization perceives competition or reacts to a disruption in its environment depends on its identity. Hence, before you start trying to understand them, try to understand yourself first.

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