Tag Archives: Intelligence Analysis

Geopolitics in Japan and Harvard Business Review, Korea

On March 21, Milo will offer an IE Masterclass on “Geopolitics for Business” in Tokyo.  The following day, he will be speaking on the same topic at Nissan’s Global Headquarters  and in a Nikkei Open Seminar.  Please contact him if you would like to attend one of these sessions.

Special Lecture with Harvard Business Review Korea, 24 March, 2016

Special Lecture with Harvard Business Review Korea, 24 March, 2016

In Seoul on March 24, Milo will offer a session on the promise and pitfalls of Big Data at Ernst & Young.   That session will be followed in the evening by a special, two-part Masterclass for Harvard Business Review Korea (Donga Business Review) entitled “Intelligence Tools for the Business Professional”.   In this session, Milo will explore how businesses  can use analytic tools drawn from the Intelligence Community to understand incidents like the de facto 2010 Chinese embargo on the export of rare earth elements.  Please note that this event hosted by DBR on a fee basis; if you are interested in attending, please register here.

The content of all of these sessions will be covered in much greater depth in Madrid in June, when Milo is co-teaching the three-day IE Executive Education course “Unconventional Edges in Finance: Tools from Intelligence Agencies, Behavioral Finance, and Scenario Strategy.”  Details about the course and how to register for it can be found here.

The Euromoney Qatar Conference 2015

Event_850_359px_Qatar_v1On Wednesday, December 9, Milo is speaking on the panel “Qatar’s Strategy in a Changing World” at the Euromoney Qatar conference.   The panel will address Qatar’s place among the shifting geopolitics of the Persian Gulf region, and the financial risks and opportunities generated by recent global trends.   In addition to his panel, conference speakers includes senior figures from the Qatari financial and political establishment and a keynote address by Sir John Scarlett, Former Chief​ of MI6.

For details of the event or if you would like to attend Milo’s panel, please contact him directly (or of course contact Euromoney directly to attend the Conference as a whole).

UK Parliamentary Committee echos our findings on diversity

Readers of Constructing Cassandra will remember that our first recommendation for improving intelligence analysis at the Agency was, “Enforce diversity at the CIA for practical, not moral, reasons. We find that the homogeneity of the CIA personnel severely hobbles its central mission” (page 15).

While diversity in terms of gender, race, religion, etc. is not a perfect proxy for cognitive diversity, it certainly plays a role in the sociology of knowledge and the natural selection of accidents that are central to strategic surprises.

It is gratifying, therefore, that  in a report released yesterday, a UK parliamentary committee on intelligence and security urged MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to increase the diversity of their workforce, especially in terms of gender.

You read it here first

You read it here first

Specifically, the report notes, “it is the variety of ideas, the competition, the challenge, the lack of ‘group think’, and the interesting collaborations, that a diverse workforce brings to an organisation. If organisations are only recruiting and promoting one sort of person, then they are only going to get one sort of solution to a problem. Even with some of the brightest and the best, if they are cut from the same cultural cloth, this will inevitably result in a narrower perspective.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

You can read more about the committee’s recommendations in yesterday’s TelegraphGuardian and on the BBC.

Geopolitics: Shortcuts For Spotting Good And Bad Analysis

If you enjoyed the piece in Forbes earlier in the week about the similarities between poor geopolitical analysis and psychic cold-reading, an expanded version, “Geopolitics: Shortcuts For Spotting Good And Bad Analysis” is now available on Seeking Alpha.

A Slipshod Analysts Best Friend.

A Slipshod Analysts Best Friend.

Geopolitics, Investing, and the Little Book of Psychic Cold Reading

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Milo’s latest advice for investors and business people trying to come to grips with geopolitics is now available on Forbes.com.  It’s called “Geopolitics, Investing and the Little Book of Psychic Cold Reading”.

Geopolitical Alpha – What It Is, And Why You Need It

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Milo has just published the first of a series of articles about Geopolitics and investing on the financial news site Seeking Alpha.  It’s entitled “Geopolitical Alpha – What It Is, And Why You Need It”.

If you want to jump ahead in the series (and explore some of topics the Seeking Alpha series will cover in more depth), see our previous posts, especially Geopolitics and Investing: A Reading List and How to Think like an Intelligence Analyst.

Comments and questions are most welcome either here or on the Seeking Alpha site.

 

 

New video: How does identity play out in surprises? The example of Osama bin Laden

In this video about our book “Constructing Cassandra”, we explain how identity plays out in strategic surprises, using the example of Osama bin Laden. Watch it here on YouTube.

Constructing Cassandra Now Available

Our new book on strategic surprise, Constructing Cassandra:  Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001, is now available for pre-order worldwide.

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Interested readers in North America can read reviews and order it via  Amazon.com or Barnes&Nobel;  in the UK you can use Amazon.co.uk; in the rest of the EU, you may wish to use Amazon.fr or Amazon.de; and in Asia you may wish to use  Amazon.jp.

If you do order it thank you.  Naturally, if you have any questions about the book, please ask us.

Workshop on ACH – Analysis of Competing Hypotheses

Milo and I organize a workshop on Tuesday, May 29 on ACH (Analysis of Competing Hypotheses). ACH is a tool originally developed by Richards Heuer at the CIA to analyze complex and uncertain situations. It is widely used in intelligence and international politics, but Milo and I think it applies equally well to business for strategic decision making. ACH uses a deceptively simple framework to use ideas from the scientific method, cognitive psychology and decision analysis to overcome a common but immensely important bias:  the fact that we tend to perceive what we expect to perceive rather than what actually exists.

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Geopolitics and Investing: A Reading List

As I explain to my students at IE, the most any business school can hope to do is move you from unconscious ignorance to conscious ignorance of a subject.  In other words, a course can lay a firm foundation in a subject, and then provide a jumping off point for future self-study.  After my MIAF course “Geopolitics and Investing”, that usually prompts the question, “Where should I begin such self-study?”  How do I start to learn to generate “geopolitical alpha”?

As I said in an earlier post, there are certain key books that point you towards how to think like an intelligence analyst.  Because the skills of an intelligence analyst and a geopolitical investor overlap so much, I would also say that investors interested in geopolitics start with those key books.  In particular, if you haven’t mastered the critical thinking and the basic analytic  techniques described in Thinking in Time, Essence of Decision and The Thinker’s Toolkit, you are still in kindergarten as far as intelligence analysis is concerned.    Heuer’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (downloadable free from the CIA’s site here) is also immensely valuable.  None of these books will teach you geopolitical analysis per se, but they will give you a solid foundation in non-quantitative analysis.

One investor gets a grip on Geopolitics

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