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
Silberzahn & Jones 