Before I joined, the CIA’s Head of Recruitment recommended I watch Ronin to learn something about the life of a spy. It’s a story set in the years between the Cold War and 9/11, when spies were using old skills to do new things. The new things in Ronin include a chase for a briefcase. The old skills are the planning, execution and reacting to what happens. The main character is Sam, played by Robert De Niro. Playwright David Mamet (credited as Richard Weisz) was brought in to

In his 2008 bestseller Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell famously highlighted the 10,000 hour “rule.” The “rule” is that it usually takes 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert at something. One of his examples is the Beatles. Over a four-year period, they played over 1,200 shows in Hamburg, Germany and played for over 10,000 hours together. Then, they were ready to conquer the world, says Gladwell. They had become experts at producing and playing “great” music. But was it the 10,

Working with risk is complicated. If you work in law enforcement or the military, you’ve got spreadsheets and computers and checklists to help you with risks. If you work in finance, you’ve got algorithms to help you make good decisions about risk. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got mentors (hopefully) and bankers and consultants who help you analyze and minimize the risks to your business. When you’re a spy in the field, you don’t get much help with risks. You don’t have

I was consulting for a large company. The project was to tie the company’s data and analytics to their decision-making in a particular area. They had tried to do it several times before but hadn’t been able to make it work. They were desperate to get it right, so I had the freedom to take a different approach. Step one was simple: Talk to the top 40 leaders in the company and have them tell me their questions. I asked the leaders to ignore their current data. I asked them to

The Data-Analysis-Decision-Action process in A Spy’s Guide To Thinking isn’t static. It isn’t something you do one time. It’s born from Boyd’s OODA Loop. As a loop, you cycle through the DADA process as many times as you can. After you act, you observe the results. You collect new data. You feed the new data into your analysis. So you make better decisions each time around. You get feedback. And you use it to inform what you do next. You can have a problem at any of the stage

Jordan Peterson has the #1 nonfiction book at Amazon for the fourth week in a row. As a clinical psychologist, he has insights into behavior, and he likes to call out silliness when he sees it. His book is called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos. Peterson knows history. As a university professor, he knows modes of thinking change over time. “Framing” changes over time. What we do with the data from the world around us changes over time. In an interview last year, Peter

This is one in a series of Spy's Guide book reviews. For more, see spysguide.com/blog Michael V. Hayden, Playing To The Edge As boss of the National Security Agency during 9/11 and later boss of the CIA, Hayden managed two intelligence bureaucracies. At NSA, Hayden’s work was expected to be in the first two steps of the DADA sequence: Hayden’s job at NSA was to collect as much data as possible, maybe more than anyone else in the world. Then, the job was to analyze it. To tran

When you do an edited radio interview, you give up a lot of power. You sit and talk for a while. They ask questions. You answer them. Then the real work begins. The interviewer and editor cut and splice what you say. They pull together what they think will be interesting to their audience. They try to get good quotes. They try to make the interview something their audience will listen to and share. They try to create "good radio." In the course of that, they have a lot of pow

Scott Adams wrote this about President Trump's first week: "Here’s how the math of persuasion works in this situation: 1 outrage out of 3 headlines in a week: Bad Persuasion 25 outrages out of 25 headlines in a week: Excellent Persuasion At the moment there are so many outrages, executive orders, protests, and controversies that none of them can get enough oxygen in our brains. I can’t obsess about problem X because the rest of the alphabet is coming at me at the same time."