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

Recently, China President Xi Jinping gave a speech about China’s place in the world. He talked about Zero-Sum Games and (implicitly) Positive-Sum Games. ​CNBC reported: "In his speech, the Chinese president sold a vision of China as a benevolent leader of the global economy, emphasizing that open systems are the best course of action for the world. 'We must refrain from seeking dominance and reject the zero-sum game, we must refrain from 'beggar thy neighbor' and reject power

In the Spy's Guide books, Positive-Sum Games and Zero-Sum Games are a simple way to develop effective strategies. Author Chris Illuminati (his real name) asked me how those games apply to strategies in office politics. The result was this article. Here's how it starts: Working in an office is oddly the same as working in the field of espionage. There are allies, enemies, allies who could become enemies and vice versa. There’s also intense negotiation to get more money, a more

Russian publishing house Alpina (Russian publisher of Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Covey, and many others) has translated and combined A Spy's Guide To Thinking and A Spy's Guide To Strategy into a single volume. The Russian title is "Think Like A Spy: How To Make Decisions In Critical Situations." Alpina says it's a bestseller in Russia. Here's the cover: Alpina posted reviews from two former Russian intelligence officials and an author (via Google Translate): "John Braddock's

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

If you’re a reader, you’ve probably read a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Either his bestsellers The Tipping Point, Outliers or his more recent book David And Goliath. Now, he’s teaching a “masterclass” on writing. One tip he gives away for free in the advertisement for the class (beginning at the :59 mark): Gladwell: “One of the mistakes I think writers make is they spend a lot of time thinking about how to start their stories. And not a lot of time thinking about how to end them

This is one in a series of Spy's Guide book reviews. For more, see spysguide.com/blog Jack Devine, Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story A spy’s career is tied to history. From the 1970s through mid-1990s, Jack Devine worked in the trenches of major historical moments. He was a young case officer in Chile during the Pinochet coup. He touched on the Iran-Contra Affair. He worked to supply Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan. He rose through the ranks and became Acting DD