About 15,000 words in all, spread across the original "four flows" from Pentagon's New Map (flow of security, people, money and energy), plus the missing "fifth Beatle" that never was: the planned food & water economic security exercise scheduled for October 2001 atop World Trade Center One (part of my NewRuleSets.Project work with Cantor Fitzgerald during my Naval War College days).
Going into the effort, I wasn't sure the flows angle would be all that great, after all the effort I put into the major trends work previously (politics, economics, technology, sustainability, demographics and security). I felt like I'd be slicing the same apples.
I was wrong and they turned out much more interesting than I thought possible. Chalk that one up to Wikistrat CEO Joel Zamel's strategic eye.
The one that super captured my imagination was the food and water page, which I did completely since landing in Beijing (sort of poetic, given China's expanding appetites!). Truly cool was figuring out my top-ten list of subflows and realizing there are some profound patterns, like virtually all of the world's moveable feast in soybeans being grown in the Western Hemisphere and then two-thirds of that heading over into Asia. I now get Indiana's ag scene a lot better.
Next up? I start into the 14 global shifts listed near the end of Great Powers.
But for now, some Tsingtao!