Questions from Ohio college student late last week. Figured I'd post my answers:
How did you translate a career from being a Cold War analyst to an idea generator?
I didn't really. I wasn't really ever a "Cold War analyst," despite my training. In truth, I would have been magnificently unhappy if I had stayed a classic academic or become an intell analyst - or if the Cold War hadn't ended. I just have no staying power on subjects, defined by me as working a particular field for years and years as many people do. It just would have driven me insane. The longer I get trapped in one subject, the more depressed I become. I truly get off on drawing linkages between things versus cracking nuts on any one subject.
I realized that fairly early in my career: I greatly preferred a wholly new topic to doing the same thing over again, and that doesn't exactly help with career advancement in any normal sense. You tend to work your way out of every career track out there, and you typically risk the appellation "superficial."
The upside of being a natural horizontal thinker (across domains, versus drilling down in one) is, your work and subject matters are always fresh, because whatever the combination you're plumbing, there doesn't tend to be a whole lot of conventional wisdom on the subject. So the key thing is, you have to like operating on the frontier of thinking.
The reality of that desire, I have found, is that you'll have a hard time surviving on a single job (mentally you won't like it) and you'll limit your recognition to a certain extent, because you'll never be "the person" on a particular subject. That means, you'll need multiple affiliations (see my nav bar at right) and you'll typically operate with very little secure income flow. That's an eat-what-you-kill, no safety net lifestyle that some like but most abhor. One thing to do as grad student, another to do as father-of-X, because in latter instance, you have to maintain a substantial network to line up all the work necessary to generate sufficient income (but that's good for generating new ideas too).
But here's the beauty, because you truly live and die in this mode based on your ability to generate new ideas and innovative analysis, you've created a life path that highly incentivizes you to be the kind of thinker you enjoy being. Or as my Dad often put it, making your natural hobby you career and getting paid for it. It's also allowed me to work out of my home since 2005, meaning, when I'm not on the road, I am fully accessible to my kids. Again, for some, that's a nightmare (constant interruptions, irregular working hours, etc.), but to me, it's everything I loved about grad school (about a dozen balls in the air at any one time) and everything I hated about regular work in an office (show up 0800, leave 1700, commuting both ways). I tend to work a big week (60-80 hours), but I work around my kids' lives, and since interacting with them is such a great source of idea generation as well (how can you be a futurist without having kids?), that's professional perk.
So here's the odd part: to be a creative thinker, I find, you have to be highly disciplined in your work life, allowing you to have a dozen or so bosses who constantly prod you from different angles. Right now I am working on a solid dozen subject matters - a very disparate collection. But I love that, and it feeds the beast.
Horizontal thinkers tend to be (my experience) fairly rare relative to drill-down artists (normal expertise), so a loner's mentality is good, and you need a lot of self-confidence about working on your own but meshing your material with others (you are always part of a net, or have editors, etc.). It's not for everybody, and it's a choice that keeps you on the fringes of most things (you're not a joiner, per se), but you have to know what you like and what your personality is.
This path just makes me very happy and I can't imagine doing it any other way. I have nightmares of the single job in the single office with the single boss.
Is there any advice you have for students who are interested in making a serious difference in the world?
I always say, learn as many languages as possible. Don't have to be good at any of them, but just the process of studying them enough to gain accessibility to the mindset. That's a skill I use every day, and it allows me quick access to domains for the purposes of cross-linking analyses.
By "languages," I don't just mean actual languages, but also subject-matter languages. I love to take on a new subject just to learn the language and the logic and all the terms.
That's an inherent skill set for thinking laterally/horizontally, and since you will be changing subject matters constantly, the key is to develop your preferred tool kit of analytic approaches. There is no set way to do this, in my mind, you just want to consciously collect great analytic tricks, maneuvers, procedures as you go along. I probably have about three dozen that I use over and over again in all sorts of subject areas, because I've come to trust them in terms of the revealed output. So you think of them as tracking tricks, like stuff I always do when I'm canoeing a new river. Not the fastest route, but one that rewards you in the accumulation of impressions that lead to analysis. Being observant is everything. Analytically, my whole life feels like one big deja vu, meaning I am constantly saying to myself, "I think I've spotted this dynamic somewhere else before."
So again, variety over drill down, and academically, that probably requires a big mushy soft science field that allows you a ton of freedom. That's why I did political science. Exceedingly hard to foster horizontal thinking in a technical field until later in your career. I just know personally I never would have survived that journey.
How did you develop your philosophies?
By constantly seeking out the most interesting and fear-filled work I could find, subjects where, by most accounts I had no business trying to forge new thinking (Isn't there somebody more established who can crank out an answer we all know and love - in advance?). If I don't feel over my head on some level, I don't like the work as a rule, unless the balancing factor is some insane ambition or unusually deep-in-the-future scope that allows a whacked amount of freedom in approach. One of those three factors needs to be in place.
Besides that, I think it's key to expose yourself to a wide array of thinking, steering clear of most of the work in your own field (I find reading political science to be a "little mind killer," because after a while, you're so read into the conventional wisdom you can't say or write anything else). Collect great nuggets as you go along (I will read entire books for the right paragraph that I will - from that point on - carry at the tip of my tongue) and likewise collect clear images of what-must-happen-in-the-global-future so that you can explore the tectonic interfaces between these large forces to understand how things likely unfold for regions, states, individuals. It's like carrying this "Inception"-level complex narrative in your head at all times, and you're constantly engaging in script changes, but because you're always focused on the linkages (both present and downstream) you find the notion of "black swans" a bit silly - like a middle-age crisis. You know where you are in time, and you are always working your set of expectations regarding future sequencing of change, so "bolts from the blue" are just little scenario inserts that spice up the narrative but don't knock you off your contemplation of the whole.
Also key is patience. If you need to be right tonight, or in the next 5-minute TV segment, then you don't want to do this, because you will constantly be backtracking. A good long-term thinker is a terrible pundit, because he or she doesn't have a new mania every other week. The upside is that you're not always freaking out, the downside is that the mass media loves experts who freak out, because they provide rich content ("This is possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to the X!"). So you have to be comfortable with the ups-and-downs of real-world events, which shift from one mania (victory!) to the next (stalemate! defeat!). My favorite bit on this is Zhou Enlai being asked about the French Revolution and answering, "It's too early to tell." If you need climaxes to move on, you can't do this. Handling ambiguity well and enjoying anticipation more than completion are job requirements.
Will you be doing any presentations in Ohio?
No, but you can come see me in Johnstown PA on the morning of the 10th of May. It's an open to the public event. From organizer J. Stewart Ross:
The Greater Johnstown Chapter of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) is excited to announce that we will host Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett on Tuesday, May 10th for his talk "Strategy of the 21st Century in Transition." The meeting will be at the Holiday Inn—Downtown Johnstown at 8a and is open to the public. Dr. Barnett is a leading national security expert and the New York Times bestselling author of The Pentagon’s New Map, Blueprint for Action and his newest book which debuted on 2/5/09, Great Powers: America and the World after Bush. Dr. Barnett is a nationally known public speaker who has been profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He is in high demand within government circles as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert of military transformation, as well as within corporate circles as a management consultant and conference presenter on issues relating to international security and economic globalization. Registration is required. Additional details will be provided in the near future. Contact me or see the link below for more details if you are interested.