Gone to Lambeau with sons

Bucs at noon tomorrow.

Fish story

Shift my work load from Friday to Saturday to take advantage of the fact that: 1) kids were home from school on Friday, and 2) spouse was heading to Terre Haute for Nona time.

So I put the canoe atop the Odyssey and pack up the gear. Vonne drops us off about 5 miles north of TH on the Wabash, and I steer with Jerry up front and the three girls in the middle (Vonne Mei paddling some). 

Beautiful fall day, but still most of the trees haven't turned along the river, so we might go back for one more trek before winter.

Anyway, very quiet on river, as we're the only people there, and we are, at this one point, just floating along the right side in shallow waters, taking a beverage break.

Then I put my oar into the water for a stroke and out jumps this big fish in response.  Maybe 18-20 inches and a solid 6 inches midrange in "height." In the instant I see it flying completely out of the water, my first thought is, that is one beautiful big fish.

Then the water surrounding us for about 15 yards on all sides erupts like a jaccuzzi and there are similarly sized fish jumping completely out of the water everywhere - maybe 50 or so. It is loud and chaotic and goes on for about 10 seconds as everybody seems to be frantic to escape our dreaded clutches. At several points I'm semi-deflecting fish about to jump into the boat (I know, later, I thought, hmmmm - dinner! But right then I was worried about us flipping this kayak-style canoe).

I have to tell you: I have canoed rivers for about 4 decades and I have never run into that one. We pretty much screamed throughout the whole thing, it was just so bizarre and unexpected on this otherwise uber-quiet journey.

But very cool. The fish were gorgeous and it was exciting to see all that action in such a short bit of time.

We talked about it for the rest of the journey down the Wabash.

Enterra's new website launched

Exciting stuff. Find it here.

Enterra continues to expand its pioneering work in supply-chain management, and, despite leaving the company as a part-time employee last summer, I continue to work with CEO Steve DeAngelis in a consulting capacity. So, suffice it to say, I couldn't be happier with how the company has matured in this way.

As the site proclaims, Enterra "is a cloud-based, intelligent supply chain technology company that solves complex supply chain execution problems of consumer products and retail organizations through real-time data sharing and analytic solutions that “Sense, Think, Learn and Act” to continually improve process execution and capitalize on new demand generation opportunities."

Never leave the game!

Found this shot on the web, and it's almost exactly my view from season tix seats at Lucas (we bought as option for some of the games, selling the rest to keep it a neutral exchange--money-wise).

Anyway, I go to the game last night with son Jerry after XC practice. Dumbass that I am, we arrive for 7pm game, because that's what it says at Packer Insider website, but that's the CST and not the local EST. But I was happy to be there, because Jerry got to see how the team does all the same walking-stretching routines that we start each XC practice with.

Game got out of hand with 3 mins left as 3rd-string QB Harrell threw a near pick-six and Colts scored on next play to go up by 8. Since my older son was still MIA from his HS football game (fan, not participant), I figured Jerry and I would leave then and track down Kev.  So we walk out and Jerry is pretty upset about the turn of events, because he hates losing big-time!

Wife phones and says Kev surfaced, so now we don't need to leave. Jerry is a bit tearful about the outcome and I tell him, Who knows, it's a one-score game so let's sit back down and watch the last 2 minutes. So we do, in another section, and the Pack drives down the field to score a TD on 4-and-goal with 40 seconds left.  Then we do the two-point and tie the game.

THEN we onside and recover, pass three times and kick a 50-yarder FG to win with no time left! Jerry is ecstatic!

And I relearn a lesson.

Second game of doubleheader at Milwaukee County stadium in mid-70s. Brew Crew way down and my Dad up and leaves in disgust, heading to car.  Little bro Ted and I stay behind (I'm old enough by this point). Brewers stage comeback, replect with PH appearance by Hank Aaron (he DH'd first game and was sitting out second) that ties the contest.  Frank Luchesi, a true nut and manager of the Rangers, gets tossed and buries home plate in dirt before leaving.

Then history: Aaron is forced to play left field for the last time in his career in order to stay in game.  He catches a line drive!

My Dad sheepishly reappears, smiling. 

Then more history: last walkoff homer of Aaron's career and second to last HR overall. I think it's the 10th but maybe 11th inning. 

Anyway, we were in heaven.

So the old bit about not leaving until the fat lady sings.  

When I was eleven, I used to lose it emotionally all the time over the Packers.  No choice, it was the dreaded down years of the 1970s.

So funny to watch Jerry suffer just like me three-plus decades later, and learn the same lesson: it ain't over until the last out/last play/last second.

Sad day in Grand Rapids MI; tough luck for maven of presidential museums

On vacation with younger quartet of kids and spouse in the UP (Upper Peninsula MI) and we spent last night in Grand Rapids.  Today we had a hot fun time in Meijer Topiary Garden (stunning collection), and then Vonne drops me and older trio for quick spin at Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, figuring it would be so seminal to do so the day after Betty Ford passed.  Dumb me:  place closed for preparations for her internment.  Gerald is buried just to the right of the museum, which sits on the banks of the Grand River.  Workers were already working over the grave site, which listed her name and birth year (1918) followed by a dash.

What are the odds?

Also odds defying is a bipolar local ex-con going on shooting rampage and killing seven - also in Grand Rapids Thursday-Friday.  People in town are feeling a bit strange, to say the least.

So we signed the condolence book (nice) at the museum and continued our trek northward to the Mackinac Bridge, which I haven't gone over in over 30 years.

The mosquitoes up here are frightening large!  But we have a nice vacation home on a big lake just off the Lake Superior shoreline.  Older two kids are blazing their own paths elsewhere in the country - with plenty of texting.

It feels weird to be on vacation with 4 kids under 12!

Leaving my position as senior managing director at Enterra Solutions

I made the decision recently with Enterra to cease being even a halftime employee as of 1 July (I had been a 1/2 to 2/3rd employee during the great majority of my time with the company). This move was in keeping with the company's evolution over the past couple of years: by expanding so concretely into supply chain management, there was simply less for me to do in the position, which largely had me searching for the right businesses in which to best exploit Enterra's technologies.  That search now over, I move on to other opportunities.

My six years at Enterra were quite fascinating and I greatly enjoyed helping build the company.

Florence and the Machine live at Indy on 4 July

Went to concert with my eldest (Emily), a huge fan, as am I.

We were third row on the left.

What I learned:  alway shoot vid on the iPhone wide-angle, so it doesn't get squeezed on YouTube!

Also:  Flo is half-American (mom) and this was her first time in the States for 4th.  

 

25 years later

Vonne and I were married on 21 June 1986, so we celebrated our 25th anniversary on Tuesday.  Slow day for us, because it was all get-things-done before we flew out very early the next day to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos island chain in the Caribbean.  Close family friends offered us their condo down here and we were very excited to come.  First time for both of us in the Caribbean.  The Caicos chain is just due east of Cuba.

I have no idea why that map says "North Atlantic," but here's a wider angle:

And I guess there's just a tight definition of what constitutes the Caribbean.

Anyway, we've already done the snorkeling, and we'll do the sunset cruise tomorrow and a crab fest at a neighboring island all day Saturday.  Also working on some jet skiing in local cave waters.  

Providenciales has plenty of great restaurants, and so we're working our way through the NYT's highest recommendations.

Last night, after a great meal on the beach, we walked back to the resort along the long and stunningly pristine beach on the north side of the island, and I pulled out my 25th anniversary "wedding ring" to replace the one Vonne had cut off months ago after she fell chasing Abebu and broke a couple of fingers (Abebu, when she first arrived, had a heart-stopping lack of respect for street traffic).  The ring(s) were later lost somewhere in the maelstrom that is our house.

In truth, Vonne hated the rings, which fit-into one another to make one larger ring.  I had picked them out from a Cambridge Mass jeweler who designed them himself.

So this time, I designed the ring myself.  White gold and wider, it splits in the front to hold one square-cut diamond (me) offset on one tip (so, diamond shaped), and then six other stones (three to the left and three to the right) to represent the kids.  The are leaf-like and lean outward from the diamond.  Three sapphires on the left for Em, Kev and Jerry.  Then one citrene for Vonne Mei and two onyx for Metsu and Abebu.  It's a one-of-a-kind ring for a one-in-a-kind family (although, oddly enough, I think it would work for Angelina Jolie as well - if you altered the sequence.)

The jeweler tried to talk me into birth stones, but I told him I didn't need any artificial color scheme - I've already got my rainbow coalition.

The ring turned out very nicely and I picked it up on the 21st, about 12 hours before we flew.

Vonne, fortunately, loves this ring, and it looks as great on her hand as the old ones did not.  It has a nice Lord of the Rings vibe to it, says Emily, who helped me describe the design and finalize it with the local jeweler.

One ring to rule them all!

I just couldn't take her on a 25th anniversary trip and have her walk around the entire time without any ring.

We all conspired to fool her and it worked.  She was convinced I had found her old rings and had them repaired.

Face painting at our parish's annual fair

Wife makes several dozen cheesecakes which they sell for $3 a slice (actually a deal given how world-class her cakes are - people come to the fair just to buy her stuff) while daughter and I face paint.  When we publish the Emily Updates in the fall, you'll learn that I started face painting when my sister Maggie sent me a book/kit (still got the original book and used it this weekend) in 1994 and I began painting Em's face to divert her attention before going to the Lombardi Cancer Clinic for her chemo rounds.  Em was only two but sat very well for the paintings and she loved dressing up to complete the part.  Em now outclasses me as a painter by a ways, but it's something to be painting other kids with her 17 years later.

Emily has this Depp thing - bad.  I always paint myself as Darth Maul, because it pushes the squirming little kids to Em (I scare them) and it makes the bigger one sit still when I paint them.

Emily did this one on Vonne Mei.

I did both of these on Abebu (left) and Metsu (right).

I did Jerome up big time on Saturday.  He was the top parish kid finisher at the 5K in the rain early that morning.  I finished about a minute behind him, and was grateful to be that close.

"Emily Updates" begins eBook production

I am in the process of working out the details with my literary agency, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, to publish the "Emily Updates," our (Vonne and I) real-time diary of our first-born's battle with cancer as a three-year-old in the mid-1990s, as a eBook serial this summer.  We're looking at four volumes, roughly 50,000 words each, released sequentially as eBooks via Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Today I turned in the edit of Volume 1, which encompasses the discovery/diagnosis (chapter 1), the long initial hospital stint (chapter 2) and then, after a time jump, the start of the weekly updates six months into her chemo protocol.  The rest of the updates take the reader through the end of her treatment 14 months later.

I'll be doing the same light edit of the rest of the 150,000 words of text over the next couple of weeks.  I am enjoying the process immensely and remain very proud of the work.  The original e-diary (really a blog before there were blogs) came to 400,000 words.  I spent 1996-1998 editing that down to 200,000, and that's the version I'm editing now.  That version was online from 1998-2004.

This collaboration with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth will be an experiment for both of us - a first-time event. But I wanted to explore doing eBooks, and I think this is the perfect venue and the perfect time to finally put this out.  It is especially joyous for me to work the text with Em herself home from her first year of college!

Today I edited a bit where my 1995 Tom was dreaming of watching an older Emily pull away from the pack at the 2.5-mile mark in the road race, as well as stun the audience with her brilliant comment during the competition.  I have since witnessed both events:  Emily winning her division in a 5k race at the Naval War College sometime in the early 2000s (the trophy is upstairs); and Emily helping her constitutional team take first honors in a state competition in Indianapolis as a HS frosh (I was in the audience when she pulled out the constitutional case that was the lever civil rights lawyers used to start overturning a certain class of discriminatory laws in the South (interstate commerce clause, if I remember)).

Anyway, it was just so amazing to see the words on the screen - dreams that have literally come true since then I penned them in pure aspiration 16 years ago.

More news on this project to follow, but for now the plan is to get all four volumes out as eBooks this summer. Reason for my personal push is that I begin discussions on a new professional book in the fall with 1-2 potential collaborators.  Pretty excited about that too, so want this out of the way.  Scrambling on the edit now because of the Wikistrat grand strategy coming up, where I'll be judging 200,000 words of submissions (minimal) every week for four weeks running.  I take grading very seriously, so I expect that effort to be consuming.

Mystery Scene mag story on Mom's reference works

 

Just wanted to capture it for my records.  From Winter issue of mag.

Spoke at bankers professional training seminar in ATL

Actually termed an "economic and strategy seminar" for bankers in the fixed income capital markets.  Morgan Keegan puts on a number of these events around the country each year - all part of the professional training required by the various industries they service.  I spoke last summer at the MK event in upstate NY for pension managers, so this was my second go-around with them.

Over a hundred in the audience, and I got the tough slot:  4pm and I'm the only thing standing between a group that's been going from early in the morning and the end-of-training mixer.

This time I went with the Mac suggestion of creating a separate, cootie-free user account on the laptop and running the brief off the shared hard drive as a way of isolating the program and seeing if that made a difference on latency and/or the crash I suffered in Johnstown (first ever during a talk).

It worked beautifully.  No latency whatsoever and I got through the entire brief for the second time.

With nothing to occupy my mind WRT the slides, I was able to give the best performance yet of the new brief. Probably not all that different, as far as the audience is concerned, from the prior three.  It just was more mentally relaxing because I got in that unconscious groove when the humor starts spontaneously appearing.

Nice dinner at "Bones" later that night in Atlanta.

The brief now seems set:

• Opening with "map";
• Flow of people, ending with Middle East projection;
• Flow of money, ending with Asia projection;
• Flow of energy, ending with Africa projection;
• Flow of food, ending with Western Hemisphere projection; and
• Flow of security, ending with tripolar projection (US, China, India).

Each flow has me presenting, in yin-yang combination, something we must accept and something we will fight/struggle with.  The regionals are presented as evolutions that reflect the interplay. Full-up, it runs 75 mins, which is what I did at MK. Q&A happened in the mixer, which is always nice because then you really have time to get to know people and their concerns.  Plus, a martini is really nice after the energy output!

The brief is now loaded so that, no matter how much time I have, I cover things in the order I want, so more important/topical up front, degrading as you go back.   If I don't finish, I still feel like I gave everything I could/should in the time allotted.  Naturally, I could easily break out additional slides to make them a full-day teaching seminar - and any length in between, which is how I like it.  It's also easily updated for topicality. Sad to cut some favorite slides, as so little remains of the original "Great Powers" brief now, but time marches on and one needs to stay abreast with the audience.  What I have now is arguably the most easily accessible brief yet for none-Pol/Mil types.

My speeches this May have constituted a Packer victory lap:  IL with the cops and firemen (NFC championship v. Bears), Johnstown PA (right next to the Steelers) and now Atlanta (NFC divisional).  

Great off-season!

Reminder: Speaking Tuesday morning (0800) at Johnstown PA

Yes, I plan to level the place with the brief!

People always asking about open talks.  This is a rare-enough one.

Local coverage of the event from the Tribune Democrat:

National security expert to speak

National security expert and New York Times bestselling author Thomas P.M. Barnett will speak at a breakfast meeting in  Johnstown.

Barnett will attend the May 10 meeting of the Greater Johnstown Chapter of the National Contract Management Association at the Holiday Inn-Downtown. He will discuss the “Strategy of the 21st Century in Transition.”

Barnett is a nationally known public speaker. His areas of expertise include being a forecaster of global conflict and an expert on military transformation. He also is a management consultant on issues of international security and economic globalization.

His newest book, released in 2009, is “Great Powers: America and the World after Bush.”

Registration and breakfast will begin at 7:30 a.m. Barnett will speak from 8 until 9, followed by a Q&A session, meet and greet, and book signing.

Guests and nonmembers of the association are welcome.  

The cost, including breakfast, is $25. For details, call Melinda Schreyer at 262-2338.

Other notices:

See you there.

Joining the contributors to Time's Battleland blog

It's the new blog run by the always impressive Mark Thompson and it's focused on security issues.  I will cross-post from here on occasion - all the better to get the word out.

I was honored to be asked to participate by Mark, whose work I've long admired.

This won't impact my output here or at Esquire's The Politics Blog, but it will give you all a nice outlet for suggested posts.  So when great stuff pops up, please keep me and this new venue in mind.

Easiest way to reach me is thomaspmbarnett@mac.com

New brief great, but problems with presentation

Keynoted this morning in San Diego at Hilton:  North American Electrical Distributors association.  Thursday I spoke in St. Charles IL to Illinois police and firefighter pension managers group.  In both instances, the brief got slower and slower the deeper I went in, meaning slower response to RFID clicker.  All transparent to audience, but it unnerves me to have any uncertainty in my clicking.

Now, when I run the files on my new MacBookPro, it runs like a charm, but when I'm hooked to a monitor, it's like this build-up occurs and there' more latency with each click.  In both briefs it sort of peaked on this one slide that's actually pretty tame, but I'm really confused by the issue.

How can the Mac be just fine clicking through in SlideShow without a monitor feed, and then get slower when connected?

Talked to Mac and they suggested I set up special user account, transfer the file there, and then work PPT in isolation there.  Trick is, to really test it, I need to work it with a projector.  Option is to buy VGA cord and do it with home theater, which is what I probably do.  Other option is to kill the super-sexy and complex new transitions I use in PPT 2011.

The experiments continue.  Advice welcomed.

Meanwhile, I am getting truly psyched about the new brief.  Second time about 75% better than first. Starting to reach my magic zone.  Just need to get my clicking confidence back.

Unbelievably nice new feature on PPT 2011

New feature allows you to visualize and access any and all layers in a slide.  For most people, not necessary, but I often have 60-100 layers in one slide, so accessing something for editing can be a nightmare (literally pulling aside all the layers to find the one way down you're looking for).  Now I can just bring to front, fix, and then stick back wherever I want, as the animation order in unaffected.

Brilliant!

Waiting on a biopsy, working on the brief

Saw the dentist on Monday and ended up having a impromptu biopsy collection for the possibility of oral cancer. Don't figure the odds to be high, and yet it has preyed on my mind for the week - in part because they cut something out and damn it!  All of a sudden you've got this wound that hurts like hell and is a constant reminder of the biopsy in progress.

The danger of my position right now is that if I don't work, the money doesn't flow.  That's the inherent vulnerability of the sole proprietor, no matter how many clients he has.  It most definitely gets me thinking about 8 mouths to feed as the one provider.

Fortunately, I have good healthcare through my continuing tie to Enterra, but like too many families in this country, I can easily scenarioize a financial collapse if the right person is hit with a medical calamity - namely, me.

Yes, I have good long-term disability, but frankly, that is always life support after you've taken the X-month hit of lost income and the policy finally kicks in.  It's designed to prevent bankruptcy but not much else.  I am life insured to a very high degree, but millions don't replace a father, so there's comfort there but not the sort you want in the here and now.

I'm not complaining so much about my personal economy right now, because it's good.  It's just that realization that if I were to disappear from my work engagements, clients won't pay for non-work.  I'm not at the full-time position, like at the Naval War College, where I could slide by for quite some time, doing the minimum to keep collecting the paycheck.  We eat what I kill and what I kill is a based on momentum.  Take me out of circulation for 12-18 months while I fight something and where are we?

It's not an abstract thought for me.  I remember going through my first-born's cancer.  It was all-consuming for both Vonne and I.  I could barely perform at work for almost two years.  Luckily, I was well-established enough that I skimmed by during that period.  I just don't have that construct now.  What I do isn't rewarded by the one position.  Like a lot of professionals I have to create my own network of work, making me the weak link - or more specifically my health.

Again, odds are low for me on this one.  I don't smoke, chew or pursue cigars.  I do have structural teeth issues from so-so orthodontics in my youth that I will probably end up correcting the harder way now.

The weird thing is, about 80 percent of my health issues in my life have occurred in maybe a ten-square-inch chunk on the right side of my head (ears, sinus, lymphs, teeth, eyes), with the original structural cause being that I'm systematically small on my right side, compared to my left.  It's a tiny difference; it's just systematic. A real medical expert can spot it by looking at my face.  It's about a one-in-one-thousand condition that's benign in general, and yet it creates these structural stress points on my right side.  I was simply born this way.  My lopsidedness has defined me, right down to my cock-eyed optimism (one eye being higher than the other)!  It reminds me of reading about the Apollo program (book I'm finishing now) where the original design flaws, made years earlier, combine with a host of small issues to create the one catastrophe at the worst time. The human body is an amazingly complex thing, with supreme powers of adaptation (like me squeezing my right eye for decades to achieve 20/20 vision before I got prisms).  But it all catches up to you in the end and the cascade eventually swarms you.  All you really have is the choice of how you define yourself - functioning or not?

And there we're talking the mysterious world of mental health, where I do find myself feeling glad that I have plenty of reasons to stay focused.  Emily, my eldest and 17-year-cancer survivor, came home last night from college and my house of eight felt so familiar - right out of my childhood (we were a family of nine).  I realize I've spent almost five decades recreating my youth and now that I have it, I would like to keep that achievement for a while, knowing that loss and additions are to come but treasuring the configuration right now - a sort of golden moment poised between what you know and what you anticipate, like getting to know all these wonderful people in their adult lives.  I would trade my entire career for ten minutes of that future; it's the only story that really interests me - along with the evolution of my marriage (coming up on 25 years this June & 29 years together).

I also fear that if there's something bad, I'll end losing something - like maybe my sense of taste. Then I realize all the major adjustments I've made over my life - stuff that other people would find amazing from their perspective (even as, of course, I'd find the same to be true about them).  Again, human will is amazing.  I recently achieved my life-long dream of being able to sleep with my mouth closed. It only took 48 years and about ten surgeries, none of which were performed for that reason and yet, I am given this small-but-significant gift in reply for the efforts, and I treasure the ability - the sense of peace I achieve by this act. And again, we lose everything over time.  It's just so great when you win one.

And so I feel a bit frozen: it's just that lull between somebody cutting something out of your body and awaiting the verdict. Issue is real enough, and I have a ready excuse of a recent trauma.  I just don't have any frame of reference to judge my story versus what may come back from the lab.  I just know that if it's bad, our entire collective existence pivots on a dime.

Again, been there and done that, and I wrote the book (which Vonne and I are talking to my agency now about serializing as eBooks).  In the end, we all go through it.  The question is only timing and circumstances.

But it does remind you of the refrain, "At least you've got your health," as well as the larger reality of the shift in risk from groups to individuals that has unfolded for most Americans these past several decades. A lot of us, whether we realize it or not, are "sole proprietors."

Something to get off my chest, I guess.  You tell yourself you're not going to worry, but when you're somebody who makes a living imagining unfolding futures that are both good and bad, your mind wanders.  So I write it here and it's gone from my head, and I can work done today instead of being trapped in this thought.

Meanwhile, I retool the brief for a six-pack of talks I'll be giving in IL, CA, PA, PA, VA and GA over the next six weeks. It just felt right to revamp.  You keep the core slides you cannot live without, but you have this sense that what people will want to hear right now is X, and so you build in that direction, the excitement being you are performing, for the first time, new slides.  Some of the slides I've had in mind for years, others came on lately.  But the look and feel will be decidedly different.  Office 2011 for Macs has some capabilities I've been waiting on for a while.  Naturally, I am already stressing this machine by asking the program to work on the edge of its capabilities.

But what else is new?

Question on iPhone

Spent evening putting hoist system in garage for canoe.  Real effort with 16-foot ceilings, but worth it.  Six-to-one pulley system truly ingenious.

Anyway . . .

Finally got iPhone.  Have Mac desktops at home and now three laptops, but have resisted on phone until Verizon carried it.  Now if the NFL will just move beyond that satellite provider and sell games directly over cable . . . 

Got Elago covers, which are very thin, but wondering now about protector for screens (we got three in all for all but our collegiate, who does not want to change).  Kevin is adamant about screen coverage to protect from scratches.

My questions are:

1. Does one really need a screen protector?
2. Which are the best?

Question from Oxford student (and Wikistrat grand strategy competitor) on starting out in the field

I'm a first year graduate student at Oxford studying Economic and Social History--a program that applies different social scientific frameworks to the study of history. I'm very interested in geopolitical analysis, and, as the first of my degree's two years draws to a close, I'm beginning to start looking at what might come next.

Zach Miller, head of the Oxford team competing in the Wikistrat grand strategy competition.

As Wikistrat starts collecting college/think thank teams for its grand strategy competition in June, certain requests come my way in terms of career advice.  So here's my take on the general query above.

I can only advise on the basis of my experience, because I've made no study of the question.  So naturally I'm going to be biased toward certain means and ends.  I will also try to genericize this answer so it's not specifically just about US tracks.

In general, I advocate getting a PhD before leaving, and I don't advocate taking time off along the way.  Why? Every bit of time off the academic track raises the possibility of never finishing, which happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of good reasons, the primary ones being marriage followed by kids and a decent enough living in a good job that you figure, "I really don't need to bother with the PhD."  Later on, though, most people still regret this decision and wish they could have found (or still find) the time, but it's just too hard. Personally, I know I never would have gone back to finish, even though I suspect I might have been able to finish the dissertation on the side while working early in my career. It just would have been a killer on my marriage and made me a wholly absent husband (rehabbing that house was truly fun) and father (who wants to miss their first-born's life-and-death struggle with advanced cancer?) at a time when I would have regretted just as much as missing the PhD opportunity, so I'm glad I sequenced it.

If you can stay and get it done, it's so much faster and you get the experience in full, plus you get the side experience of teaching, which is great for teaching you basic skills of explanation and grading conceptual presentations.  You also learn confidence in getting up in front of audiences.  Overall, very much worth the effort.

But, if you're like me, you'll also need to work several other jobs while you finish the PhD (I was also a super for a large apartment building), and the juggling there is also worth mastering, because if you end up like I have, working out of my home office for a wide variety of organizations, you'll come close to having the same life dynamics.

I was able to get this process done during the first few years of my marriage (1-4), while my wife did her early career work (although she could have gone on in a vein similar to me and we could have pulled that off as well).  Between us, living cheaply with no kids, we had plenty of disposable income, so we did a lot of fun things together that not only solidified the marriage, but smoothed the intense time of my writing a dissertation.  It meant we put off kids until year 6, but we found that worthwhile to do too, so that our marriage was well-established by the time we started a family and I was completely done with school.  Side issues, it may seem, but being unhappy in your life isn't worth a career track.

The two primary reasons to get the PhD are:

1. You've got the union card, meaning you have the adjunct teaching option that much more easily obtained - if desired, and there may be some point where you actually want to go academic, like I did at the Naval War College - point being there are no glass ceilings to be confronted once you have the union card; and,
2. It's just a great experience to write a book-length defensible piece of analytic worth.  You will never get this duo of deeds in any other setting professionally.  You can seek near-equivalents, but nothing quite like it, and I just think it's incredibly worthwhile to have that all under your belt before starting out.

After that, I think it's important to go to a good "finishing school," or a place of high analytic rigor that teaches you professional research and writing and presentational skills - before you do anything else.  These skills in the real world are far different from those taught in academia, which really only prepares you to be an academic in terms of practical skills.  

Private consulting firms can do this, but you really want to go a top one where there's tons of established talent, otherwise, you can easily end up being the "talent" yourself in a small shop, and there you will scramble to lead work without any real apprenticeship, so learning will be lost or achieved only under the most painful circumstances (shoulda, coulda, woulda).

My first job was with a very small shop and they were using my name and degree to try and win contracts, which was a sign of their small and desperate status.  I was immediately thrust into work of a highly detailed and technical nature and I had no idea what I was doing.  Two weeks in, a better offer came from a major analytic firm that worked for the navy and Marine Corps, and I jumped ship instantly, realizing the "finishing school" opportunity that was lacking in my small "beltway bandit" shop.

You can find such apprenticeships in think tanks, government research arms, etc.  You just want to avoid the busy-work places that use up all your time in process (I wouldn't recommend the legislature right out for that reason) - if you want to build that intellectual infrastructure in your head.  Fine to jump into process-heavy things later, but I suggest 4-6 years in a place like I described, learning the basics of professional research.

Once you've done that, then it's all a question of what you want to do and whom you want to do it with.  You can go ideological with a think thank or go functional with foreign policy, foreign aid or defense.  Personally, I think the latter two are more complex and unique and thus require the more direct experience.  I think the foreign policy/State stuff can be picked up by moderate exposure, but the aid/defense stuff is more technically inaccessible from the outside, so some inside time is useful.  

So that's what I did:  working mostly directly with the military, and spending several years working with USAID.  I always had interactions with State but I never put in the time there as either a direct hire or contractor.  But if you want the 3D perspective, which I think is key, then you want to hit as many of those as possible, prioritizing the complex defense, then aid, then diplomacy.  I think another reason why I felt most comfortable going light on diplomacy was that I was a political science major, so I had the most academic standing in that general field.  So I guess I would say mix and match as per your academic trajectory.

Another reason why I focused on defense (which, frankly, surprised me afterwards because I had no intention of doing so while in school): most development is done by the private sector, so the aid stuff teaches you about failed/failing states but doesn't teach you all that much about what works outside that troubled realm. But defense, especially that practiced by the US, is truly unique, so understanding that reality helps a lot on the geostrategic thinking. A lot of experts think they can learn that from a distance, but I say no. Some direct exposure is required because it's a very closed - and close - tribe (which is why I don't necessarily advocate direct service in uniform, because a lot of minds never escape that thinking even as a few do so spectacularly - so again, know yourself).

Once I had those experiences in hand, I felt like I knew the government scene, but I felt rather slow on globalization-the-economic process.  Yes, I had taken plenty of economics in college and grad school; I just didn't know business.

I have described my career journey as figuring out the world through the New York Times (my international relations PhD/academic experience) first, then figuring out Washington (via the Post) next (my time at Center for Naval Analyses), and then figuring out Wall Street/business through picking up the WS Journal/Financial Times/Economist and my time working with Cantor Fitzgerald (bond broker-dealer) while at the Naval War College and then my stint in Enterra Solutions since 2005.  I had read all these papers all along; I just didn't "get" them in full until I has the associated experience to go with them, so it was my MSM equivalent of diplomacy (NYT), defense (WAPO) and development (WSJ/FT/Economist).

By the time I had gone through my stint in the Pentagon following 9/11, I was finally - at just over age 40 - operating at my full powers.  I fully expected it would take that long, and never worried about keeping pace with others who did things earlier.  I really wanted to do the apprenticeship route sufficiently so that when I really broke out my big ideas, they were truly big and representative of my journey versus stuff I just dreamed up and hoped would establish me.  In John Boyd terms, I wanted to "do" before I took on the "be," and in truth, I am still focused on the "do" versus "be" and may very well end up sticking with the former my entire life, because I just so like the evolution mentally versus the "job," which I tend to fear for its numbing requirements. I also now realize I will only sacrifice so much for the "guru" track, in part because I find the media work such a creativity killer and I know that limits my reach. But you have to go with what makes you feel most creative, in my opinion, because, at the end of the day, that's all you've got. Jobs and profile come and go with tastes and forces beyond your control, but your creativity is THE asset worth protecting within your career. The global financial crisis actually helped me in this regard, by cutting back the speaking opportunities and forcing me back to more consulting/analysis, which I am finding tremendously renewing and easier on my family life - just when I needed it - because the travel is less hectic and I avoid being too much in broadcast mode. Not that I don't still love the speaking, because that is a favorite career addiction of mine and I'm gearing up right now for a slew of speeches in late April though early June. I just like this new balance better and - again - it came just in time family-wise.

But that's just me.  Like my post to the OH student, I came to realize that I live for the ideas and the analysis more than the decision-making power.  That may be because I'm the 8th of 9 kids and I wasn't raised to be the #1 son/daughter with "responsibility."  But it's also why I'm so creative, something that's always created a certain amount of friction for me. 

[Having said that, realize that everybody has their definitions of what constitutes "do" versus "be."  It just depends on what you consider the "doing."]

Some of the best advice I ever got was from a legend in the technical means field by the name of Gary Federici. Gary was genius level on the subject of bureaucracies and struggles within them, and he was an eminent producer talent, meaning he knew how to assemble minds and exploit them.  He told me early in my career that I was an amazingly creative thinker and that most people in most organizations would hate me for that ability, primarily because of its disruptive potential.  So he advised me to chart a fairly self-reliant and independent course, because if I hoped organizations would elevate and reward me on that basis, I would end up a bitter old man.  Gary was absolutely right, which is why I've spent my years since associating myself with Gary-type people - the more the better.  My motto is the old Roman proverb:  the slave with many masters is a free man.

So that's my basic advice on career tracking, with the following amendments:

• Never turn down a speaking opportunity.
• Always volunteer to be the main writer, because the power of the first draft, as I like to call it, is about 80 percent of the final product.  Plus, just like with speaking, you only get better by doing.
• Always associate yourself with editors, because they are your best route to becoming a good writer, other than reading other good writers and practicing a lot yourself.
• Don't repeat your work if you can help it.  If you want to think horizontally, then it must be new frontiers all the time - or as much of the time as possible.
• Associate with mentors who recognize your best skills, and avoid those who want to work on your weaknesses.  Spending a life working on weaknesses is a loser track.  Spending a life working on your strengths is a way to be magnificently happy - meaning successful in the way you like being successful versus somebody else's definition.
• Get good agents (and I use that term loosely) for all the skills you suck at.  I have multiple and they all make me who I am. They are worth the money you pay them.
• Get married and have kids and put your family first, because you will likely live a very long life and this career will end, and when it does, and you're old, you will learn this truth: nobody ever lies on their death bed saying, I wish I accomplished more. They all say, I wish I treated my loved ones better.  My wife puts it this way: Do not treat strangers better than your family. People who become addicted to their careers typically do that, and it leaves them standing alone in the end, and no career and no accomplishments are worth that tragedy, because you only have one life to live.

But again, my advice is for someone like me.  I hate creative repetition in my work, but I love and am almost Zen-like in my desire to experience repetition in my personal life.  So I accept a certain lone-wolf reality in my career as the price for my being an idea hamster, and I balance by having a very stable home life.  I will take my kids, in succession, to many Packer games where it's just me and that kid on the long trek to Green Bay. None of them care about football.  They want the same experience with me that I had going to baseball doubleheaders with my Dad at Milwaukee County Stadium (the Brewers).  I work primarily to get the money that allows my home life to proceed as I believe it should.  I live in a place like Indy for the same reasons (crappy for my career, great for my kids and family).  Everybody makes choices and lives with the consequences.  The only good career is one that reflects those choices and self-awareness.  Otherwise you're 49, living in a condo in Reston, driving that red Miata convertible, hitting on interns half your age, and seeing your kids every other weekend. To me, that's hell on earth. To others, it's the reality they bumped into unconsciously as a result of being un-self-aware in their careers and just doing what was expected of them instead of what they truly desired.  

But again, it all depends on what you fear/love more: I have zero fear of career disruption, and frankly enjoy the scary prospect of regular reinvention and lateral moves into entirely new circumstances. Other people think that's hell on earth, and will do whatever - personally - to keep the "career" on track. Me? I would -and routinely do - sacrifice career to keep the family as stable as possible (and to enable our continued growth in new kids , because that fulfills my spouse's life desire and I find it natural enough [coming as 8 of 9] and likewise useful in improving my thinking over time by exposing me to all sorts of unexpected things, like raising strong African-American women - not something I had put down on my bucket list per se!). [Note also my statement to the OH student: If you want to be a futurist in your thinking, you need to have kids - however achieved, because you need that forced life extension beyond your selfish self.] I would experience such a profound sense of failure if my family broke up, but I experience zero sense of failure over career troubles/challenges. Again, a lot of people in this world are the other way around nowadays, going through spouses and families. It's just about what you value. I simply know I could not be creative if my life was a mess. To be creative, I need to be in a very special place - what I define as "life safe." But "career safe"? I have no idea what that is because I've never achieved it or - as I now realize - sought it.

[And I will tell you that that last bit was very hard for me to achieve in self-awareness, because I am my mother's child and she grew up with a father like me and found it extremely upsetting because he was a highly creative, boisterous, addictive type who lived with very little career stability even as he provided good home stability despite his wife (my grandmother) dying while my mom was a teenager. So my mom, naturally, has spent her life with me preaching the exact opposite of the career I've chosen. All of my six siblings have lived careers primarily spent with big companies/government agencies, suffering the usual tumults there but never being the spread-out, highly independent actor I have been since '05, which she thinks is pretty nutty.]

In the end, being a strong thinker in the vein described here requires a tremendous amount of self-awareness, and you can't get that if you lose yourself in a career. You need a certain distance from life, however achieved, to obtain the clarity of view. To me, that's a better life but hardly the only life. It's "better" because it fits me, and it yields the career I find most exciting, coupled with the personal freedom I deem most crucial.

Also realize that I will answer this question differently in ten years.  Maybe I make the f@#k-you money by then because my wife and I can only adopt so many kids before our age cancels us out (then again, she is already talking foster kids for the follow-on), and say the right candidate comes along (admittedly, he or she will more likely be Republican than Democrat, despite my voting habits) and I decide I want to retake the DC plunge. If I did, it would be a predictable-enough one:  the 20-month stint before I must return home to prevent my family from imploding. Then again, there are so many fascinating business opportunities out there in emerging and frontier economies, that I might find the true "grand strategic" opportunities more there than in government (my current sense).  Point being, my life rationalizations are always subject to review.

Questions from OH college student

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.

PDF for registration