Fox Business News interview on Esquire China piece & "term sheet" proposal

COMMENTARY:  Felt I did alright considering all the pain meds over the past few days (I went cold turkey this ayem).  My right ear certainly stands out!  If you look closely, you'll see black-and-blue bruising.  The ENT basically had to enter my ear canal from behind the ear, so it's like he cut it off and then sewed it back on--hence the absurd swelling and why my ear sticks out so.  But trust me, I look 1000% better than the day before, and then the day before that, and so on. When I got home Friday, I looked like some CG monster!

Feed was nice into my left ear, and because I couldn't hear anything out of my right, I was sort of nicely insulated (i.e., no listening to myself live in the room and feeling disconnected from my interviewer in NYC). Jerry sat off to my right and watched the whole show quietly, but he found it weird that I would suddenly speak and then go silent and then speak and then go silent and . . ..

Felt it was a decent performance, considering the surgery recovery and all.  Nice limo ride into Indy for it, which Jerry enjoyed.  Felt I mentioned Esquire and my Beijing partners sufficiently, and the book and Wikistrat got nice plugs.  Obviously could have gone on far longer and there was so much more ground I wanted to cover, but there you have it in 5-6 minutes.

Final indignity:  vid stops right when I blink, like somebody turned the robot off!

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The "five flows" are done at the Wikistrat globalization model

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!

Super-empowering effort: finishing the Technology Trends page on the Wikistrat model

Sweet mother of God what an effort!  Worst case on the previous ones (Political, Security, Social-Demographics, Sustainability) were two days (working DEEP into the night), but this one took three days when all said and done. Naturally came in "heaviest" at 5700-words (norm is 5200).  

Why such a challenge?  I'm not a hard scientist nor technologist. My interests lie primarily with how technology can send the planet down this path or that.  So I had to spend a lot more time thinking about my "six packs" (major trends and major forecasts and the 2 risks = 2 opportunities + 2 dependencies).  No attempt to cover the vast universe of technology, just trying to pick out the quarterback, left offensive tackle, number one receiver, strong outside linebacker, cover cornerback and free safety (yes, I have a West Coast bias after all these years)--you know, the key players that determine the team's overall prospects, or the ones you hope are all All-Pro caliber (as Rodgers, Clifton, Jennings, Matthews, Woodson and Collins all are!).  

Then there was this weird challenge of capturing regional trends. How in God's name do you do that? Well, you read a lot of UN reports that track things like R&D spending as percent of GDP, world share in scientific papers, innovation rankings, levels of communications network penetration, patents, and so on.  And what you discover is that educational systems and business risk-tolerance mean all, but connectivity is fast relieving the extreme imbalance (Core is responsible for 95% of all technology/science/innovation, while one-third-of-humanity that is Gap is basically half-Israel and everybody else).  

Then there's the drill down on individual countries, like what's up with technology in Turkey today?  Turns out there's a UN report with a chapter on Turkey.  Here you notice things like Iran could be Turkey overnight if . . . the place wasn't run so badly.

I have to admit, despite the teeth-pulling nature of the effort, it was a lot of fun to investigate and write.  I now feel myself to be superempowered on technology trends, like I just woofed down a Powerbar and a venti Latte!  I know I didn't get every tiny detail/interpretation right, but that's the beauty of the collaborative, online wiki-based venue: corrections and adjustments and expansions will be forthcoming from all the best kind of appropriate thinkers.  

More broadly, the whole point of this exercise is to create an intellectual, collaborative space where people truly interested in thinking systematically about the future are forced/encouraged by the horizontal layout to do so, and not just jump - day-in and day-out - along that one-damn-thing-after-another stream-of-MSM-stories consciousness, where your biases tend to crowd out what should be your analysis because there's too much to wade through and you lack the larger framework for assembling all the pieces.  

Left to your own devices, you're John Nash frantically stringing yarn between stories stapled to your shed wall and babbling to yourself about how it all comes together.

Or you walk yourself out of that shed, log on to Wikistrat, and join the party.

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to think systematically about the world and its future as one big interlocking puzzle.  I mean, I spend TIME!  I can't help it; it's just how my mind thinks - as in, my first thoughts in the morning and my last ones as I drift off to sleep.  I even dream this stuff - and enjoy doing so.

But even here on the blog, with all my central data-system managing efforts, I'm constantly reduced to searching my online brain - frantically - on a regular basis to try and remember what it was that I came across that triggered this inter-connecting thought.  Simply put, the diary doesn't do it.  

But Wikistrat's model strikes me as excitingly close to the ideal: it's like this ultimately scalable space of whiteboards where I can draw out, in infinitely connecting expressions, my host of global/regional/national/sub & transnational scenarios and keep them updated, the sum intellectual effect of which is that I'm constantly prompted to think not just systematically across time but systematically across domains - i.e., not just go long but go wide.  

And I'm finding that a very pleasant sensation, like I'm working out daily and my muscle mass is building.

Yes I know this exclamation is self-serving, but as someone who's into his creativity above all else, this is what lights my engine.

I've unwittingly stumbled into writing another book - online - about the world and its future paths

The big clue?  My whole eating and sleeping and day-jobs working habits fell into that same pattern I subconsciously adopt whenever I write a book.  Finally I just turned to Vonne and said, "I feel like I'm writing an entirely new book online for Wikistrat."  

To which she replied, "Duh! I picked up on that a couple of weeks ago."

Just finished the Social-Demographic "global trends" page in the Wikistrat Global Model that I'm building with Joel Zamel and his team.  It clocked in at about 5200 words in all (summary, quick one-liners on top-dozen world powers, then six major trends, then six regions and their trends, then six major forecasts, and a wrap-up of opportunities, risks and dependencies).  This is the third of six global trend pages that I'm populating.  Done Political and Security, teeing up Sustainability, Technology and Economics. When all said and done, these six base pages will come to about 35,000 words, or the equivalent of my biggest book chapters (the Core-Gap chapter in PNM or the American Trajectory chapter in GP).

Many more base pages (the ones you visit most frequently to start your journey through the model) to go after that in preparation of launching the first iteration - or "lite" - model in early January.

I have to tell you, it really is like crunching down all my thinking from the trilogy of books but then writing it all in a new synthesis.  

Actually, that's misleading because I'm stunned at how much new material I'm writing (like basically all of it and none of it at the same time).  It's like I've slipped into this back-office alternative-universe of my work where I'm drilling downways and sideways and backways and upways [he typed, in his best imitation of Gene Wilder doing Willy Wonka] and it's feels like I'm creating something at once more concentrated and a lot more expansive - original but familiar.

It's hard to explain but it signals my creative juices are flowing.  

It's not a book, but it's not just a lot of words either.  It's these dense-matter concepts linked nodally to one another, the idea being that if you get enough linkages, it starts to take on its own thinking function.

My favorite-but-hard-to-deliver brief was my first in "The Brief" series that I use to this day (literally about 1000 slides later, a number I can verify because I sent that many on to Joel and Wikistrat for various embedding throughout the model--something I'm hugely excited to share in this fashion):  a scenario-based exploration of alternative global futures that drilled down by regions and domain trends (same ones we're using at Wikistrat) and Waltzian levels (system, states, societies/leaders/individuals).  In many ways, I'm recreating and updating that monster of a package but doing this time in a wiki structure, for which it is eminently more suited than that one-damn-thing-after-another (Tufte's criticism) manner of presentation that I employed in the original brief (long abandoned by me as a presentation approach--in part in response to attending Tufte's class).

So it's like I'm rewriting everything I've ever known/written/briefed/analyzed and - as writing goes - it is exhausting  . . . just like a book but worse in the sense that it is the intellectually-hyperlinked, super-packed text style of that "State of the World" piece or the sidebar list from "The Pentagon's New Map" original article. Sort of like an encyclopedia entry but more dense--like my baker-supreme spouse's cheese cake, but filled with analysis instead of cheese (you can only eat so much at one sitting).  

[Hmm.  Must have been the Green Bay sojourn with Vonne Mei to Lambeau last Sunday.  My inner cheesehead is melting from all this writing.  Which gives me this other weird image:  what would Hannibal Lecter do to a cheesehead?  Would it be like that scene with actor Ray Liotta in that creepy sequel but more like a fondue?]

And I think that's fitting-- and fun for the reader.  It'll be a place to visit again and again and sort of interact on your own with a virtual version of--initially--my strategic "brain" and later those of other analysts we bring on. [I'll be like some original code that slowly fades under the weight of new iterations--not unlike a parent with too many kids!]

It's an amazing intellectual challenge and before we turn it loose to the public, I will definitely take a snapshot and hide it away in some file cabinet, because it'll be the closest thing - for now - of a virtual version of me in all my intellectual glory (just plain gory to some, but glory to me).  It almost feels like I'm transferring my mind to the web, so I get that same immortality tingling that I experience when I'm penning a book--this sense of intellectual completion.

But unlike a book, this thing will live and breathe online, interacting with, and changing in response to, readers and premium-readers-turned-contributors and content-generating clients. The scenarios will come in all forms, on all sorts of subjects, generating in all sorts of dynamics both mass and elite. Eventually, my initial populating of the model will recede, like some early lizard brain as this monster evolves upward, but it'll always be there--its strategic DNA.

Most importantly, it's delivering exactly what the Civil Affairs officer at Monterey was asking for:  an online universe of my strategic thought that anybody can access and explore and absorb and - best of all - manipulate and make their own (he kept repeating, "I just can't help but think it would be great if there was this place . . . online . . . where all your thinking was crystalized and we could send officers there to get it down in their heads.")

Anyway, I just completed a bit and the whole emotion reminded me of putting a first draft of a chapter to bed, so I felt writing that down here, just like I do when I write a book.

Plus I'm putting off writing my weekly WPR column, which I think will be on Yemen.

The sample Wikistrat "CoreGap Bulletin" is now available

Go here to download.

The Wikistrat team and I are proud and excited to offer a sample "CoreGap Bulletin" to give you a sense of the doorway we're offering into the Wikistrat globalization model--or a "taster" as my new Australian colleagues put it.  It's designed to cover the week's leading indicators on globalization's advance/retreat and provide you paths right into our model of its progression, laid out as a universe of scenario pages hyperlinked to one another and supporting analyses from Wikistrat.  So when you come across something that really pops your mind open to some possibilities, you're then able to proceed right to the relevant scenario pages to dive deeper into the possibilities, shape them yourself with editing, or go one step further and generate your own competing scenario pathway.

That's the essential human-capacity building aspect here:  don't just read the news as it's cranked out at you, but process it systematically by exploring its system/state/individual-level consequences.  Run your thinking to ground, as it were, and, by doing so, start building or maintaining your own strategic muscle mass.

Let me give you a tour of the sample bulletin, which I wrote in its entirety even as it's our near-term goal to start bringing in additional deep thinkers to the pool.

First off there's a 600-word-range, op-ed grade piece we call "Terra Incognita."  It's designed to get you excited and read into something we think constitutes new ground for globalization, meaning a potential game changing pivot in its pathway.  The sample bulletin covers China's presumptive new president come 2012, Xi Jinping.

Right off the bat here, you get a sense of what you're going to be able to do with Wikistrat.  Check out the "Wiki-It" bar on the right: A host of linkages to relevant scenario pages that allow you to engage the story far more deeply.

The general template here and examples from the column:

• Special Strategic Issues:  Chimerica--US-China relationship and Chinese Decision Making Calculus
• Global Trends:  Leadership changes in key countries
• The Four Flows (from The Pentagon's New Map):  here we highlight investment, people and energy
• Global Shifts (from Great Powers):  here we focus on The Consumption Shift and The Governance Shift
• Strategic Profiles:  China Strategic Profile and United States Strategic Profile
• Regional Net Assessments:  Asia Net Assessment
• Global Net Assessment.

Next up are a series of five more structured analytic pieces (400-500 words each) that we think give you Globalization's Future in Today's Headlines.  Each comes with a basic description, then a good dose of Analysis followed by Outlook, and then a series of Bottom Lines (Dependencies, Risks, Opportunities and Recommendations).  As with the opening piece, you'll see a Wiki-It bar on the right that gives you access to a set of relevant scenario clusters.

In the sample piece we cover the following:

1. PM Angela Merkel's argument against multiculturalism in Germany (giving you some much needed contrast with Stratfor's the-Nazis-are-coming shtick)
2. The latest Wikileak dump on Iraq
3. Geithner's failed effort to gain consensus on a rebalancing scheme (complete with hard targets) at the pre-summit G20 ministerial
4. How Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai's ban on private security firms put the US "civilian surge" at risk
5. China National Offshore Oil Company's buy into a major U.S. oil & gas shale field deep in the heart of Texas!

After that sequence, we give you six additional but shorter analytic pieces (roughly 200 words) that we think capture key integrating trends/events WRT globalization.  We call them "Six Degrees of Integration."

The six we cover in the sample are:

• E-commerce taking off in China
• The World Bank extending its emergency food program
• The explosion in small robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles coming out of the Long War
• China's executive MBA program in Africa
• The British decision to whack their defense budget big time
• The potential for Sudan's upcoming divorce to pit the U.S. and China against one another--or not.

The concluding entry to the bulletin is a significant essay (The Deeper Dive) that runs in the long op-ed range of about 1200 words.  It's meant to collect up all our thinking from the previous entries and give you some globalization theme to hang them on in your head.  The sample bulletin's entry is summed up by the acronym D.Y.O.C.--as in, Develop Your Own Counterparty.  In a frontier-integrating age, you cannot wait on the locals to develop their own ability to provide you with sufficient counterparties for dealmaking.  Better to simply bring them into being on your own, through education, training, military-to-military cooperation--however.  

Well, that's the sample bulletin.  Please give it a read and tell us what you think.  It's designed to provide you with long-range thinking on globalization, eschewing the usual OMYGOD! responses you get in the mass media. But it's also designed to pull you into the Wikistrat universe so you can make strategic thinking a part of your workday toolkit.  Wikistrat should become the place you deep dive whenever you're looking for that angle for the story/paper/report you're working on and you just don't feel like you know enough on the potential pathways to pull out your own scenario with confidence. It's also the place we want you to turn when you read something and your head is all jumbled with possibilities and you want someplace to sort them out systematically with inputs from others.  You may have several ideas of your own on the subject, but you want to compare and contrast them with others, and explore where those scenarios link up with the rest of the world.  Wikistrat will be the place to run all that speculative thinking to ground.  It'll become your own little black box ("Where do strategists get these ideas?") where you get to flip off the lid and check out the inner workings.

Listen, we know the Wikistrat concept lives or dies with the utility of the model itself.  There are plenty of newsletters and bulletins out there that will do much the same things this one does--just not with the same dedication to the long range nor with the put-you-in-the-driver's seat ability to engage your inner strategist. The bulletin is just a doorway--simple as that.  We think it'll be a great one that you'll go through regularly to--again--develop your own strategic-thinking muscle mass, but it's just the beginning of what we think can become a mutually beneficial collaborative relationship--the kind web-savvy people increasingly expect.  

So let me make this perfectly clear:  when you get this bulletin every week, what you can read in 15-20 minutes is just the beginning of what Wikistrat can offer you when it comes to thinking systematically about the future.

Monday the blog moves to Wikistrat

It'll be transparent to you all, and the blog will continue in much the same way as it is now.  I'll just be devoting more and more of my irrepressible analytical efforts (as longtime readers know, I've tried to repress them on a regular basis!) to Wikistrat products, which I'm excited to help develop. As I'm currently working with my editor, Mark Warren, to go to market with "The Emily Updates" book, I don't have the outlet of working a new volume on globalization/US foreign policy/international relations and Wikistrat gives me a relationship where I can put those inescapable energies to some use.  That's also why I'm getting my security clearance re-established almost six years after I gave it up at the Naval War College.

Unless I pick this sort of focus for the blog, I just wouldn't know what to do with all the information I get from tracking the media and all the ideas that result, and I'm just not ready to retire that part of my brain.  It's simply too much of who I am.  But as my decision a while back to stop the heavy volume indicated, after six-and-a-half years of blogging (this is post 12,006), I needed either to decide and integrate these analytical efforts more formally into my work or to set it aside.  Fortunately for me, Wikistrat saw an opportunity in that decision-point and so we'll see how this collaboration evolves.

Again, it was time for me to find some larger home for the blog and my larger body of work versus doing this all by myself as the proverbial one-armed paperhanger.  Now that Enterra has matured to the point where we're no longer in the evangelical mode and I'm back to the level of effort I had in my first 2-3 years with the company, I need to reacquaint myself with a lot of subjects where I've maintained the minimum  of currency to write but not the maximum possible for deeper exploration as I see fit--or simply get excited enough to pursue.  

And I think moving the blog to Wikistrat will help me do that.

So see you there next Monday.

The big-flow blog will return, as part of a larger offering

Right now negotiating with the Israeli start-up Wikistrat (click here to download their brochure) to have them host my blog as part of an exciting new offering we're collectively working on. For now, the outlines of the plan are such that I will continue to offer a free blog version (with a flow not too far off what I'm offering now) and a subscription-based big-flow blog (to include an additional periodic flow of meta-analyses on globalization's trends, turns, etc.).  The larger goal is to create an online offering for individuals and enterprises alike that leverages Wikistrat's platform, meaning the content flow is but one traditional aspect of what we are crafting in terms of online strategic planning tools.  You know my old bit about wanting to replicate my skills in the next generation?  Well, this will be the primary outreach tool: a place where you can come and gain access to a super-scenarioized model of how globalization works and evolves, where you can create your own scenarios and pathways and shocks-to-the-system and explore them to your heart's content, interacting with me and other analysts.  

What excites me about this venture?  This isn't the traditional black-box approach, where you turn over your particulars to a consultancy and they draw upon their expertise back at the shop and then crank you answers that you cannot trace in logic (beyond what is shared).  This will be a place where the very underlying technology will be shared with you, and where your intellectual forays will be pursued in collaboration with strategic thinkers, meaning, at the end of the day, a real transfer of both technology and intellect is obtained. 

I believe that the great outsourcing of strategic planning that corporations pursued in the 1980s, creating the rise of mainline business/strategic consultancies since then, is over and in the process of being reversed (insourced).  I think the globalization landscape is just too complex and every-changing for companies, government agencies, etc., NOT to have that skill set within their organizations.

And I think my collaboration with Wikistrat (an experiment just beginning) will provide the human-capacity-building that a host of companies, educational facilities, public agencies will find compelling--far more so in the rising/emerging markets, where the need is greatest.

And so I am very excited to begin this adventure, putting the blog to more focused use.

The PNM-Wikistrat connection

Got email a while back from Joel, Australia-born, now living in Israel after some schooling there.  He says he has all the books, reads everything I write online, and brags that he's seen the brief well over a hundred times (none live).  

Then he explains how he and three other twentysomethings have created a start-up company (incorporated 6 months ago) that seeks to adapt the Wiki platform to a competition-of-the-fittest-style generator of strategic planning within organizations (companies, government agencies, etc.).  After two successful pilots using mostly Israeli intell types, the company moves toward marketizing the offering.  In some ways, it reminds me of using GroupWise in the Naval War College economic security exercises I led atop the World Trade Center with Cantor Fitzgerald pre-9/11 and in other ways it reminds me of when email first starting hitting command post exercises at combatant commands in the mid-1990s (creating this fascinating individual-based work-around and highly competitive intellectual network that quickly trumped the formal thought-gathering processes).  In both instances, you escape the limits of hierarchical conversations (often broadcasts by the most authoritative figure in the room) and tap into the wisdom of crowds under conditions of much tighter latency (less time involved to reach effective decisions after weighing alternative pathways).  In a sense, a way to both speed up (under the necessary scenarios) and improve the usual pick-option-B mentality that prevails.

What attracted me was Joel's description of how the company has used my vertical-versus-horizontal-scenarios thinking to customize the system with all manner of prompts to analysts to think in both dimensions--so highly interdisciplinary.

The basic conceit is, unlike traditional wikis, we're talking more than one page per analytic target--hence a competitive environment.  What often happens in these decision-making environments is that a core group is assembled to put together the options PPT package, and a tremendous amount of poorly thought-out necking down of pathways ensues.  By creating a more horizontal playing field, freed from hierarchical bias (i.e., the guy with the most stars on his shoulder boards must be the smartest, right?), the primary intellectual traction points become the linkages between the competing options pages.

That's a thumbnail description that does not do the effort justice.  Go the company's site to see more in-depth presentations.  

Two ways this interests me:

1) Strategic consulting in the private sector requires--more than ever--some connectivity to solution-delivery, meaning almost nobody is paying the old top-dollar for PPT slide decks and reorg charts--only.  Instead, companies want your interaction to come with some technology solution that simultaneously empowers them to deal with the issue in question.  Advice just isn't enough anymore.

2) Governments as a whole struggle with these problems, and are always looking for new tools to empower individual workers while connecting them to the wisdom of crowds, whether it be fellow bureaucrats (where a tremendous amount of wisdom truly resides) or with the citizenry (their natural counterparty).

So check out the site if you're interested.  I am happy to connect anybody to Joel (although I'm sure his site has a contact function) for whatever can be arranged in demos/dialogue.

Naturally, I got a kick hearing about how the vertical/horizontal scenarios-&-thinking stuff resonated so nicely with someone in the private sector, so I'm happy these young fellas out.

Plus, does it get much cooler that seeing your ideas expressed in an Israeli start-up?