A Spy's Guide To Strategy (eBook)

John Braddock (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
184 Seiten
John Braddock (Verlag)
978-0-00-007645-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Compare your strategy to a spy's strategy.

In the sequel to the #1 Kindle Single A Spy's Guide To Thinking, a former spy puts you in his head. He shows you what he sees: Allies, enemies and allies who could become enemies.

He shows you how he built his strategies.

He shows how to reason backward with the logic of Positive-Sum and Zero-Sum Games.

He shows you how his strategy always starts with game theorists' First Rule of Strategy: 'Look forward and reason backward.'

He shows you how the same process worked in World War I, the 'War On Terror,' and his own strategy with a lying source.

Bestselling author John Braddock was a case officer at the CIA. He lived what he teaches. A former university fellow, he now helps people and organizations sharpen their strategies with customers and their competition.

Is his way of building a strategy better than yours?

Buy this book to find out.

Textauszug

1
Strategy

 

“What people do affects what other people do.” - Thomas Schelling

 

He told me a lie.

And then, more lies. A whole bunch of lies.

But that wasn’t the problem.

Lies are normal, when you’re a spy.

The problem was that it was the wrong kind of lie.

Usually, a spy’s lies:

1. Conceal something and/or;
2. Protect the spy.

Sometimes, a spy’s lies do both. But these lies didn’t. They didn’t do either one. They did the opposite.

The lies exposed him. And didn’t protect him. The lies made things more dangerous.

Not just dangerous for him. Dangerous for me, too.

Which made me wonder if it was an accidental lie. Maybe it was a heat-of-the-moment kind of lie. Maybe it was an emotional lie. Maybe he lied from embarrassment. Or shame. Or insecurity.

Then, after he lied once, he had to lie again. And the second and third and fourth lies were told for the usual reasons. To conceal the first lie. To protect him.

Maybe that’s what happened.

Whatever the reason, I had to do something about it.

He had lied. Now, it was my turn to act.

It was my turn to do something about it.

But first, I wanted to understand why. I wanted to understand the decision behind the lies.

You see the action of a lie and you take a step back in the Data-Analysis-Decision-Action sequence. You look at the decision to lie.

Then a step further back. What were his choices?

Then a step further back. What analysis led to that decision?

Then another step back. What information or data did he analyze to make the decision that led to that action?

Then you go back to the action and take a step forward.

What result did he expect from lying?

You look at intent.

Like the courts do. They dole out different punishments depending on why something happened. When someone gets killed, the courts want to know why.

They want to know intent.

Accidental? Negligent? If so, third-degree. A crime of passion? If so, second-degree. Maybe third. Malice aforethought? Cold-blooded and pre-meditated? First-degree. The worst kind.

It doesn’t matter if the initial crime was third-degree if a worse one followed. You get judged on the worst one. If there was first-degree crime to cover up a third-degree crime, you’re judged on the first-degree crime.

Which he had done. Whichever way they started out, his lies had become first-degree.

They were done on purpose.

Which meant intent.

And his intent mattered for a practical reason.

His intent was a clue to what he would do next.

I wanted to know how he would approach our next meeting. Would he come as a friend? Or an enemy? Or with a bunch of his friends, who would be a bunch of my enemies?

What would he do next?

A strategic question.

A strategic question because what he would do next mattered for what I would do next.

With strategic questions, you game them out. You predict what the other side will do if you do X. If you do Y, you imagine how they’ll respond. You put it all together and choose the best path forward.

You build a strategy.

Which isn’t difficult, if there’s a predictable path for the other side.

Which there wasn’t. Because there was a wrinkle with the lying source.

A wrinkle that took away the predictable path. A wrinkle that made it difficult to build a strategy.

The wrinkle was that the lying source knew that I knew he had lied.

He knew he had been caught. He knew that I knew.

Which meant he was thinking about what I would do next. He was thinking about whether I would do bad things.

He was thinking of worst-case scenarios.

He was thinking strategically, too.

Which meant he could deviate from a predictable path. And probably would.

Which was dangerous.

Because the worst-case scenarios in his head came from spy movies. From what spies in the movies would do. James Bond. Jason Bourne. Jack Bauer.

He had seen them all. He liked to quote them to me. He liked to compare what they did to what we were doing.

Which was a problem.

Movie spies hurt people. Sometimes, movie spies kill people. Sometimes, movie spies blow up whole villages. For less than what he’d done.

Now, he was gaming out what I would do. Would I hurt him? Worse: Kill him? Worse still: Hurt his family?

I wouldn’t. But he didn’t know that.

Which was a problem.

A strategic problem.

After all, this guy wasn’t a bureaucrat. He wasn’t a businessman. He wasn’t a normal guy.

He was a tough guy. Professionally.

He’d been in fights. Fights he’d won. Fights he’d lost.

He knew what fighters know: Whoever strikes first usually wins.

If he thought a fight was coming, he’d make the first move.

He’d strike first.

Which meant I had two choices:

1.      Wait for him to strike, or;

2.      Strike before he did.

Which he knew.

If he thought I’d choose option 2, he’d go sooner. He’d strike before I could.

Which I knew.

It would be the logic of first strikes.

If we both thought a fight was coming, a fight was a certainty.1 One of us would strike as soon as there was a chance.

Dangerous.

Which I knew. And he did, too.

Which meant I needed a good strategy.

For that, I had to see his strategy.

Because I missed it the first time.

I missed it completely.

 

---------

For most of the 20th century, it was good to be an American. It was better being an American than being an African. Or an Asian. It was better than being from South America. Much better than being from Europe.

Then came the early 2000s, and it was especially good.

The Cold War was over. The Berlin Wall was gone. No risk of nuclear strikes. No concerns about invasion. No existential threats.

Plus, American influence was spreading. Which brought trade and technology and access to new horizons. Which meant it was even better to be an American. Conflicts were fading. Wealth was exploding, if you were an American.

There was still greed and ambition and market crashes and rogue states, but the trend was positive. For Americans, things were getting better.

Until 9/11.

The Twin Towers fell. The Pentagon was struck. Heroes died in a Pennsylvania field.

For the first time in a long time, outsiders had killed Americans on American soil.

Everybody knew somebody who was killed.

For me, it was a guy who lived next door in college. His girlfriend dropped him at the Twin Towers twenty minutes before the first plane hit.

After they hit, she tried to call him. She got nothing. She stayed in Midtown hoping for a return call. She watched the buildings collapse and hoped he stopped for coffee. She watched the dust rise and prayed something had kept him in the lobby so he could escape. She hoped he had done anything except take the express elevator to the 101st floor.

But he took the elevator. We know he got to his desk. We know he was on the 101st floor when the planes hit.

After that, we don’t know what happened. Maybe he died from the smoke. Maybe he was crushed in the stairwell. Maybe he jumped.

No one knows what happened, except that he was gone.

With so many others.

The grief came in stages. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

But not everyone got through the stages. Some got stuck on anger.

No bargaining. No depression. No acceptance.

Just anger.

Anger was fuel for the war to come.

But not the normal kind of war.

A “war on terror,” it was called.

But terror isn’t an enemy. Terror isn’t even a strategy.

Terror is a tactic.

Terror is a tool of war. It’s a small part of a larger game.

Which confused a lot of people. Many Americans didn’t know we were at war. Many Americans didn’t know why 9/11 happened. Why terror was used. Why we had an enemy.

But none of that mattered at first.

All that mattered was that enemies existed. All that mattered was that enemies had attacked us. Enemies had killed our people.

It was time to fight back.

The CIA was ready.

The CIA was ready because we had fought the enemy already. In the Middle East. In Africa. We had been bloodied in bombings.

But 9/11 was different. It happened on American soil and innocents had died. Thousands of innocents. It was time to fight back.

The CIA’s Cofer Black, Gary Schroen, and Gary Berntsen took a plan off the shelf. And bags of cash. Rounded up every intelligence source they could. Partnered with Afghan Forces. Worked with the Special Forces to track down our enemies.

A guy in the training class ahead of me went with them. A former Marine, he was in the Special Activities Division.2 He was trained up. Ready to go.

He went to Afghanistan. In a prison, he was acquiring intelligence. There was an uprising. The prisoners attacked him. He died when he had no more bullets. His name was Mike Spann.

Thousands dead in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. And one of our own in Afghanistan.

The hard work continued.

The enemy leader Bin Laden was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.8.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 0-00-007645-7 / 0000076457
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-007645-8 / 9780000076458