Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

One thing I learned when I was becoming a bit of a mini-celebrity in the Y2K debate of 1999, was that it’s awfully important not to look like you’re into—much less engage in—shameless self-promotion (he says, typing away dutifully in a blog born of the sheer desire to move units for Putnam).

Alright, what I really meant to say was: I have this rule about where I and my material go, and that rule is that I never ask anyone to let me give the brief, I only give it when people come to me and say they absolutely have to have it. Same thing with writing: I don’t write anything on spec and then hope to sell it. I only write things I know will sell in a heartbeat, or when asked to pen something specific.

Now that may sound arrogant at first blush (something I never do, BTW), but it’s really the height of humility (even using that construction seems arrogant, doesn’t it?).

Wait a minute, if Mr. Parenthetical is going to comment on every damn thing I say in this post, it’s going to get a bit annoying (you’re telling me!). So let me turn off that function. I know it’s here somewhere (MS is always so gooooood about coming up with tools like that).

There.

My point about only going where I’m asked to go really revolves around my inability, displayed throughout my life, to judge my own talents or pick my own material. Frankly, the hardest decision I ever made was what to write my Ph.D. dissertation on. I simply have no skill in figuring out what to work on, when to write, whom to brief, or what project to direct. This is both funny and very expected when you think about it: Barnett the great strategic planner has a hard time planning his life and career.

But frankly, this is why I married Vonne. She has an unerring ability to judge people, situations, opportunities, forks in the road, … damn near anything. I have the judgmental gene, and she does not, but her skills in this area far exceed my own. Plus she’s a goddess in every sense of the word, so I was smart enough to propose marriage to her back in 1985 in front of Old North Church in Boston (“One if by land, two if by sea, I may seem kinda odd, but will you marry me?”).

Hmm, I will be writing to Bill Gates personally about that last one.

So I have actually stumbled my way through my career, largely letting other people guide me, but mostly listening to Vonne. As the sixth of seven sons, I naturally gravitate to older men as mentors, figuring they know everything—like my brothers. But I have a few older women mentors too, including my wife.

My point in telling you all this is that I wasn’t scheming back in the summer of 2002 to make any issues of Esquire, much less pen a big-time book. I’m not lazy or anything, I just assume that fate or my mentors or my whatevers will make things happen all in their due course, and that whenever I start trying to push things along myself, I always screw the pooch. So I was plugging along in the summer of 2002, delivering my mega-brief to whomever I was told to deliver it to. The people directing me at that time were my boss in OSD, Art Cebrowski, and my “connector” friends, like Mitzi Wertheim of The CNA Corporation. So when Art or Mitzi said, “So-and-So just has to see the brief,” I would go like any well-trained dog-and-pony act and do my thing, waiting further instructions.

I also took my cue from the PAO at the Naval War College. I have always done whatever the current PAO (Public Affairs Officer) asks of me, because they tend to be wonderful judges of talent and need, matching professors and their material up to the right media opportunities. So whenever the PAO, Cdr. Susan Haeg, would say, “I’d really like you to brief this group,” I would always say yes without blinking. Often the briefs went nowhere, but sometimes they went big time.

For example, once Susan asked me to brief the New England chapter meeting of PR professionals. Sounds odd, no? But who turns down a room full of PR people? So I gave them (this being the summer of 2001) my standard NewRuleSets.Project summary brief on the future of energy, foreign direct investment, etc., and afterwards someone comes up to me and asks if I would consider helping the local United Way chapter engage in strategic planning. I am flabbergasted at the notion, but give the usual consultant’s answer, “Of course, I would welcome such an opportunity without question!”

Then you walk away wondering what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into. Well, what that brief started was Barnett Consulting. Up to that point, I was strictly a lone wolf working primarily for my old think tank in DC, the Center for Naval Analyses. But with this offer, I needed to submit a proposal in a competition with about 40 New England consulting firms, so I needed a name, and some help. Thus Barnett Consulting was born, and I sub-contracted some of the work to my old friend and colleague Bradd Hayes, and the rest is history for both BC and the recently renamed United Way of Rhode Island.

So, here I was in the summer of 2002, minding my own business, when I get an email from the deputy PAO Lt. David Ausiello. He says Esquire is gearing up for a Best and Brightest issue where they’ll celebrate a couple dozen of the leading minds in the nation, and they’re looking for someone to represent the world of national security. Am I interested in meeting an Esquire staffer?

I immediately say yes. I mean, it’s just one brief and who knows what can happen?

Well, it seems this December 2002 issue had been in the works for roughly a year prior to publication. Esquire really was taking this whole list thing very seriously, wanting to locate all sorts of up and comers in various fields, which made me nervous because I was pushing 40 at the time and wondered if I would soon age out of consideration or something.

So Andrew Chaikivsky, a very tall and strikingly handsome (he works for Esquire, so it must be) journalist is packed off to Newport to check me out. I figure to myself, this guy interviews all sorts of celebrities but probably doesn’t know his elbow from his Abrams tank. Then I think again and realize he’s probably perfectly suited to interview me, because as a visionary sort of horizontal thinker, I’m about an inch deep and a mile wide myself.

Turns out Andrew does know plenty about plenty, and his grasp of my brief (I give it to him and him alone) is both impressive and kind of thrilling, because he’s seeing all these larger connections to worlds I don’t typically address—namely, what the reading public thinks about and is interested in.

Frankly, all my audiences are very insider groups. I rarely brief where just anyone can show up. In fact, to catch me live is very hard. You have to belong deep inside the business to make it into that conference room on that hour. But Andrew is taking all this in and seeing lots of potential for informing broader audiences, in part because my stuff is already fairly dumbed down, meaning I keep everything fairly normal-sounding and conversational, rather than getting totally lost in jargon. I do that because I know it sells better to the media, and that keeps my PAOs happier—something I believe in. Susan Haeg has often said she loves to put me in front of non-expert audiences because I’m both entertaining and understandable. Simply put, as the eighth of nine kids, I am born with the gene that simply screams out, “Please pay attention to me and show your approval!” I am almost vaudevillian in this regard, which is why my briefs are so theatrical. Laurie Anderson meets Donald Rumsfeld, I am often told.

So Andrew and I part later that day, and he’s definitely giving me the vibe that he thinks he’s really found The One—The Strategist as they later call me in the issue.

So Andrew slaves away in coming weeks, penning a mere 800 words to encapsulate all my thinking and career. We talk about 12 hours on the phone, trying to get it all down to the essentials. It is fascinating for me, because I have so little sense of what in my mega-briefing would matter most to the average Esquire reader, so going through this thought process with Andrew is really mind opening for me. I begin to see the need out there for a message of hope in a better future. Andrew keeps saying how struck he is by my passion for the ideas and my underlying sense of optimism in the future, and I begin to realize that this optimism defines that vision.

Well, when the issue comes out, Esquire has this very cool party in Manhattan. They put me up in this very swanky hotel (W Hotel) and the cocktail party is very Sex and the City in ambiance. I see movie and TV stars, and all sorts of very attractive people I assume must be famous. I bring my brother and long-time mentor Jerry along. He has lived in Manhattan for ages, and so handles this stuff with great ease. At the dinner table we share later with some Esquire and Hearst Publishing heavyweights, he seamlessly slips me and my ideas into conversations, then giving me the high sign to step in and do my shtick when appropriate.

What comes out of that experience is the invitation to brief Esquire’s editorial staff. Andrew has told me previously that lots of the staffers were intrigued by my story (especially the Cantor Fitzgerald connection because we’re talking Manhattanites here, for whom 9/11 was very personal history), and I had hoped such an opportunity would emerge, but keeping to my code, I did not ask for this. I simply waited until the invitation came through.

Before I give the brief in November, Mark Warren, whom I had not met up to that point, takes me out to breakfast with Tom Junod, one of their best writers. Mark is executive editor, sitting just below editor-in-chief David Granger in terms of story content. It was a neat time, and both of them displayed the same interest and breadth of knowledge that Andrew had previously. I couldn’t help feeling like I was being drawn into something larger. These guys seemed very connected in the world of ideas, and they were talking big possibilities for moving my vision into a larger audience pool.

As we walked back to the conference room where I would give the brief, Mark off-handedly asked if I would ever consider writing something for Esquire. Naturally, I said yes, trying not to soil my pants in excitement (something the Esquire man would never do, I am told).

As I gave the brief, I didn’t get a great sense that I was getting through. The staffers, and even Mark and David Granger himself all seemed so quiet as they took in it. But I could see Andrew in the back smiling to himself like a cat that just ate the canary, and so I knew I was delivering as promised.

Whenever I brief, I always try to figure out, just for fun, which face in the audience is the one I should really be playing to. It’s just something to occupy my imagination as I give a brief I’ve delivered dozens of times before—something to keep my sharp on stage as I work my way, quite methodically, through a memorized script running two hours (quite a monologue, when you think about it, and I talk super fast).

Well, about halfway through I could tell that person wasn’t Granger per se. I know he was the big cheese, but the big cheese often isn’t the person you really want to focus on, because to him, you’re one of many things on his plate. The person you want to focus on is the person who ends up being totally responsible for whatever happens next. Based on the eye contact I was getting, I could tell that person was Mark.

So a few days later the call comes: Granger wants me to pen an article about the Core-Gap map image that is—in his and Mark’s minds—central to my entire vision. I respected the choice: it was the same slide that everyone working for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz likewise thought was the strategic pivot to the entire vision. Still, I was a bit resistant, because I always thought that other concepts in the brief were more compelling (e.g., System Perturbations, New Rule Sets, New Ordering Principle for DoD, Four Flows of Globalization, Global Transaction Strategy, exporting security).

But Mark was very sure in this choice. He kept saying this was what the public needed to hear.

What was more interesting for me to hear from Mark was this: Esquire wanted me to write the article exactly like I sound in the brief. You have no idea how weird and thrilling it was to hear that, because everyone else I’ve ever written for always wants me to tone it down and be very not-like-me-giving-the-brief. But Esquire was just the opposite: they wanted me and my style of delivery deeply embedded in the text, to be almost a character in its own right. They wanted the voice and not just the words. I can’t tell you how liberating that concept sounded to someone who’s worked for DoD all these years.

So it went like this: Mark asked for about 2,500 words and I sat down in mid-December and cranked out 4,000 over two days. Very typical effort for me: got about halfway through by day one’s end, and then killed the rest early the next morning.

Then Mark went to work, quickly killing almost half the text, then rearranging the text dramatically, and then pushing me to write an additional one thousand words where he kept on saying, “The reader will really need to hear something about this at this point in the text, so can you give a paragraph or two on this issue right here?”

It was both infuriating and thrilling to be working with an editor like Mark. Infuriating because he was such an aggressive shaper of the material, but thrilling because I felt so lucky to have someone so excited and committed to the material that he felt so strongly about how it should be presented. The worst/best reply you get from an editor is, “Yeah, that’s fine. I guess we’ll pretty much go with it as written.” With Mark, it was all so pumped up in terms of ambition. He didn’t just want the article to make it coherently to 3,000 words, he wanted that baby to grab you by the throat and then pull you like a speeding train to the finish, leaving your breathless.

Mark also hired William McNulty of the New York Times to do the map, which came to dominate the article’s look and feel. To Mark, the map was everything, hence the title. Mark’s first proposal was “The Pentagon’s New Plan,” but I freaked at that suggestion, figuring it sounded way too presumptuous. So then he countered with “The Pentagon’s New Map” in our next phone call, and I immediately agreed. It seems so obvious now, but I never would have come with it, so Mark gets the credit on shaping that aspect of the vision, along with so much else—to include the now infamous “list” where I go through about two dozen countries and give my quick, intell-like analysis of each nation’s potential for crisis in coming years. That list was solely Mark’s idea, so I guess he must be a charter member of the Illuminati like myself. 8<)

So when I say Esquire really made me, you can now get a sense of what I mean. Esquire picked me for the Best and Brightest issue. Esquire brought me into brief and then picked the one big concept to build an article around. And more specifically, it was Mark Warren himself who shaped that article from stem to stern.

Don’t get me wrong: I have pride of ownership. These are all my ideas and my writing. But Esquire, like so many other profound mentoring agents in my life and career, made this whole thing happen the way it did.

I had no idea what I was getting into with this article. Esquire has Dan Klores Communications on retainer for PR. These guys are huge in the industry. They got me on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, on Fox News, on NPR and regional talk radio shows. It was all one amazing whirlwind of media exposure, none of it quite what it seems to the viewer, but thrilling nonetheless.

One story should suffice: “meeting” Wolf Blitzer on CNN. I was all set to do the show in DC with Blitzer in person, but then Colin Powell gave a big speech and boom, I was knocked off the show as a result. But Blitzer’s show keeps saying they “want” me, so my Klores people keep pitching days and ideas to them.

Meanwhile, I have to go to San Diego to run some workshops with a Navy R&D lab engaging in strategic organizational planning. So when the day actually comes, I am told to show up at this dingy little three-room TV production studio that specializes in doing remote interview set-ups for news channels all over the world (when I walked in, the guy asked, “Are you here to do Al Jazeera or CNN?”).

So my first “big time” experience on national TV occurred in this dark little basement studio in downtown San Diego. Just a camera room, a head (with some skanky old make-up applicators which I resisted), and this guy’s office. He is a one-man shop. You walk in, sit on a chair, he slaps some background up behind you (Larry King, Nightline, whatever), and then shoves this big camera up your nose.

For me, the tech had me sit in front of a giant screen TV on which he ran a taped shot of a “live” San Diego skyline (watch the jets landing at the downtown airport!).

Now here’s the hard part: you don’t see anything of the CNN show or Blitzer. Because you’re on the West Coast, if you watched any monitor, the time delay would screw you up like those lags can do on overseas calls. So all you get to do is stare at your own image in the camera lens, imagine what the show looks like and what faces Blitzer is making and whatever stock footage they’re running over your image (based on your pre-interview the day before with some assistant producer). You have Wolf in your ear via a ear-mike, but he sounds like he’s about 100 feet under water, and of course, he’s on a bit of a delay. Worst part is, you have no idea how you look or sound. It is a completely one-way transmission. Of course, the tech says you look great, but he says that to everyone, so you have no idea really about anything until you see the tape later.

When you do, and all the graphics and split screens and close-ups and scrolling text and stock footage and theme music and everything else is “added” in, you are amazed at what a big production it is—and how much heavier you appear on camera.

Well, when that whole media merry-go-round finally ended sometime in late May 2003, I was on a completely different track from the one I had been on when Andrew Chaikivsky walked into my world the previous August. Now I had a literary agent. Now I had a 30-page book proposal. Now I had speaking engagements up the ying-yang, both with the War College/OSD and with private-sector clients via Barnett Consulting. Esquire’s offices had been inundated with a flood of letters and phone calls, leading them to print letters in two subsequent issues and triggering their offer of a quick reply on my part. I was “outed,” so to speak, from the obscurity of being a mid-level Pentagon strategist and suddenly elevated into something else that was not yet clear to me.

I was sure of only one thing: now was the time to write the book that had long been building within me. I had low expectations of any major publishing house picking up the proposal, despite my agent’s constant prodding to think big. As far as I was concerned, I would pursue this book thing only to the extent that it didn’t interfere with my work in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where I planned to keep working in the Office of Force Transformation for Art Cebrowski for at least another year or so. Little did I know, that whole arrangement was soon to end, setting in motion the endgame on this book proposal and possibly the endgame on my entire career in the government.