Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dan Abbott (tdaxp, or The Dan Abbott Experience) has written plenty on PNM and BFA at his blog. Recently he asked me to fill out a "Questions for Extraordinary People" survey that has most to do with one's creative talents (or talent in general, I would guess) for some research work he's doing as part of classwork.

It took me a while to find time to do the interview, but I jumped into it on Friday during the drive to Chicago and then finished it as we drove to a brunch at an old Victorian inn in Soldiers Grove in Wisconsin this morning.

The timing of this thing couldn't have been better, because I've been spending a lot of time contemplating such things with a view to shaping what I want to say in my imagined Vol. III of the New Map series (also larglely a fignewton of my imagination).

My only complaint with this interview? It never did ask me what my talent domain is. How I define that makes my answers far more understandable. Do I think of myself primarily as defense analyst? No. Foreign policy type? No. Political scientist? Not really. Writer? No. Public speaker? No.

In the end, I identify myself as a popular conceptualizer, or more simply, a professional visionary (often shorthanded as "the vision guy").

Is that a self-aggrandizing definition? Maybe. Actually, I think of it as a very narrow thing, but one talent domain that is identifiable, and what I want to do in parts of Vol. III is to explore and explain what it is to become a successful visionary, or future-oriented strategic thinker.

Since I put in the time on this, I decide to post it here, because that way it's easy for me to file the material, so to speak. Anyway, it's all part of TTPMBXP--at turns narcissitic and mundane, at times quite profound, but always bloggable! (and the very essence of blogging, by my way of thinking):

Dan's post of this material (with comments)

Questions for Extraordinary People

1. How is talent recognized or judged in your talent domain?
Big ideas that move others to change or action, and a body of thought built up over a career that is consistently provocative and challenging to conventional wisdom.

2. What is your own talent level relative to the field?
My talent lies in arbitraging big concepts across fields and stitching them together in comprehensive visions of systemic change; also the ability to think systematically about global futures; also the ability to explain the same to broad audiences of both experts and neophytes alike through compelling writing and high-end storytelling in a live theatrical performance.

3. Tell us how you became as talented as you are. In particular, tell us what factors contributed to your talent.
Great storytelling capacity; top-notch conceptualizer; the ability to explain and analogize very complex processes and systems; the capacity to imagine successful outcomes and solutions.

4. How did you first become interested in your talent area and at what point did you know you would pursue it seriously?
Getting a chance to move beyond acetate viewgraphs in early 1990s and start with PowerPoint. Then Office 95 allowing for transitions between slides that could be used to simulate animation, although that approach required hundreds of slides to achieve the effect. Then PPT 7.0 with animation within slides and my whole approach of using PPT as a storytelling format takes off. At that point I am still working in a traditional studies and analysis firm (Center for Naval Analysis) in DC and my use of animation was frowned upon as fluff and nonsense, as was my study of globalization as the dominant definition of global security trends. Big break for me is to move to Naval War College and get to run two projects in a row where I had a lot of freedom and the subject matter lent itself to my storytelling approach (Y2K and globalization). Plus, in each study, I spent almost all my time with industry and operational commands, as opposed to the academic/research community, and so I got away with a lot of presentation formats that went far beyond the normal bounds. The second study on globalization got me deeply involved with Wall Street firms, and that exposure convinced me I had my broader appeal than just the national security community. Once that realization was clear to me, things really took off.

5. Describe early experiences that might have contributed to your success in your talent area
Key step forward for me came with Esquire profiling me in their Best and Brightest issue in 2002. Crucial for redefining my talent as broader than just explaining the world to the national security community (instead, I realized my bigger talents would be revealed in explaining the national security realm to the world).

Mentors have also been huge for me, as I talk about in PNM.

6. Describe the role your family played in your success. Specifically, a) what was their involvement, b) how did they support you, and c) what sacrifices did they make?
Key role of parents in modeling reading, love of history and current events and politics. Lots of support in going to college and making transition to grad school. Sacrifices were many, in that I had 6 siblings who all did the same.

7. Who else influenced you?
Mentors I describe in PNM: Gaffney at CNA taught me the biz of studies and analysis, as well as an understanding of global politics; Cebrowksi taught me the military angle; Flanagan taught me the global economics. Other mentors and connectors throughout career made a point of introducing me to the right people and audiences for my material.

8. Who were your teachers and what influence did they have?
Key teachers in high school encouraged my capacity for meta-analysis and my love of presentation. A key one: Mrs. Haley, who taught freshman history at Boscobel High School. Had a Russian teacher in college who taught me a lot about life and culture. Someone at U Wisconsin pushed to have me elected Phi Beta Kappa my junior year, which was big, because it gave me the pick of grad schools. At Harvard, Huntington was key in being first prof to recognize my big-think talent. Nye also gave me a lot of credibility by sitting on my PhD committee. Biggest influence on philosophy was Judith Sklar and her devotion to concepts of justice, tempered by a sense of realism regarding the role of security (she was a Baltic Jew who had fled the Nazis). Richard Pipes influenced me similarly (another Jew who fled). Finally, Adam Ulam was biggest influence (another Jew who fled). So I guess while I never heard or read of this Leo Strauss that all the neocons refer to, I did get my share of strong moral compasses from European Jewish academics who fled the Nazis. But that makes sense to me, because WWII was the great moral turning point for a century I was born near the middle of (1962), so I grew up in its shadow in a really profound way. Being trapped in the Cold War, I worried that I would never get the chance to do anything similar to these great thinkers (I write this in PNM), but then the Wall comes down, we drift for a while, and then 9/11 makes things clear. Right now, Steve DeAngelis and Mark Warren are my big influences, both of whom take my storytelling skills and writing skills to new heights by connecting me to the right opportunities and stages.

9. Did you travel to various places to work with others in your talent area?
Traveled East for 21 years basically to get where I am today, but far happier being back in the Midwest, so I guess that counts. Moved to Harvard for that experience, then felt the need to do some time in DC, then felt the need to work directly with military in DoD (up in Newport), then felt the need to get out of government, so moves throughout my life to put me where I felt I needed to be next to advance my thinking. I don’t know how people get into an academic job and then sit there for decades (even with moves), because I would think that the lack of varied experience would kill thought. So I see my career in phases (Harvard for academics, DC for research, Newport for high-end conceptualizing and mastering presentation skills, and now Indiana for high-end consulting and writing). Now I travel all over country and world for episodic versions of all of these things, and I’m no longer tied to place.

Travel abroad has been a huge influence for me: summer in Soviet Union in 1984, two-week seminar with young pols from around world in Austria in 1992, week-long high-level trips to Moscow and India, the month in China, and a month in Central America doing intell stuff, a week teaching at the Norwegian Naval Academy. All of these trips have been big eye-openers. I plan to pursue more such opportunities with great regularity.

10. Did your schools help you develop talent in any way?
Exposure to languages helped a lot, because it taught me how to master new tongues, not just actual languages but lexicons of fields. Studied French, Russian, German and Romanian. Big research papers were big development periods for me: Senior Honors Thesis at Madison, and PhD at Harvard. Schools mostly taught me how to think. Real content came mostly in work environment, although studying the masters of political theory and philosophy was crucial.

11. What personal characteristics do you have that help you be successful in your talent area?
Crucial to have strong ego and showmanship abilities. People will shit all over you as much as possible to stop your ideas from spreading. But trick is to have thin skin at same time, because feeling disturbed about criticisms is how you improve your arguments, so ideal is to have very thin skin but hide it very well. Many will consider you an egomaniac, and at some level you will be, but you just have to get used to that charge while remaining sensitive to the implied dangers. But if you’re self aware, that’s not that hard, because large ego is always balanced by huge self-doubt, and if you’re self-aware, you can see that in yourself. Religion helps in this regard, Catholicism in particular.

Sense of humor, especially self-deprecation, is key.

Sense of wonder about everything also key, which means staying childlike in observation. When you’ve “seen it all,” please get out of the business.

Most important is ability to think laterally, so you’re definitely the fox, not the hedgehog, even as you aspired to the hedgehog’s big singular ideas (reproducible strategic concepts).

12. What limitations or weaknesses do you have that might hinder your pursuit of expertise? How do you handle these?
The thin skin is essential, but a crucial occupational hazard, as is its yang, the huge ego. Being more child-like, you trust people too much, especially opportunists who come at you constantly. But that helps you find mentors, and submit to their advice. The showmanship makes you superficial, but that makes you accessible.

In general, the weaknesses are easily balanced by the strengths, if you’re self-aware enough to see the yin-yang relationships, so I guess self-awareness is the key, and there faith counts a lot (again, another yin-yang, because doesn’t religion prevent that?). So I guess being Catholic is a big deal to me, and the similarities to Judaism in terms of thinking patterns and habits promoted probably explains why all my mentors have been either Catholic or Jewish. Then again, propinquity determines a lot, and the more I get around, the wider array of faiths influence me (mentors who are Mormon, evangelical, Muslim), so I guess I retreat to horizontal thinking as the most important way of coping with your weaknesses, and I honestly think horizontal thinking is both a nurture issue (early childhood) and how your brain is wired. Running a wonderful experiment right now with adopted daughter in this regard. Very curious to find out, except those damn Chinese went to great efforts to match personalities, so they may have ruined my sample already!

13. What barriers do you face in trying to master your domain? How do you hurdle these barriers?
Key barrier is the constant pressure to choose Dem or GOP as answer to everything.

Then there is the America-versus-Rest of World thing you always have to work: world wants American leadership but can’t stand it from Americans much of the time.

Key line to dance around is being mil thinker with no mil time in uniform, but I think not having that has been far more important for me than getting some, because the time in service would have killed most of my horizontal thinking.

Tough barrier is notion that you must be careerist in pursuit of jobs and titles, when in reality, the visionary should avoid them by and large (why should I run anything with my native skills?).

Hardest barrier is that being married and having kids is crucial to my thinking skills, but those responsibilities make pursuit of visionary career awfully hard (the balance question). Big break for me is my ability to work just about anywhere, my serious stamina, and my love of travel. Also crucial is early adopting of tech capabilities as they come online (PPT, internet, web sites, cells, email, blogs, and so on).

Key attribute in this regard: a love of scheming and getting away with work-arounds. Oddly enough, that is very Catholic.

Another big thing for me: I married an amazingly unconventional person. If I hadn’t, I am pretty sure I never would have surmounted so many of these usual barriers

14. Describe your life beyond your talent area. What other activities do you do? Describe your social life?
Was a big jock in HS, which has left residual of being able to stay reasonably fit through workouts, which helps a lot on stamina.

No real friendships outside of work and family. Work is fairly encompassing, so I must find friendships there early in career. Now, I only work with friends.

Commitment to family means my life outside of work is whatever wife and kids desire to pursue. It will be interesting to see how much harder it is to “stay young” in thinking if I’m no longer surrounded by kids.

15. What have been the advantages of pursuing your talent?
I make a lot of money by focusing on what I do best and hiring out everything else—very Druckerish (and that’s where I got it).

Lots of personal freedom to pursue what I want.

Ability for constant self-discovery through writing.

Ability to pursue that acting career via stagemanship of public speaking.

Flexibility with family that I truly love.

16. Describe an average day. How much time do you commit to your talent area each week? How is that time spent?
All depends on whether I’m traveling or not. If traveling, then it’s nonstop meetings and speeches, and the downtime is really on planes, where I read and blog and work the brief, which is under constant revision. If I’m home, then it’s a tight mix of interacting with family and working either early in the morning or late at night.

For me, there is writing every day for the blog, which is where I work out my daily thinking, trying stuff out and simply experimenting. Second for me is the biweekly column, where I package up ideas that’s I’m fairly comfortable with and want to get into print more formally. The Esquire stuff is less regular, but more encompassing, because it’s typically a month’s worth of reporting, writing and editing. When that’s going on, other things take a back seat. The books are my home runs, or the bundling up of my thinking in a maximalist sort of package. When I write a book, that’s typically three months when the rest of the world must wait, and I go into a deep creative fever where I produce stuff that amazes me later. I get the same phenomenon with the articles, columns and blogs, but all in lesser degrees.

What that tells me is that there is a creative brain space that’s my number one resource. I try to manage that creative time with great care. When I’m not trying to create, I’m as dumb as the next person, and, according to my wife and kids, I actually surpass most humans in stupidity with ease. But when I get myself ready for “big think,” I’m about as smart as they come and in certain ways, truly world class. But I don’t pretend that’s a daily thing for me, anymore than an athlete can perform at his or her peak.

So, in sum, a lot of my daily life gets wrapped up in managing the mountains and valleys of my creative output. When I’m down, I don’t pretend to be anything but your average guy. When I’m gearing up, I work my influences, inputs, experiences very carefully to put me in the right space. When I’m in that space, I’m quite the asshole interpersonally, and my family understands and accommodates that. I run with that creative space for as long as is necessary to finish whatever I’m doing (my legendary stamina), but then I will typically go into a long recovery and a bit of a personality funk where there’s a lot of self-doubt and a sense of exhaustion.

What modulates all that effectively for me are my relationships with wife and kids, my fairly steady speaking schedule (being on stage is always a charge), and the blog and the interactivity it creates. But there are clear peaks and valleys to the process, and if you’re self-aware enough, you recognize them, manage them as you can (I do actually say, “Today I’m scheduled to be brilliant!” just as I often say, “Today, I have much doofus time on my schedule.”), and try hard not to fight where I am (when I’m scheduled “down,” I have very little pretense about being smarter than the average bear, even as that can depress me emotionally).

This is the great advance for me, career-wise, as I’ve headed into my forties: a strong awareness of this creative process and getting smart on how to manage and manipulate it. Once you’ve cracked that code, you’re effectively working your most precious asset: brain time.

17. How much time do you spend thinking about or reflecting on your talent? What are your thoughts?
Very little, actually, other than simply managing my schedule effectively (avoiding overload or overlapping commitments) and doing that daily sort of maintenance (e.g., realizing I need to push hard or back off on my thinking time in any day, as in, “should I just chill today, drink some beers, and watch some “Family Guy”?). The joy for me right now is that I control my entire schedule fairly well, something I couldn’t do when I worked for companies/government that required I be in their office 8 hours a day, whether or not that corresponded to where my “head time” was on any particular day.

I’ve actually done more thinking on this in the last year than probably the previous 42 years combined. This is because I’ve had a huge number of transitions in the last three to four years (starting with 9/11), and the blog has allowed me a lot of explanation space for readers regarding my way of thinking. All of this introspection was pushed by my Dad’s death in the spring of 2004 as well, along with the adoption of our fourth child, and my wife and I heading into (and finally recognizing that status) middle age.

All this recent thinking also dovetails with the evolution of what I hope will be the trilogy of my “Pentagon” books, with PNM being the system-level diagnosis, BFA being the nation-state-level prescriptives, and vol. III being the individual-level self-help guide where I hope to teach readers how to replicate my thinking in their daily and professional lives. So I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year compiling my own sense of how I accomplish this level and sort of thinking and speaking and writing.

Upshot? You’ve caught me at a great time for this interview.

18. How often do you “fail”? What do you do when you fail?
To me, failure is just realizing the distance from where I am currently on some issue to where I ultimately want to go. Those realizations are often driven by critical feedback on the brief. That feedback then--when appropriate--results in better or newer or more expanded slides. When I’ve explained that new thing many times, it usually finds its way into the blog/column/article/book in a progressive fashion.

That’s the ideal version of failure for me.

The career version of failure is me simply recognizing I’ve grown beyond whatever bounds I currently face and need to recast myself in another venue. The trigger is typically financial: I feel scared about my ability to earn money in the current configuration of jobs/relationships/alliances and so I reinvent myself to recast those as effectively as possible. Those moments are typically scary, but invigorating in a good way. Having gone through them now a number of times, I’m fairly open to welcoming them (the instinct is to avoid at all costs), so I’m learning to enjoy them.

Performance failure happens here and there (the bad TV remote appearance, the stupid blog post, and the perceived bad briefing), but outright failure is rare (I recently had a very bad brief which stunned me, but it was mostly the result of how the event was set up rather than my performance, but it re-taught me the importance of managing the venue as much as possible—i.e., being demanding with my hosts to ensure the best performance). The bad interview is frustrating, but I’ve learned that’s overwhelmingly the function of the interviewer, something that’s almost impossible to surmount. So I guess a lot of dealing with failure is understanding what you can’t control and accepting that (you know, that old chestnut).

Dealing with failure effectively is mostly about diagnosing it quickly, accepting your portion of the blame, and then chilling on it and putting it behind you quickly. So you seek “getting back up on the horse” moments ASAP.

19. Why do you work in this talent area? Where will you ultimately go within your talent area?
I work national security because it’s that rare industry that will reward you nicely for long-range systematic thinking about the future.

I do not anticipate becoming someone who holds big jobs, because I do not seek out management opportunities, believing it’s the death of “big think.” However, there may come a time in future years where I’ve mastered the big think enough to be able to pursue it in an atmosphere where I’m more limited in my creative time, so I don’t rule out such conventional accomplishments. Ideally, though, I remain the big concept guy who advises others, and uses that career freedom to have the sort of marriage and home-life that I think is essential for personal happiness and my continued creative growth.

20. Other comments?
This has been a very nice exercise for me: perfect practice for writing Vol. III. And that’s actually a great demonstration of my success: everything I do is ultimately first and foremost about making me smarter, whether it does anything for you or not. As it stands, I have a great track record for making “clients” as happy as I make myself. But I think that’s truly the artistic expression of what I do in the writing and speaking: I do it strictly for myself and deep down, I’m amazed that it provides value to others because I assume it’s so amazingly idiosyncratic to me. If you listen to a lot of director’s commentaries on movies (on DVDs), as I do, this is a common theme to a lot of directors and writers and especially comedians (I think of Mike Myers in particular): they go through life amazed that what they long assumed was interesting/funny/cool to just them actually has very broad appeal.

I’ve gotten this compliment my entire creative life and it’s taken me many years to actually understand it: people will say that whatever I’ve written/described/presented is actually about something so much larger than the subject at hand, that it’s a particular description of a particular phenomenon that’s actually applicable to a much wider array of circumstances. For a long time, I took it almost as a criticism, meaning that people were saying my analysis lacked focus or practicality. Over time, I came to realize that statement was a compliment: a description of my skill in horizontal thinking.

I had a friend once say that “Tom acts like everything in his life is so much more exciting than it really is,” and the statement was absolutely correct: I do act that way. Not because it’s fake, but because—for me—it’s actually true in comparison to other people. Some people walk out of movies wondering about what it would be like to have lives like those depicted in films, whereas others walk out wondering about what a movie would be like if it actually came close to depicting the excitement that is their own life. I fall into the latter category, and I love it. I don’t think there’s an objective answer to that question (Is your life like a movie or are movies like your life?). I honestly think it’s a choice we all make, much like happiness. My life has all the same bad stuff as everyone else’s: I just choose not to make those bad things the definers of my existence. I aspire to be the Joel Osteen of grand strategists (I love watching him for speaking tips, BTW).

That’s real growth, in my mind: recognizing your freak skills as sellable.

I will post this interview on my blog. Someone might assume I’m giving away an early version of material that will ultimately end up in Vol. III (and they’d be right). But this is part and parcel of my approach to the blog: a test bed that allows effective feedback from a large readership. Some readers will naturally be put off by the introspection here, not to mention the self-congratulatory nature of exploring one’s talents, but again, self-awareness is everything to managing the talents I have (and, I suspect, to personal happiness for anyone), so arguing this stuff out in the open is very healthy, I think. Plus, I will get huge amounts of good feedback on this from readers via emails (especially in terms of source material I should read on this subject, and you know what? It’s cool to have several hundred research assistants always working non-stop on your behalf for free, which is the joy of the blog and internet!), making the final product that much better.

So in the end, let me express my gratitude for your pushing me on this subject. Your own blog material on my thinking has been very helpful, in part because it’s so annoying (annoying is good, because it suggests “failures” yet to be discovered and exploited for positive change), so elevating our interaction to this new level has been fun—as all self-exploration is.

Post-script: It’s instructive to me as a thinker and interviewer to note how much I warmed up over the course of this written interview: stiff and short at first, then more loquacious and ranging with each question. A good interview does that naturally, so I guess one can assume the questions were built with that goal in mind.