OODAcast

Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, USA (ret) was the 21st Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He retired in November 2020 after over 36 years of active-duty service as an intelligence officer. He had previously served as the Army’s lead for all intelligence (the Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2), where he was the senior advisor to the Secretary of the Army and Army Chief of Staff for all aspects of intelligence, counterintelligence and security.  During his long career he commanded organizations charged with gaining insights into adversary intentions and making them actionable for decision-makers. This included work overseas including six combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a squadron, brigade commander, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (J-2). Other tours included assignments leading intelligence for the Army Joint Special Operations Command; United States Central Command; and for all US forces in Afghanistan. He also led Army intelligence training and education. This OODAcast focuses on lessons for leaders of any organization, commercial, government or military. Some of the more enjoyable and interesting lessons come from being in the room with other great leaders. Imagine being in daily sessions with great's like General Mattis. Consider the lesson you would take away when you see General Mattis leveraging mentors. Time after time we see great, well read decision-makers continually seeking inputs from others, even when they have reached the pinnacle of leadership echelons.  Ashely's personal approach certainly has involved mentors and he mentions many, but his methods included learning of decision-making methods from any source. He called this approach being a "student of the human condition." The military's methods of continuing to grow and mature senior leaders is also discussed. These professional methods clearly pay off and could benefit any large commercial organization as well. General Ashley is well versed in mental models and decision-making and he references many. The OODA Loop of course, but the intelligence cycle, military COA development and others are also referenced. He also provides, in hindsight, an opinion on the most important decision he made as Director of DIA, something that may well be far more important than knowing what mental models to apply to what situation. One of the early critical thinking methods the military instilled in Ashley was a deep respect for history and a need to continue to examine lessons from the past that can be applied to today. His early exposure to this critical method of learning is directly related to the constant learning through reading that many in today's officer corps embody. Some of the books that has captured his attention lately include: The Gray Eminence: Fox Conner and the Art of Mentorship. This story of Fox Conner captures the incredible influence this individual had through mentoring others to great leadership. Some who credited him with their success include George Marshall, Ike Eisenhower and George Patton. First Principles: What America's Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. By Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Ricks, this book underscores the importance of knowing which lessons from history are most relevant. The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy From The Ancient World To The U.S. and China. Some great historical context on why Democracies are better.  

Ellen McCarthy is a highly accomplished and distinguished executive whose career started as a junior analyst and ended up reaching to the very highest echelons of the US intelligence community. In this OODAcast we explore lessons learned from her journey, capturing insights that can inform actions for those at any stage of a career. Ellen’s career began at the office of Naval Intelligence. She then moved to Norfolk and the Atlantic Intelligence Center (where we first met). She moved back to DC and would later lead all intelligence activities for the US Coast Guard as their director of intelligence, then joined DoD’s office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence working strategy and human capital management. Later she led the non profit public private partnership INSA (the intelligence and national security alliance), helping make that organization what it is today. She returned to government service as chief operating officer of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), then later led the firm Noblis as its president. Ellen was then appointed the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR), where she lead an organization famed for the highest quality of analysis in the US IC. We examine her leadership style, which was informed by exposure to several types of leaders early on in her career. Over time she developed a knack for creating visions that could help others form up on a unified purpose. She also thrived in the domain of executive action, which could come in incredibly handy when appointed to the number three position at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). We discuss examples of her decision-making and tools any of us can put in place to optimize our perspectives. This includes the strong recommendation to know history. In her case she benefited from a deep dive into the history of one of the great transformational leaders of the intelligence community, Wild Bill Donovan, creator and leader of the Office of Special Services (OSS), a forerunner of the organization she would later lead, the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Robert Wallace spent a 33 year career with the Central Intelligence Agency and is widely known for the very well done books he and co-author Keith Melton have produced on the history, culture and tradecraft of intelligence (including the SpyCraft book which was turned into a Netflix series and the Spy Sites series of books documenting the intelligence history of Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia). This OODAcast examines Robert's career from the beginning, resulting in interesting stories and insights into his leadership and management style relevant to any leader in business or government today. His professional life began as he received an MA in Political Science from Kansas University in 1968 and then received a draft notice which resulted in his two years of service in the US Army, including service in Vietnam's Mekong Delta leading long-range reconnaissance patrol teams. In the CIA his initial assignments were as a field case officer. He rose through the ranks at the agency and was Chief of Station in three locations where he directed the full range of CIA activities. Upon returning to headquarters he worked on budgets for the agency and defended spending in front of congressional oversight committees. In 1995 Robert became deputy director of the Office of Technical Service (OTS) and in 1998 was appointed its director. The OTS is the organization most analogous to the "Q" branch in James Bond movies, responsible for creating spy devices and capabilities necessary to conduct clandestine operations with safety and security. You will find Robert's observations on both leadership and management at the CIA not only interesting but directly transferable and applicable to leading any large organization. And his insights into the value of intelligence for the nation and the value of information for companies is also brought to light. Robert's book collaboration with Keith Melton began with the 2008 book Spycraft, soon followed by The Official CIA Manual of Deception and Trickery.  Their Spy Sites trilogy captures the history of American espionage from the Revolutionary War to today. Additional Resources: Spy Sites Philadelphia Spy Sites New York Spy Sites Washington DC Every Time I Get Stabbed In The Back My Fingerprints Are On The Knife Cyber Crisis: Protecting Your Business from Real Threats in the Virtual World The Splendid and the Vile

Blake Bartlett is the CEO of Janes, the well known and trusted provider of open source defense intelligence. In this OODAcast we examine lessons learned from Blake's career and path from a young student with a desire for a career in sports to success in the domain of sales. Blake believes sales is a perfect area for someone who has harnessed their passion for sports and winning and the ability to connect with people.  From there he grew to leadership of several highly regarded market intelligence organizations culminating in his current role as the CEO Janes, the first and arguably most highly successful provider of open source analysis for defense intelligence.  Blake's insights into success with sales is relevant across multiple domains of products and services, and has clearly served him well throughout his entire career. And his ability to connect with people and form trust based relationships has also clearly helped him as he needed to connect with customers, employees and stakeholders of Janes when he tool the helm in 2014. Janes is a widely known brand with a rich history. The firm began in 1989 when Fred T. Jane began selling encyclopedic insights and sketches of ships in the now iconic "Janes Fighting Ships". From that beginning Janes evolved into a major media publisher, then with the rise of the Internet age evolved into online services and now has evolved more into a provider of verifiable, trusted and accurate open source intelligence across defence equipment, military capabilities, security and defence budgets, markets and forecasts. Blake walks us through his assessment of the strengths of Janes when he assumed his leadership position including the trust and strength of the brand, but also spells out clearly how he recognized the need for change. The way one of his customers put it was that Janes was in danger of becoming the "Blackberry of the information industry " where data and information was the best but the hardest to find.  This motivated a push to make Janes information more findable, digestible and actionable by users and resulted in the Janes of today. In the discussion we examine some of Janes more interesting capabilities including new applications available now to any analyst seeking insights in to defense capabilities and operations of nations around the world. Janes now provides streams of data to organizations that want to integrate these insights into their own systems but also provides advanced applications that enable analysts to interoperate directly with data and analysis. Their content includes: - More than 40,000 profiles of military equipment (air, land and sea) in production and use around the globe - Inventories for more than 190 countries, ORBATs for 17,700 military units and 8,900 bases - Structured, consistent database of events related to terrorism, risk and security - Defence budgets for 105 countries and procurement programmes across military aircraft, combat vehicles and military ships - Market assessments, opportunities across 19 markets and data on over 7,000 defence industry organisations - Security assessments and analysis of CBRN response capabilities, production and proliferation Janes also provides training and education on the art and tradecraft of open source intelligence and services and support to organizations seeking to operationalize Janes capabilities to optimize decision-making. For more see: Janes.com

Michele Wucker is specialist in risk management and crisis anticipation and is author of the book "The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore". While we've all become familiar with Taleb's concept of Black Swans, we must equally become intimately aquatinted with Wucker's Gray Rhinos as they provide more obvious opportunities for actually anticipating and managing risk. During this interview, Michele takes us through the concept of Gray Rhinos with real-world historical examples, discussion of future Gray Rhinos, and strategies for engaging in real actions to identify, respond to, and mitigate future Gray Rhinos in business, society, and global affairs. The concept of a Gray Rhino is hugely important and has become embedded in how we evaluate risks at OODA with our customers. More about Michele Applying three decades of global experience in media, finance, and non-profit management and content creation, I help decision makers take a fresh look at and improve their strategies for confronting obvious but under-addressed business and policy challenges. My next book is YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World (Pegasus Books, April 2021). YOU ARE WHAT YOU RISK is a sequel of sorts to THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore (St Martin's Press 2016), an international bestseller with translations published in Hungary, Korea, China, Taiwan, Norway, and forthcoming in Brazil. It has been highly influential in Chinese financial risk policy. I also am the author of LOCKOUT: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right (Public Affairs, 2006) and WHY THE COCKS FIGHT: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (FSG/Hill & Wang, 1999), a social and political history of the Dominican Republic’s turbulent relationship with Haiti and the United States. Specialties: risk management, crisis anticipation, global finance, global economic trends, global risk, debt crisis, global immigration trends, economic impact of immigration, citizenship regimes, China, Latin America, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Europe, emerging markets, leadership, women. More Information: Michele's Full Bio The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World Michele on Twitter

Vikram Sharma is the founder and CEO of Canberra Australia based QuintessenceLabs. His company provides solutions based on quantum technology to strengthen cryptographic key creation and management at scale. This is an urgent need in this era of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, and key to protecting data now and into the future. Q-Labs uses the world’s fastest random-number generator to create the strongest possible encryption keys, and integrates them into advanced key management and encryption capabilities, protecting banks, governments, and other enterprises around the globe. In this OODAcast we ask Vikram for his views on what every CEO, including non-technical CEOs, need to know about the world of quantum effects. He provides explanations in very clear ways that can help inform business strategies. For example, years of theory and research followed by decades of scientific experiments show these four unusual concepts at play at the quantum level: A particle can be a wave and a wave can be a particle. Two particles can behave as if they know what the other is doing, even when separated Measuring a particle changes it At totally random, unpredictable intervals, sometimes small bits of matter come into existence and then go away again Vikram provided an easy to follow description of many other aspects of this nature of reality at its lowest level, and then led us to a deeper understanding of how quantum computers leverage physics of the real world to change the ways humans can compute. For more see: Quantum Computing Sensemaking: Guide to other OODAloop research on Quantum Computing and Quantum Security. The Executive’s Guide To Quantum Computing: What business decision-makers need to know now about quantum superiority The Executive’s Guide To Quantum Safe Computing: Take these steps to make your enterprise quantum proof Is Quantum Computing Ushering in an Era of No More Secrets?: Context from OODA’s Matt Devost on the very near future of quantum computing. What To Do About Quantum Uncertainty: Guess what, besides uncertainty at a quantum level there is great uncertainty among business and policy makers regarding Quantum Computing. AI, quantum computing and 5G could make criminals more dangerous than ever, warn police: Quantum is one of many emerging technologies that law enforcement professionals are tracking Intel offers AI breakthrough in quantum computing: This article is more about quantum simulations for AI, but shows the ecosystem that is developing around the technology Quantum Computing That Can Crack Modern Encryption More Than a Decade Away: When we see reports like this we wonder what qualifies the experts to say this. But in this case the experts are the National Academies of Sciences. Could quantum computers render current bitcoin and most blockchain cryptography powerless?: There is a worry that new algorithms that could run on quantum computing could attack blockchain and asymmetric encryption.

Rob Richer is a highly regarded advisor to international executives and global government leaders including several heads of state. Rob has a well informed perspective on international risks and opportunities and an ability to analyze and distill observations in a way that is meaningful for your decision making process. In this OODAcast we cover the current state of global and domestic affairs, key leadership and decision-making lessons learned derived from Rob's extensive CIA career. As a bonus, we talk to Rob about how the character Mitch Rapp is based upon him. Rapp is the main character in a 18 book series by the late bestselling author Vince Flynn. One of the books was also produced into the film American Assassin. Rob Richer retired in November 2005 from the Central Intelligence Agency as the Associate Deputy Director for Operations (ADDO). Prior to his assignment as the ADDO in 2004, Richer was the Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division, responsible for Clandestine Service Operations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Mr. Richer has been awarded numerous awards and commendations from a number of foreign governments. Additionally during his Agency career, he has received commendations and awards to include the Intelligence Commendation Medal in both 1993 and 1996; the Director's Award in 2004 and in March 2006, Mr. Richer was awarded the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. Additional Information: Mitch Rapp Series A State of Mind: Faith and the CIA A Quiet Cadence: A Novel The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future Word of Honor

This week's OODAcast features an interview with Camila Russo, the author of the book "The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum". Camila is also the founder of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) site The Defiant, which tracks developments, emerging trends, and news in the fast moving DeFi space. In this interview, Camila shares how her experience covering fiat currency issues as a reporter for Bloomberg sparked her interest in Bitcoin and how she focused her attention on the Ethereum project early in its development. We discuss Camila's book and the emergence of Ethereum as well as the most interesting applications of Ethereum, future disruptions, and the general trends driving the DeFi space. Apologies for the dog barking. We did our best to minimize it, but a shared reality of our work-from-home existence. Camila's book was one our picks for top 10 Security, Technology, and Business books of 2020. Additional Resources: The Defiant Camila on Twitter The Infinite Machine on Amazon

Former Congressman Will Hurd joins us on this episode of OODACast to discuss what he has learned about business and entrepreneurship from a diverse career in the intelligence community, elected office and the private sector. Will has successfully leveraged the skills of a CIA operations officer in a variety of contexts, including the founding of cybersecurity firm FusionX with OODA co-founder, Matt Devost. Will most recently served in Congress as the representative for Texas' 23rd district from 2015 to 2021. In our OODACast discussion, Will provides practical, motivating guidance on how to develop new contacts and leads, cultivate client relationships, make an "ask" confidently and effectively, and close deals. He has leveraged all of these skills in his capacity as an intelligence officer overseas, a fundraiser for political office, a co-founder of FusionX, not to mention his parents' cosmetics business when he was a kid! Will explains how to prepare to meet new contacts and make client meetings purposeful. He shares that one must be specific and concrete when making an "ask" of a client, partner, donor or any professional interlocutor. He emphasizes that practicing, even role-playing, is the key to shedding the discomfort of pitching and negotiating. Tune in for this robust conversation if you want to become better at selling, negotiating and closing, and learn how from a leader in intelligence, politics and business.

Kathy and Randy Pherson both had successful careers in the US Intelligence Community, where they pioneered new analytical methods and would later help bring those methods to widespread adoption in the community. Both are also successful business leaders who created companies that build value for others. In the OODAcast we discuss the third edition of their book: Critical Thinking for Strategic Intelligence. They provide their context on what a good intelligence program in industry or government looks like, how to avoid out for cognitive bias and cognitive traps, how to be proactive in data collection and processing, and how to produce intelligence in ways that can be consumed by decision-makers. The also provide insights from the latest cognitive science and do it in a way that can help any analyst in any enterprise improve. We also examine what critical thinking is, and how to teach it. Kathy reviews what she calls the "5 habits of the critical thinker", which includes: Examine your key assumptions Consider multiple alternatives Look for disconfirming data Look for drivers underneath your topic and finder indicators of future action Understand the context and how the issue is framed, through framing seek to understand Kathy and Randy have had a very interesting career together (they were the first married couple to join and spend a full career at the CIA). One aspect of their career I found particularly interesting was their work with the famous Richards (Dick) Heuer. Dick had taught Randy on topics like counter deception, and was later a contractor under Kathy. Years later Dick and Randy would work together on books including one on Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis. We hope you enjoy meeting them and learning from them in this OODAcast. Other related reading: A Practitioner’s View of Corporate Intelligence: Organizations in competitive environments should continually look for ways to gain advantage over their competitors. The ability of a business to learn and translate that learning into action, at speeds faster than others, is one of the most important competitive advantages you can have. This fact of business life is why the model of success in Air to Air combat articulated by former Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd, the Observe – Orient – Decide – Act (OODA) decision loop, is so relevant in business decision-making today. Useful Standards For Corporate Intelligence: Discusses standards in intelligence, a topic that can improve the quality of all corporate intelligence efforts and do so while reducing ambiguity in the information used to drive decisions and enhancing the ability of corporations to defend their most critical information. Optimizing Corporate Intelligence: Actionable recommendation on ways to optimize a corporate intelligence effort. It is based on a career serving large scale analytical efforts in the US Intelligence Community and in applying principles of intelligence in corporate America. An Executive’s Guide To Cognitive Bias in Decision Making: Cognitive Bias and the errors in judgement they produce are seen in every aspect of human decision-making, including in the business world. Companies that have a better understanding of these cognitive biases can optimize decision making at all levels of the organization, leading to better performance in the market. Companies that ignore the impact these biases have on corporate decision-making put themselves at unnecessary risk.