Martin Petersen Studies in Intelligence Vol 55 No 1
An advantage of getting older is increased perspective. I have been doing, thinking and writing about intelligence and intelligence analysis for almost 40 years now. The business we are in has changed a great deal in that time, but more in its form than in its fundamentals. I want to focus on three broad topics: understanding the customer, the importance of a service mentality, and the six things I learned in doing and studying intelligence analysis during my career in the DI. While these experiences are drawn from work in the CIA, I believe the principles apply across the Intelligence Community (IC).
Understanding the Consumer: Five Fundamental Truths
The Importance of a Service Mentality
The Six Things I Learned
Read the complete article….
Phi Beta Iota: This is a pleasure to read, and useful.
See Also:
Jack Davis on Analysis (All Phi Beta Iota Posts)
New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence
Apr 9
Workshop Details
Explore the landscape of large-scale change and map the pathways to a future new world in an intense, hands-on, unprecedented workshop with Don Beck and John Petersen.
Humanity is seeing the growing stress fractures of a global system undergoing extraordinary, historic change. Social systems are surfacing extreme responses to unprecedented threats to the status quo. Titanic shifts in the global financial, climate and energy systems all seem to be conspiring to undermine the effectiveness of almost every historical – and familiar – approach to living on this planet.
This workshop is an unequalled opportunity to learn about the options, potentials, processes, and possibilities related to large scale change.
A Few Links and Reviews (including DNI’s Global Trends 2025):
Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 27
Amazon Page
AnnoyingSeptember 4, 2009
John L. Petersen
John Petersen’s earlier work was vastly more interesting and more structured than this little 4.5 inch by 7 inch 100 page double-spaced blowing in the ears of Gary Hart and Leon Fuerth, among others. See my reviews of his earlier work:
Out of the blue: Wild cards and other big future surprises : how to anticipate and respond to profound change
The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future
This book lacks a strategic analytic model and fluffs around the edges of important literatures without ever striking the right note.
The author is a dedicated, intelligent practitioner, but he is neither a scholar nor an analyst in the classic sense of the word–I found this book, in the larger context in which I read and think, annoying. A form of classic comic book for busy people in Washington who will nod and confirm the author’s sagacity without ever recognizing that there is really nothing here.
There is not a word in this book about corruption, integrity, information asymmetries, data pathologies, or the out and out rape of America by the two political parties.
The author is flat out wrong when he states on page 52 that “Humans don’t deal well with discontinuites and rapid change.” That alone dropped this book to three stars, and the rest of the fluffy-face stuff kept it there, including the intelligent but recycled and truncated material from earlier books.
Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 4
Amazon Page
Compelling, Sensible, Easily Understandable
September 1, 2007
John L Petersen
I read and started to use this book well before I started doing Amazon reviews, and was reminded of this today when I started updating my brainstorming briefing.
I know John personally and consider one of the most balanced observers of the future, and especially gifted at casting a wide net to find weak signals, and then using analysis to make sense of disparate noises.
I strongly recommend this book and his more recent updated edition, Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Big Future Surprises
Vote on Review
Sep 1
John Petersen
John has done some futures work and thought critically about both early warning and “wild card” surprises. See our reviews of his books in the Reviews section. Below is a piece he did for the OSS Conference.
21st Century New Role
Dec 20
