Business Confidential — What the Office Can Borrow from Intelligence Work

Business Confidential brings together former CIA officer Peter Earnest and writer Maryann Karinch. Much of their attention goes to hiring and managing people.

Their CIA is a workplace, with less glamour and more ordinary work than its film version suggests. Recruitment, research and reporting give the authors ways to ask questions that also come up in a company.

Hiring, Intelligence and the Organisation

The book is arranged around three areas:

1. Selecting people
2. Collecting and analysing information
3. Improving an organisation

Selecting People

The first part made me think of recruitment at large Korean companies in the 2000s and early 2010s. Those companies also used several stages to decide who should be hired.

Assessments and In-Depth Interviews

The authors describe personality assessment and detailed interviews as parts of the selection process they knew. The sequence sounded familiar from Korean corporate recruitment at the time.

Finding Someone Who Can Work with Others

The person an organisation needs may be someone who can get good work out of a group. The authors describe engaged employees as people with clear motives who follow through, make it easier for others to do their work and take responsibility for the result.

What a Strong Candidate Does

The book looks for candidates who can show how they would fit into the work.

1. Find out what the organisation does, who works there and what its competitors are doing.
2. Speak honestly without inflating what you’ve done. Take responsibility for what you say.
3. Be able to explain why you want to join and how you might put your strengths to use there.

What Happens after the Hire

The authors cite a Gallup estimate to show how costly disengagement could be for employers at the time. The exact figure matters less to their case than the observation that hiring somebody and helping them do good work are separate tasks.

Career support and mentoring are two ways of making it easier for people to see a future in the organisation.

New hires also need onboarding. That includes training for the job and a reception that makes it possible to ask the first few questions.

Stories, exercises and role-play can give a new employee practice before the stakes are high. Cross-training also lets people see how decisions made in their own department look elsewhere in the organisation.

Collecting and Analysing Information

The second part looks at a central job of intelligence work: collecting information and working out what it means.

A decision needs accurate, reasonably objective information while there is still time to use it. The book ranges from specialised methods of collection to the kind of open search anyone can do.

The Moscow Rules

The book includes a selection of reminders known as the Moscow Rules:

• Check your assumptions.
• Pay attention when your instincts tell you something is off.
• Look for a distinct profile or a pattern that changes over time.
• Be consistent.
• Avoid alarming the people you are trying to understand.
• Learn how the other side operates and where.
• Keep your purpose in view before acting.
• Avoid harassing the other side.
• Leave yourself options.
• A repeated incident may deserve a different explanation from an isolated one.
• Choose the time and place for action with care.
• Remember how readily people rationalise what they see.

Interpreting Behaviour

The authors use the language of translation and decoding for the work of interpreting gestures and behaviour. A gesture can carry a different meaning from one culture to another. Several observations and some knowledge of the setting give you more to work with than a single movement.

Turning Information into a Report

A lot of available information still leaves somebody with the work of deciding what matters. The book considers individual analysis and a questioning approach in the Socratic tradition.

The result needs to be usable by the person who will make a decision. The authors outline a report built around an issue, a discussion and a conclusion. A company might use it like this:

• Issue — a meeting with a customer to assess satisfaction.
• Discussion — a full report is due Friday. There is no immediate decision to make.
• Conclusion — the customer is unhappy with part of the billing process, which accounting can review. Installation and compatibility also need closer technical support.

The person reading the report determines what the report needs to tell them.

Improving the Organisation

The last part turns to branding, marketing, changes of direction and responses when something goes wrong.

Who Made the Brand’s Image?

The authors ask whether a company actively created its image or found that customers had assigned it one. They discuss Apple and Southwest Airlines as examples of companies with a recognisable image of their own making.

It is a question worth asking before deciding what a rebranding exercise is supposed to change.

Relationships Can Change

The book also brings an old political observation into business. Partnerships and rivalries can change as the interests behind them change.

Keeping Trust

The authors compare a sales presentation with building a relationship in intelligence work. Trust comes first. Then comes finding out what matters to the other person, making a proposal and dealing with the questions that remain.

Both parts of the comparison depend on people believing what the other party tells them.

Some of the US examples were hard to place from the Korean translation. What kept me reading was the experiment of taking a practice from intelligence work and seeing how it looked in an ordinary office.

Book Information

Business Confidential

Authors

Peter Earnest and Maryann Karinch

Publication

17 April 2013 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788975276682

View the book on YES24

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