The challenges of modernity:
• Believing our own PR
• Numbers over sensing
• Valuing SigInt over HumInt

Gordon Housworth over at always worthy ICG Blog, highlights a piece in Jan/Feb "Foreign Affairs" by foreign policy emeritus Edward Luttwak

One reason why the CIA favours rendition [summary deportation of suspected Muslim extremists to Arab states for interrogation] is its lack of interrogators who know foreign languages -- and I mean not just difficult languages such as Korean, but also easy ones such as colloquial variants of Arabic, or indeed modern standard Arabic, in which fluency requires only a few months of moderate effort. Companies instruct their salesmen to pick up Arabic when assigned to Middle East spots, but the CIA is apparently a less demanding employer. The CIA's degeneration, however, is of far broader scope. The Mormons and cow-college graduates who have come to fill the ranks of the Directorate of Operations since the Ivy League's post-Vietnam desertion are simply too provincial for the basic craft of the espionage trade, the recruitment and handling of foreigners as agents. So long as the Cold War lasted, the solid products of satellite photography and all manner of electronic intelligence masked the erosion of espionage skills without which there is no going after terrorists. While competent case officers with languages and tact are few, deep-cover operatives are absent -- the US has been engaged with Iraq since 1990, but the CIA did not have one agent in its government when war started anew in 2003, nor any operative on the ground. Now, ordinary Army and Marine officers are doing a better job of recruiting Iraqi informants than the CIA.

To my eyes and ears, Luttwak describes precisely the challenge of corporate America here also--a cultural weakness, a looming competitive disadvantage: Our belief in the shiny, sexy--the touchable--the evermore ubiquitous, technology.

The last few posts her have mentioned a falling out occuriing, a disillusionment with the tools generated by our other tools: Companies. Nick Carr blasts IT as becoming inconsequential. CFO magazine tracks best practices to a price-of-entry parity basement, quickly and easily replicable competitive advantage therefore, becoming no advantage at all. We doodle our dreams of process and network on whiteboards ignoring the impact of the decimation of proximity in these developments. Throughput gets privilege, making proximal sweat and effort, a lost reseourcefulness and bucket-brigade esprit d'corps an anachronism. The losses are tremendous up and down the heirarchy, equal to the distances created.

Two thoughts come to mind, both from the same book: Arts with the brain in mind.

Author, Eric Jensen: America is a feeling-phobic society. [A good interview with longtime neuro-writer Jensen, here.]

And Rolf Jensen (unrelated), Director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies.

We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place a new value on the one human ability that can't be automated: Emotion.

The CIA would do well to learn this. As would the Business Roundtable.