What I learned from Stevan Dedijer. By Yves-Michel Marti.
Regards sur l'IE. The Business Intelligence review. September-October 2004
I first met Professor Stevan Dedijer during an SCIP (1) conference nearly ten years ago. I was just starting out in the business and my book (2) had recently received an award from the Financial Times newspaper. Stevan Dedijer was already well known as one of the founding fathers of the profession. His former career in the intelligence services and as head of the Yugoslav nuclear programme had clearly established his credentials. I was impressed by his imposing stature and focused look.
He approached me: “Mr Marti! I read your book - excellent! I’ve picked out a few articles for you. Here, this one discusses secrecy as practised by the American intelligence services and that one the investigative methods employed by the Royal Society in the 17th century. You must also meet one of my friends, Mr XXX, who has amazing stories to tell. If ever you’re in Chicago, make sure you get in touch with Professor YYY, a truly wonderful person. Oh yes, I nearly forgot, here’s a business card from Mr ZZZ (Japanese university professor specialising in knowledge management). Do mention my name when you contact him.” »
This avalanche of pleasantries from an illustrious figure with whom I had no connection made me somewhat wary. What did he want from me? Why had he come up to me in this way? Did he know about some of the confidential files I was working on? Was he working for a State intelligence service to pick my brains? Why choose me, when the conference was very well attended by people far more experienced and well known than me? I was suspicious of his attitude. I received several faxes and short notes from him over the following weeks and months. Always offering advice, ideas or contact names. He never asked me indiscreet questions. Intellectually it was just gifts and friendly gestures.
It took me quite a while to understand his attitude. Professor Dedijer was a man fired by a single passion - intelligence (in the information sense). Like all good scientists, he conducted his investigations as his masters had taught him to do when a student in nuclear physics along with Fermi and Einstein at Princeton in the 1930s: detect talents, enter into discussion and exchange information with them and seek to build concepts and theories to explain the World.
This article is written as a homage to this amazing character full of humanity and scientific exactitude and to pass on what he taught me during a dozen meetings from Zagreb to Washington for nearly a decade. So here we go.
There are four levels in Business Intelligence. A bit like the coloured belts in judo. The basic levels focus on techniques, whilst the upper levels focus on philosophy. Just like in judo!
Small mouth and big ears
Parano is the most basic level in Business Intelligence. You meet it frequently among Security Directors in major groups or managers in defence industries. These people think they are truly intelligent when they put the so-called Small Mouth and Big Ears technique into practice. They introduce intelligence programmes and spend their time at scientific fairs raking in everything they can get a hold of. During my time as an engineer I saw a fair few of these little grey men going round the stands collecting leaflets and moving close to groups of researchers to listen in on their conversations! They usually give the impression of not knowing many people and not having many pals. I don’t think they gain anything very useful from their information-collecting endeavours.
Give to Get
The next level up is one I call Give to Get, an expression culled from the Americans. An example of this is the stunning young lady of Lebanese descent employed by a major industrial group and who spent her life at international trade shows. She always set off on her travels with an impressive amount of documentation which had been screened by her superiors and which they called "sacrificed information". She went round all the competitors’ stands on arrival handing out her documentation, thereby receiving leaflets from the competition in return and setting up some useful contacts. At the end of the show she distributed videos of her company's products to acquire those of her counterparts, which occasionally included sensitive information.
The Give to Get strategy is a classic in Intelligence. It has been used tremendously by the greatest of the great. Mazarin, for example, spent his life giving presents. Handkerchiefs soaked in perfume when he was poor and later, canvases by the Masters and solid marble tables when he became the richest man in Europe. Towards the end of his life, Talleyrand showed his visitors his collection of several hundreds of moulds of ladies’ legs: every year he sent the ladies of his acquaintance made-to-measure silk stockings! The “hollow interview” is another version of this technique. Instead of putting questions to a target, he is asked to correct a rapidly-written report. Full of confidence and flattered by the importance accorded him, the target often talks too much. These approaches are rounded out by a whole range of influence techniques - escalation of committment commitment, social proof, cognitive dissonance, etc.
Despite everything this approach is limited. We are stuck in a win-lose situation: I’ll give you so that you give me. At the end people are not suckers and do not fully trust anyone using this petty mentality.
Generosity is a strategy
The next level is Generosity. Some information sources are just so acute and so superior in their degree of knowledge that it is virtually impossible to give them anything likely to interest them. This applies frequently to top-flight scientists and engineers. They often only exchange views with a very limited number of their peers, people acknowledged on a par with themselves. They may, however, agree to let drop a few crumbs of their knowledge to those with a good reputation or who they feel are working for the common good.
Mr Michel Billaut, who created the Atelier de la Compagne Bancaire (bought out by BNP-Paribas), is a good example of this. An economist with little knowledge of telecommunications or the Internet, Michel Billaut became the French guru on Internet commerce during the 1990s. His generosity, his enthusiasm to share information and his contacts, the simplicity with which he welcomed everyone - students and even competitors - to his conferences made him well-liked by all. Little by little he became a genuine system in information channelling, making it mandatory for anyone seeking information to cross his path.
Your reputation and relational power (called Guanxi by the Chinese) is built on uncalculated giving with nothing expected in return, over many years. When it's your turn to ask the questions, everyone around you does everything possible to help. Professor Dedijer never asked me questions. But he was just so pleasant that if he had I would have bent over backwards to try and answer him, within strict legal and ethical limits, because of course I was always conscious of his past and his close links with the greatest master spies on the planet. I applied this strategy during my six-year tenure as Director of the French branch of the SCIP Association and I am convinced it helped the boom in my own business.
Global intelligence
Professor Dedijer had this class, and more. He had gone beyond this level to that of enlightened humanism. For him, Globalisation, the Internet and Business Intelligence were only symptoms of the human race's move towards greater things. He shared the palaeontologist and philosopher Theilard de Chardin’s vision of a planetary society, a “noosphere”, a collective intelligence entity. He said to me “The human species is becoming a single community”, and I replied that it resembled ants - one ant is stupid, but an anthill is intelligent.
Wars are often started by dogmatics or extremists, people who shut themselves into a system of thought and who refuse to know or recognise another. During the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, I have often noticed that members of the Israeli intelligence services (Mossad and others), who have perfect knowledge of Palestinian history, language and culture - as their job so requires -, take more realistic, human and reasonable stands than the politicians. The enemy is demonised from afar. Close to he can be understood, we can empathise with him and it’s a step towards Brotherhood. Business Intelligence therefore helps create links between people and societies. Close to, we realise that we are not in head-on competition with the one we thought was a competitor and who may turn into a partner.
Professor Dedijer viewed the concept of war in general, and of economic war in particular, as contemptible (3). For him, the aim of Business Intelligence was not to “kill the competition” (4). This messianic vision of an advancing Humanity fuelled his interest in the intermediate stages of this development: measuring scientific progress in under-developed nations, the organisation of State intelligence systems and their link with the business world, how leaders such as Elizabeth I or Churchill could lead their countries towards Peace and Prosperity (5).
Secrecy and economic judo
There’s no otherworldliness here. Rather economic judo. And to achieve this, it is vital to practise secrecy and hide your intentions. Professor Dedijer sometimes said “Man is the secret animal”. He didn’t quote the Japanese Masayoshi Hotta, the Shogun’s advisor in 1857, by chance: “Exert our influence gradually over foreigners, so that all countries in the World ultimately enjoy perfect tranquillity and our hegemony is recognised throughout the planet”.
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