Tom Barnett, a Change Agent and 'Horizontal Thinker' No One Can Ignore
February 10, 2006
I would be remiss to not call attention to a very unique change agent early in this web log. Dr. Thomas Barnett captured my attention nearly 3 years ago when I had a chance to hear him brief his many concepts around war in the context of "everything else". He is one of the best public speakers I have ever heard - with a command of a stage and a way of saying things that allows both left and right-brained people to quickly grasp his concepts. This article from the Wall Street Journal captures what it was like to hear Tom give his famous PowerPoint briefing. The day I heard the brief at the Office of Force Transformation in Arlington, Virginia, my mind was opened to a new way to think about everything I read, see, and thought I understood of the WOT.
Barnett uses many lenses to see the world and Globalization is one of them. Unlike Tom Friedman, Barnett goes beyond just rich descriptions of what is happening in the world. He brings a conversation of global security to Globalization. Barnett is a classic example of what we call a 'Dogged Conceptualizer'. He is a "horizontal" thinker at heart who sees problems not in the context of vertical silos but in the context of a horizontal assimilation of many data points that allow you to see what’s really at stake.
I call Tom out so early as he was a great supporter of what we did in writing the change agent paper. In fact the day we interviewed him was noted on his web log:
"Then spent hour in cafe in basement of Longsworth (they have that whole underground network among all the buildings) with Dan Forrester of Sapient Corp, who is doing research article on "change agents" in the government. I had given him a slew of names to chase earlier, and now he was interviewing me. I will probably use this piece as cite in Vol. II."
Barnett indeed supplied a rich of list of people he thought fit the concept for the paper. We could not interview all of the people Tom recommended but we did get to many. The list of names he gave us was run through with colleagues at Catholic University, Gartner, and Meta Group.
I have thanked Tom in many small ways this past year but felt it deserved a post all its own. Thank you Tom.
To those who don't know him nor have heard of him, I encourage you to read the following and of course to get the book that started it all for him, The Pentagon's New Map. I have hopes of collaborating with Tom this next year so that he can leverage the change agent paper for his forthcoming third book due out in 2007.