INTRODUCTION: How Much Is Business? How Much Is Espionage? by Maryann Karinch I began this book as a skeptic, unsure that spies could teach business pro- fessionals a darned thing that was legal. After a few days of absorbing the stories and other material, I was sure they could, however. One key to seeing the connection was to ask questions that related to the actual jobs and not to the Hollywood versions of spy work. The other key was my keeping in mind that Peter Earnest is no ordinary spy. The breadth of his career experiences and his ability to communicate the lessons derived from those experiences make him a superior resource. The result is a book offering transferable business practices from the CIA''s National Clandestine Service (NCS) that support employee selection and retention, creative and agile problem solving, mission-focused outcomes, and learning from mistakes. Peter''s experiences in the world of espionage illustrate core business principles. Peter and I also knew of many events from the business world that either implemented or failed to imple- ment those principles.

Including case studies from both worlds is one way this book capitalizes on his expertise and mine. My initial vision of what this book would be was wrong in certain respects and yet, ultimately, right overall. This seeming paradox evolved as my preconceived notions about the intelligence services matured during conversations with Peter. For example, I expected a great deal of regularity: models for action with prescribed shapes and clean edges. Knowing how case officers in the field must handle each covert meeting and action with diligence, I assumed Peter would share codification of practices, formu- las to achieve certain outcomes, and patterns and systems that could be replicated to improve the effectiveness of any business professional. There are some structured programs like that in the book, but for the most part the how-to guidance takes a different form. Instead of blueprints, the recommendations here have the tone and shape of executive coaching. They flow from Peter''s insights about the true success of the intelligence services: the people "on the line," why they stay there, and the advantages and functioning of a culture of trust.

This is so for a couple of reasons. First, the people "on the line" are not just case officers who recruit foreign nationals or technology wizards who will bug the lairs of terrorists abroad. They are everyone in the National Clandestine Service. Second, the insights on why they stay at the Agency are prescient, as well as reflective of what has worked in the field for decades. In today''s business world, "climbing the corporate ladder" is becoming a quaint phrase. Many people enter the workforce today viewing career advance- ment as a route to a purpose-driven career or simply "doing what I want to do." The Central Intelligence Agency has known since its inception that it could not lure high-caliber talent with competitive salaries alone. Intelligence officers are government employees with established pay grades.

Leisure time and an evening meal with the family may often be hard to come by for case officers, who in many cases do two jobs: the cover job and the covert one. Third, from hiring processes to communications practices through problem solving in the field, building trust both internally and externally is vital--and doing so is a calculated and achievable action. Loyalty and creative thinking are not random benefits of having good people on board. Companies can foster these attributes in a series of steps. Having tackled business issues for thirty years as an employee, an entrepreneur, and now a writer, I especially enjoyed this project because I came to understand what kind of relationships, culture, programs, and leadership make it possible for a government agency with high demands to attract and retain so many extraordinary professionals. Most of the answers to how-to questions came from Peter, but other sources in both the public and private sectors contributed important details as well. Using Peter''s description of the Agency''s successes in the key areas of personnel, operations, strategy, and learning from mistakes, I sometimes reverse-engineered the outcomes. That is, I looked for those areas of success in private companies and found out how they achieved the same results.

In addition to getting glimpses of how the Agency conducts its business, therefore, I saw how companies screen employees effectively, channel the talents of their workforce to outsmart the competition, breathe life into a corporate culture, and maintain healthy management practices. For instance, sometimes the methods used by the National Clandestine Service and by business are similar, if not identical; sometimes they look quite different. But even though NCS officers--I''ll call them spies for convenience, even though the term really applies to the "other guys"--and business executives may not live similar lives, the methods they use to get their jobs done are rarely worlds apart. So organizations in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors can implement every bit of business guidance in this book. As for my paradox, I was wrong about what shape the how-to business information from a spy-turned-businessman would take, but I was right that it would showcase the unique insights of a successful businessman who used to be a spy. That unusual man, Peter Earnest, serves as narrator in this text--he is the "I" and "we" on the pages that reference people in the Intelligence Community. For the most part, the stories and counsel here reflect our combined experience and research--but all those stories about silent drills and dead drops . I had nothing to do with them.