Lessons from the Everyday Spy Part 3: Focus on the Basics

So assuming we are not going to meet an apocalypse anytime soon. There is much to mine from Everyday Spy on how to thrive. 

Steve Bartlett asks them: “Are there any particular skills that people who are trying to be successful in their average life, because this is called the Diary of a CEO, that you learned through your time at the CIA that you think are most useful for people to be successful, however you define that, in their day-to-day lives?”

Andrew says: “The first thing I want to say is that our book Shadow Cell talks not

necessarily about awesome spies. It talks about how we went back to the basics. We went back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA, sticks and bricks. We gave up all the technology. We gave up all the fancy satellites. We gave up all the drones.

And we went back to build off of strong foundations. And we didn't do that because we're smart. We did that because the terrorist groups that won the global war on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks. And they were winning over an American Department of Defense that had a $900 billion budget every year. We spent $8 trillion in the global war on terror only to evacuate Afghanistan. All of that happened because they were using foundational tools that we couldn't crack. And in the shadow cell, that's all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to dominate time after time.

And there's so much in everyday life. And there's so much in business from marketing to sales to budgeting to hiring practices to, you know, annual and semiannual reviews. There's so much that businesses can take from this basic idea of never letting  go of the foundations. Never let go of your sticks and bricks.” 

This is what I try to instill in my founders. This is what I try to focus on myself. It’s always the basics. They never get old and it works most of the time. You get into trouble when you try to be too clever. Innovation is great but there is a reason the basics are called the basics. They are the foundation. They are “Lindy” and have withstood the test of time.