Hello everyone, welcome to our conversation with strategy featuring Ilana Betel on strategy and the private sector. My name is Eleonora Natale, I'm a lecturer in international history at the Department of War Studies. Conversation with strategy, as you know, is a monthly appointment that we have here in the department to offer the opportunity to students to meet our most prestigious visiting fellows and ask them questions about their research, their area of expertise and their career. So we have, as you know, a number of former diplomats and intelligent analysts among our visiting fellows, journalists, civil servants and policymakers. So in this conversation, they usually discuss their career journey and they provide tips or advice for students for success in their chosen profession and also offer insights into contemporary strategic challenges. So before I introduce our guest today, I remind you that the discussion will be followed by questions and conversation with students. So please use the Q&A box here on Zoom to leave your questions and I will collect them at the end of the conversation. And also this event is going to be recorded. So we'll available on the War Studies website. So today we have here my colleagues, Professor James Gao and our special guest and visiting fellow Ilana Betel. James is professor in international peace and security here at War Studies. He was responsible for a number of projects on security and diplomacy in central and eastern Europe. Among other things, he has served as an expert advisor and expert witness for the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And he was also an expert advisor to the UK Secretary of State for Defense. His research interests include international peace and security, war crimes, UK and European security policy and the Yugoslav War. Ilana Betel, thank you for being with us today. She's a strategic advisor, writer and historian. She's a former UN official and advisor for the Balkans. And she has worked extensively with both governments and clients in the private sector on just strategic and policy issues related to security, defense and energy in the European Union, in Russia, Turkey and the Middle East and the transatlantic community. She has a background in media and academia. She has published widely, including a weekly column on the EU defense and security. She holds a PhD in history from UCL. She's a member of the Women in International Security Senior Advisory Board in Brussels. So thank you both for being with us today. And I leave you the floor for conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much, Eleonora. And Ilana, hello again, welcome. I should say that I've known Ilana for quite a long time in meeting around her husband because she and I were perhaps the only ones who really understood what a transformative role he played. That's a story for another day. But it does mean that she's, she is well placed to understand strategy. And I think we'll come to that a little bit later. I was thinking, Ilana, maybe first of all, you could just give us a little bit of background on how you went from doing a PhD on civil military relations, I would call it, that kind of thing at UCL, to working with the UN in that system and then from that into the world of that magical word, consultancy, where who knows what it really means, but lots of people seem to do it and do very well with it. Well, first of all, thank you very much, James. I'd like to think a slightly more about strategy than just sleeping with a general, but there you go. Far more seriously, my PhD wasn't necessarily on civil military relations. My PhD was in conscripts and conscription in the First World War. The relevance of that was much more to do with both what their experiences were, which you could call civil military relations, but maybe more significantly as to their memory and why nobody knows that approximately over half of the 5 million men who became soldiers in the First World War in the UK or conscripts, everybody thinks that most of them volunteers. So I became very interested in the way societies and countries understand war, deal with war, have wars and imagery. When I finished my PhD, I did a postdoc at Pilipus University and carried on within that field, dealing mostly gender actually, I dealt in masculinity and a variety of other things, but had to admit that I found it not entirely fulfilling, if you want to put it that way, and had an opportunity to go and attend the UN General Assembly as part of the third committee, which is the Human Rights Committee, and to be in the women's debate, because there's human rights and there's women's rights, it's not the same thing. And just realized I'd found my media and really, really loved it. And this was in 1993 and then again in 1994. And at that time Bosnia was all over the headlines everywhere, this is the biggest hotspot in the world. But in fact, they were having a huge problem getting people to go there. And the calls put out to delegations in the UN as to whether they could help find people. And I was asked whether I'd be interested and I immediately said yes. And went on a two month contract and stayed there for two and a half years initially in Sarajevo. I arrived there in very late 1994 and left in the middle of the spring of 1997. And found it absolutely fascinating. And again, just realized I'd found my media if you want to get that way of putting into practice. A lot of more theoretical ideas I'd had to deal with as an academic, and actually dealing with the day to day of what a war situation is like, and conflict in its conflict resolution problems or lack of conflict resolution, as we know in the former Yugoslavia and especially in Bosnia. And just found it fascinating. And it went from there I stayed with the UN on and off. I said on and off because I actually left after two and a half years. I was rather exhausted and took leave of absence and was a fellow at Oxford at Green College, which at that time hosted the Reuter Foundation. And I wrote a paper on the media and Bosnia, which was very first manifestation of the problems between reporting and the way media represents conflict, which I think has just got worse and worse over the past 25 years. And then went back to the UN and carried on in my merry way with regards to the Balkans, including the Kosovo war and became the senior advisor of the Balkans in the Department of Political Affairs. It's now joint with the Department of Peacekeeping Affairs. And entirely by chance, again, was not sure what I wanted to do in terms of UN jobs that I was being offered. Came here to do a took leave of absence, came here to do a short consultancy to see what the private sector was like. And that was 23 years ago this month. And the rest is history. And here is Brussels. And here is Brussels, indeed. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the consultant's life in Brussels, the different people with whom you've worked, the different companies and the relationships with government organizations? I should start out by saying two things. One of them was the reason consultancy became even remotely interesting to me, apart from as a source of income, was that the UN had no offices properly in Brussels at that time and still doesn't have a very strong representation. The main European headquarters of the United Nations as the United Nations Secretariat is in Geneva. So even though they end up opening all kinds of ad hoc offices here when there's a need, it's a huge waste of the taxpayers' money, if you ask me, given that both NATO and the EU, which are very relevant to the UN, especially with regards to peacekeeping and a variety of other issues, are in Brussels. But for historic reasons, it stays there. And definitely in 1999, it stayed there. And so when I decided to stay here, I had to leave the UN effectively. And at that time equally, so this was in 1990, no, this was in 2000 and 2001, because of enlargement, the EU enlargement at the end of the Soviet Union, then the EU was undergoing a lot of transformations. And I suspect if I'd have come two or three years before, I wouldn't be at all interested, because it was entirely a regulatory town. But what had happened at that point was partly as a result of the Balkan Wars, partly as a result of the mass treaty, partly as a result of enlargement, it had begun to deal in a lot of other areas. And what we now know as the CFSB had started to grow rather largely. So suddenly there was a whole niche there for people to understand about things like defence and security, which really wouldn't have been the case before. The other thing about Brussels, which is really important to understand before I explain what consultancy does, is that it's not a typical consultancy city. Brussels and Washington DC, I came to understand considered beltway cities. In other words, everybody in the city will wear another deals with the business of the city, which is government legislation or whatever. The major difference is that because of the way the EU is structured and the importance of capitals, there are relatively few think tanks here, on the one hand, and on the other hand, more and more policy issues are decided here collectively, more and other companies often, even governments don't want to pay for too big a representation. So you actually get to advise on core policy issues here, as opposed to what happens in the most public places, which it's largely lobbying in one limitation or another. So when I first started to do these things, as I say, it was the beginning of the CFSP. And a lot of aerospace and defence companies genuinely wanted to understand what was going on, how this was evolving, how this was being related to the Horizon programme, which still exists each every seven years as a new Horizon programme, which is for research and development. And so it was very interesting in very many ways because I was just genuinely telling people what was going on, finding out myself and, you know, doing a lot of what I did before in terms of policy work, but just doing it for the private sector, with the added bonus that nobody got killed at the end of it. And I didn't really care if they took my advice or not. So it was great. And I got paid for it. So it was very, very good. Having been that flippant, though, the work of consultancy remains, again, consultancy is such a broad church for want of a better thing, which is what a nice Jewish girl would say. But it is, it can include anything from at the one extreme lobbying, and that the other extreme, genuinely advising governments, companies, whoever is in need of it on how to interface sometimes, if they're doing it on a short term basis, in other words, they've got a crisis.   And I sit at that end of the spectrum, if you want to put it that way, I advise anything from, as I say, governments to senior executives in companies about what the long term issues and developments are in that specific area of interest, or on a specific issue, and how it is that they should position themselves and what are the potential risks, and how they can deal with that in one way or another. And so maybe you can take us to a sense of what strategy is, and you've already made clear that's more than the business of generals, is what it is and how it relates to these different organizations with which you deal, and indeed the organizations which have hosted you or employed you or however the right term for that would be. I think that the way I see strategy and the way I understand it, is first of all, it's not a plan, however I think strategy is a plan, I've got it entirely wrong, and steps. And it's a plan, it's a very good thing to have, plan a way to do that, but that is not strategy, strategy is more what we tend to call nowadays, the vision thing, which I tend to call not so much the vision thing, but what is your overall aim? What are the issues that you have to take into consideration in order to attain that aim? And then you can start asking people for plans and what are the potential steps within it. However it only becomes a strategy when there is resistance. So as soon as you start pursuing your aim, you're going to ensure, you know, you're going to encounter in one way or another, for better or for worse, forms of resistance, forms of objection. In the battlefield, it would be, you know, you've encountered the enemy and the enemy's got other ideas about what your aims are and will try to support them. In the corporate world, or indeed in the business world, which are not necessarily the same thing if you're an industry or something like that, it's something else. You will be encountering exactly the same sort of things, whether it's your rivals, whether it's for some of them it could be government legislation, whether it's geography, if you're in the energy business, which is a nasty word to speak of in the days of COP26 and climate change. But I haven't advised energy companies quite a lot, not so much in how to get, I don't know, gas out of the ground, or I'm not a technician that doesn't interest me at all. But one of the biggest projects I work on, which is an interesting one to use as an example here is a gas pipeline that ran from a certain place in Central Asia to Europe. That is a project that had already been going for five years before I encountered it and I worked on it for 12 years. And my part of it again has zero to do with anything about how to make a pipeline, how to get anything to do with that. And I can say right now it's not Nord Stream and I stopped working on it about the seven years ago. But it went through a lot of countries. You had to develop an understanding of what are the abilities of each of these countries. Again, not in the technical sense, but in the political sense, the geopolitical sense, why they would collaborate with one another, why they wouldn't collaborate with one another. And you know, sort of constantly finding ways in which to make this possible. Or when a block came up, that country decided that even though six months ago it said it was going to be doing X and then it suddenly decided it's against its interest to do X or it's been offered another GLY resistance. You have to come up with ways of circumventing that ways of coming up with another. But your aim is constantly to get a pipeline going from country X to country Y. And to do it in a way that is both benevolent to all the countries that it goes to, benefits all the countries that it goes through, and delivers a project such as it was that is necessary to do. So it's a very wide spectrum of how you do these things.  So let's move on to the next thing and see how we can get it back to where it is.  But you know, because as I say, resistance means that it's actually going somewhere. If you weren't going anywhere, nobody would resist it. You said your work was more in the perspective of long term strategic advice. But you mentioned crisis management. And I'm aware that last year, you were certainly sharing ideas about crisis management and the crisis that confronted all of us. Would you maybe be able to tell us a bit about the difference, as you see it, between crisis management and the longer term strategic advice that you'd be giving? Because some of what you just said sounds like crisis management to me, frankly. And also, maybe a little bit about, yeah, all of this understanding in its relation to the CV-19 crisis that's shaped all of us. Absolutely. I don't think what I said before was crisis management. Crisis management is when something unexpected happens, when you don't have a long term strategic vision, or you don't have an aim that you're going towards, and then an event happens. And it becomes a crisis because it turns out that you haven't foreseen it in any way, shape or form. And it's not resistance. It's an event. And it's an event that has come out of, outside of anything that has been understood or planned. Now, crises tend to come about for two reasons. One of them is because they're genuinely unexpected, a whole set of circumstances that no scenario planning, no nothing could have said would happen. Or because you were warned that it could happen, you didn't prepare for it, it happened, and you're in a crisis. I mean, between those two extremes, you can find endless permutations, but I tend to find that those are the two forms of crises that you can understand. And or you can expect as much as a crisis is unexpected. So COVID-19 is a crisis in both those perspectives. So in other words, there was lots of scenario planning that said that there would be some form or another epidemic. It wasn't thought of as a pandemic, but it was thought of that there could be, especially on the back of Ebola and on the back of a variety of other animal-borne and bird-borne diseases that have been happening, especially in Africa, and especially in the Saudi Peninsula, in the decade previous to when COVID began. There were many assessments that said that that could happen, but because it had not really affected the Western world, I don't think that anybody took it seriously. So it was therefore perceived as being out of nowhere. And anyway, once it happened, it was out of nowhere because there was no preparation for it. So you got, as I said, both both extremes. It was made worse by the fact that in many countries, a lot of what had been explained as strategy turned out to be a really bad idea. So the strategy had been, this is globalization. Let's just outsource everything to the cheapest bidder. And that included pharmaceutical companies in which governments will sort of like, let the pharmaceutical company decide what it wants. Pharmaceutical companies have decided that most generic drugs or most drugs have become generic and therefore they were not profitable. And within vaccines were the same. So facilities to make vaccines, which are intensely complicated as it turned out, had been closed down across many countries, not just in Europe, but in North America, South America, in a lot of parts of the world. A lot of it had genuinely been outsourced to India, which had decided to become a champion of these things. And pharmaceutical companies had focused far more on high end drugs, which were much more profitable. So high end drugs are sort of special cancers as opposed to your day to day breast cancer, then sort of cancers that have relatively small audiences, but for what you can charge if you find a drug for it, vast amounts of money. I'm giving that as an example, because governments have not noticed that, oh, if there is a problem, then who's going to make the drugs for us? Because we will need them for the whole population. And then it turned out that a lot of the source material for a lot of drugs is also now done nearly exclusively in India and China for things like ibuprofen and paracetamol. They are there. And just giving these two examples of medicines before we even get into other things like masks and kits and all of these sort of things, that what had appeared to be a strategic decision, let's go global, had suddenly become a very, that we've seen a completely different perspective of, oh my god, this is incredibly short-sighted. Who's going to provide us with all these things that we need? So there was a crisis in every respect of it. If you want to put it that way, it was short-termism hiding behind the idea of strategy therefore all the, in many countries they found that the various, I'm using the word here, where we keep things. But basically, exactly, there was a huge shortage.  So that was the crisis in the developed world and in the developing world the crisis was they didn't have it to start with. So that is a crisis in every respect and that's, we're climbing out of it now but not entirely because it takes a long time to shift thinking as well as capacities of production, of planning in one way or another. So crisis, though I would say in defense of systems one thing, which is that we've been living through this at a snail's pace, so it seems to us that the pandemic has been going on for ages and ages and ages and nothing was done for a very long time but actually if you look at it in realistic terms the turnaround time has been amazing, you know, as historians we know that when they look back on this they'll say it's just been absolutely amazing that things were taken over so quickly. No, it's been astonishing how quickly some things have happened, including the emergence of seven different vaccines, whatever their particular merits. Do you think that was the locus of strategy, if I can say that, that saw us cope with this and deal quickly, was more in the public sector or in the private sector? Public, public for sure. In every country as far as I can see it was ultimately public sector that, I mean I'm not getting into dodgy contracts and all the rest of it, I'm talking about thinking, okay what are we going to do? Then at the end of the day it was our amazing incredible education systems that could bring together amazing thinkers and who knew how to reach out to the practitioners, who knew how to work together with the public sector people to bring together these solutions and then they could turn to the private sector and say we need this and this and this, we want this and this and this, we can interface with it that way. So maybe you could expand that a little bit in the differences between strategy in the public sector, broadly whether governments or UN, however that might be and strategy in the private sector, I think you've indicated earlier already some sense of difference and this perhaps draws that out even more. It does, it doesn't mean a bit, the private sector, your camera is frozen James, the private sector has a very has a double audience if you want to put it that way, it has it's usually whoever buys or uses or comes or whatever you know their end user, the customer, the client, whatever and it also has their shareholders so you are constantly having to juggle those two and find a way of bringing them into some form of coherence is what I would say and they are not often in complete agreement because the shareholders just want their money that's why somebody's invested money into a company whereas your client, customer, you know whatever it is you want to call it, wants the product, wants the best product for the best possible price, wants it now, wants it in quantity, wants it in whichever way it is that you want to to see it. The public sector used to only have one customer if you want to put it that way or one focus which is the the government, a public sector is there to serve the government and the government serves the people. I would say that the biggest evolutions that we've seen over the past few decades has been that the public sector is perceived to serve the people as well as the government and there's often a big contradiction between the two because the government is full of politicians who want short-term solutions, who want them now, who want them to make them look good whereas the public also want short-term, want immediate solutions but they want to know that they're proper and you can count on them and that you know etc etc etc so I think that there's a big difference between the two and one way or another and you have to strategize differently in order to be able to serve them. But what I have found that somebody who's moved between the two sectors is that they're remarkably similar at the end of the day, it's groups of professional people trying to deliver a product and in the private sector I tend to feel that you can cover it up, you can cover up the problems much more easily than you can in the public sector, they won't wear another. I think it may have lost chains. You have me by a secondary means if you can hear me. He's sliding back through the window. But the king's internet dropped me on the computer and is refusing to reconnect so you have me without the view via my iPad for a moment while we try and get the computer going again. So inevitably I missed part of the answer there but I was already preparing to ask you because the final little bit of a question could you tell us a little bit about working with Fleishman and Teneo and these kinds of companies with which you've been associated recently and what exactly do they do and how do you fit in and how does that relate to any of these kind of issues, the private sector approach and I wish I'd heard more about the differences between them because it would probably make more sense that I would have included some nuances. Basically what those companies do they are both what's known as public affairs companies. Fleishman, I'm just going slightly bigger just so that people understand how these things work. Fleishman-Hillard is part of what's known as the Omnicon Group which is a very large global company which has this huge portfolio of advertising public relations, public affairs strategy. Nowadays they have huge amounts of online companies that belong to them. Omnicon is one of the competitors of WPP which is better known in the UK. I think it's overall it has a turnover of billions so Fleishman-Hillard is one of its companies not particularly one of its bigger companies either that specializes in public affairs and public relations. Its office in Brussels is considered to be the largest Brussels. I think nowadays is the largest public affairs company. It has a turnover of some 15 million euros a year and actually specializes mostly in financial services. I tend to work with those companies because they just provide me clients and I don't have to earn all the plans for myself so it's really quite as easy as that because they tend to already work with great big companies and governments but I also work independently sometimes not so much with companies as with governments and NGOs and INGOs. I work quite a lot with the Oton Society Foundation for example on a variety of projects that have got the less to do with that and what to do with geopolitical issues and other areas. Tanea was much the same it's a smaller group it's a private group and I just moved because after 16 years I thought it was time for a change and I think particularly at more or less than that really. Nothing strategic about it. Anyway Eleonora maybe I can return to you to manage questions because I'm not in a position to do that like this. Yeah no absolutely and also I think it's time so thank you both for this very engaging conversation. Please leave your question in the Q&A section. Don't use the chat and I will monitor questions for Ilana. We have about 20 minutes 25 minutes so feel free to send us your questions. In the meanwhile I have like a curiosity what is your what was your favorite project the most exciting project that you ever worked on as an advisor do you have a favorite one? Yes I really enjoyed the pipeline the pipeline was great great great fun. I also worked on two different free trade agreements for countries which I really enjoyed also. That was a very gratifying it was two Latin American countries over two different times and it was it was very very good fun and very interesting because it took me out of my comforts slightly but understanding their interests and their needs which are very different you know from country to country when you come to do a free trade agreement it very much depends what your sectors are in your country why you're interested in it and it's trying to get it through the various governments and getting it through the European Parliament and understanding the obstacles there was very very interesting I found out a lot. Thank you I was also wondering how much did it count the fact that you had a PhD and you had experience in academia when you started you know to move in this other sector do you think it was crucial the fact that you had developed skills in research in academia or do you think that you know for students who might think of that sector as a profession Oh I wouldn't do it to go into the private sector at all there's no need whatsoever. I think that there was an appreciation but I think it was coupled with the fact that I've been working in the UN for several years and I had quite a senior position when I left that I think on its own a PhD didn't really count for much really unless it was because it wasn't a technical one it wasn't offering something in a very specific area so I think that you know if you're wishing to advise on areas of expertise that you know sort of climate or something like that it's really quite important to understand what you're talking about really you know sort of even at the political level you really do need to know what you're talking about and the same goes for I think financial services for example you don't need a PhD but you really do need to understand how it works Can I ask do you get examples of people coming in kind of younger people because you get the impression that for the kind of work kind of consultancy strategic advice you're engaged with it has to come a bit from experience and by contrast I see quite a number of young people graduates go to work in financial institutions in risk analysis because there they can take the research skills and apply them and it doesn't matter whether you've got experience and seniority to some extent but for the kind of things you're doing it really is a product of that experience and seniority Yes except that it's exactly the same as those companies that you're talking about or those areas that you're talking about so I just do it at the the senior end of it but there's a lot of research and a lot of sort of I work with teams that which a lot of more junior people do those things absolutely and often I need them to just go and find out a huge amount of things for me because I just have no idea sort of thing etc etc so I think that there's you know sort of you have it at all I've got most huge amount of starter jobs in consultancy it's a very good place to start There's been a couple of questions turned up so let me try yeah how would recommend to a business practitioner to increase their strategic thinking yeah what would they have to do in understanding capabilities and so on in this kind of world we live in everything moving really quickly yeah what do they need what do they need to hear They need to hear where their where their more long-term position is going to be and why it's going to be affected by unfolding events why what they're doing now either feeds into that or not and I tend to find that that's one way of explaining these things that you know it's really terribly important to speak in terms that people understand so just sort of going around on that grand strategy when you know it's one thing if you are let me start this differently if you're talking to a CEO or somebody from a big corporation you have one kind of conversation because they have the capacity within them to not within them just personally but the organization to put aside resources for creating the conditions for what they need ahead they can decide that they're going to allocate funds to go and buy completely new equipment or to enter a new country or create a new market or whatever but you'll only come to fulfillment in three, five, 10 years depending on what it is but how it is that you can advise them that you the way that you see this issue developing that market developing or where governments are going on legislation or I don't know what you know depending on the issue if it's a smaller organization that's where you tend to have a lot of these problems because they don't have the capacity to lay off the resources to do that they have to usually work within much more shorter term their long term is usually financial but their ability to maneuver and change product or change capability in the short term is often much more limited because they have a more limited range of product or what it is that they're trying to do the services they're trying to offer have been structured precisely for that market so they don't usually have built into them that same resilience that can say okay now you can lay off that in order to do that. Thank you. Yeah there are some more questions from Mikael he's asking when and how did you realize that working on strategic advice was something you enjoyed and you were good at? Really really enjoyed it and it wasn't. I really saw because I found I was doing something that was contributing to a situation and I mean not the bad situation but to help solve the bad situation and also that you could be very creative and find niches that other people haven't thought of for example and try and find ways to do things that were not necessarily run-of-the-mill or issues that hadn't been thought of before and then translating that into the private sector probably I found that when I was dealing simultaneously with NATO and the EU I found it very satisfying so I also it took me a few years to really understand the way both organizations worked and what their advantages and disadvantages were how it is that you can work with the best and get the best outcome from. Thank you Ilana and Mikael is also asking he had three questions in one so he's asking if any resources any books or websites that you would recommend to someone for improving their strategic capabilities? No utility of force that's a very good one I'm thinking strategic I would say that since I wrote it but no I didn't really read what most affected me the way I was thinking very interesting I loved Lloyd George's memoirs I thought they were absolutely fascinating to understand how somebody who started out in one area and with a relatively narrow interest political interest not only grew his own political vision but really really strategized how that was going to happen and then when he became a wartime leader understanding grasping this huge huge machine which was the British government and a losing war effectively in how to turn it around so I learned a huge amount from that I think I found it very very interesting not particularly nice man but I thought he really really thought in an interesting way you've got a slot through three volumes I wouldn't recommend it but could you expand on that just to give us the condensed praisey of it or yes Lloyd George there's two things that he did which you know he's often to my mind maligned because they're people only remember that he's you know gave lordships or what a peerages to friends or whatever but he was the one who got the 1911 insurance act through he both wrote it and got it through and was willing he really began to understand that the instruments of power in the state and in how to do it and how to work in a coalition he put a huge amount of pressure on Asquith and on others in order to get this through and when he takes over when he becomes prime minister during the war when he takes over from Asquith in his memoirs he says if he'd understood at the end what he understood then that this was an economic war as much as it was a military war he would have done things very differently so I think a lot of his book is really illuminating in that that he was willing to understand that things were beyond what you see in front of you or the immediate problem and to understand it as a much larger intricate machine and I think that I was very much I would take that as being part of understanding strategy which is that you've always got to understand things as being intricate and part of the machine as opposed to this is the plan this is where we're going this is how we're going to get there oh there's a change in the road then we're going to get there that way and that way whereas he really understood how each issue not necessarily interlinked but had to be coherent with this ongoing event Reminds me of reading about Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation let's say there may be a similar comparative story understanding adapting and getting the things through do you think any of that is well understood either by bureaucrats in Brussels or by the businesses that you've worked with and advised of course it's partly understood once you've spoken to them but I mean do they have a real understanding of that or are they just kind of being a little bit we want something now short term even if it's looking to the long term and we'll just listen to what Ilana says I think that it very much depends on who you would call I feel prone to defend the bureaucrat as you put it with fontil nails isn't it he's she here and I the faceless as they're often depicted in the UK press they've got faces and they actually function but actually yes they're very much part of a very intricate very complex machine and they're very aware of that they're also very aware that no matter what happens it's the same as in the UN they say one of the reasons I have so much empathy for them is that having worked in the UN you just know that you're always going to get blamed no matter what goes wrong you know so that's what you're there for in one way or another so you know sort of the bureaucrat is very much in the same you know they can again they did do an excellent job both in dealing with a pandemic in the sense that they're healthy isn't even a common remit of or common competency as it's called here of the EU and in getting vaccines and in doing a lot of things and you know just get blamed by the governments or by the the population or the media in one way or another but yes I think they have a very strong sense of working for a very complex machine that is made up of both institutions of which one of the institutions the council is made up of governments so therefore is of a completely different makeups and most would have to deal with and that your end user who which is the people of the EU are quite far removed from me from that point of view not because you're a faceless bureaucrat but because they're citizens of states and the states are the ones who are made together in order to to do those things a b practically by definition everything the EU does is strategic because of its sheer size and for the fact that it doesn't run things day to day it is there in order to be the back room machine that gets everything going so it's a constant issue of breaking things down into the smallest issue building them up seeing how it fits together as an intricate machine and then sending that out into some kind of process so those I think there is a very strong understanding from that in the business community the longer you hear the more you understand that when you first come here you think that it's sort of bafflingly complex and why do I have to put up with this my company just wants that or this sector just wants this but once they've been here for a while they do begin to understand there's a there's a logic they then get told they've gone native by their company or by their country but that's something else internally but yes there is a sort of understanding that this isn't entirely just obtuse rulemaking in one way or another that still doesn't take away from the fact that usually they're here for the profit and you know what's the quickest way to get to it in one way or another I would say that one of the last things or one of the things I have learned over the years working in all of these machines if you want to put it back what not in them but alongside them is that in the best of all possible worlds the best outcome is when you get business working with government or legislators or whatever it is you want to call it with civil society it's a magic triangle I tend to call it because then they all in a rather strategic way sort of that each other's opponents they're they're the opposing force and they force each other to come to some kind of equitable solution and I most strongly understood this during the financial crisis in 2008 and then the euro crisis because usually what we call civil society is represented by NGO one way or another and they have lots of experts in them and not so you know I could have either gone into the private sector I could have gone into the NGO sector would have been you know equally interesting problem with financial issues is that anybody who knows anything about them goes to work for them so there's remarkably few civil society organizations that deal in finance and that was one of the huge huge problems in dealing with the financial crisis if you go back and look at it which was it was straight off between business or the banks if you want to put it that way and governments and the EU and therefore there was no mediating force and the banks largely got whatever they wanted because they convinced both the governments and the EU that unless you pay them unless you give them the money then they're going to collapse and everybody's going to go broke so they got the money and we paid but it was quite an interesting example of where a strategic capacity failed because there was one part of the triangle missing Well talk of triangles brings Klausowitz to mind and I wonder if you'd care to take an invitation to develop thinking on Klausowitz and strategy in the private world and I say this against the background of a prejudicial background that I've seen the books of Klausowitz for business and a couple of colleagues we kind of tried to attend some courses it was quite difficult they were very skeptical of people from kings and war study business courses purporting to teach things about Klausowitz and then it came with the prejudicial view that they A didn't get Klausowitz anyway and B were more talking about planning which is of course something that Klausowitz is not just talking about but the triangles mentioned triangles does make me think of Klausowitz so I don't know if maybe Klausowitz Klausowitz for strategy in the private sector in two minutes I would prefer my triangle to Klausowitz as one I mean Klausowitz speaks of the trinity of the union I think mine is exactly the same actually I'm not sure I was yeah yeah you know sort of unless you have both society public I call it civil society but you know it's basically us the consumer the citizen the paying person paying everyone which is the business the bureaucrat the civil servant whatever on board you will never get a good outcome if you just leave it to a straight-off outcome between business and the legislator so that is my holy trinity absolutely and he's absolutely right yes I am Klausowitz again and I've just adapted it for you in one minute but I would say that he after all came to it because he participated in the Battle of Yenna wasn't it and came away from it realizing this was a whole different way of war and went away trying to understand why it was that Napoleon could use his forces in the way in which he used them also end up with the forces that he had given that you know sort of they were conscripts and they were a completely different force so I think we've unleashed a force in the world over the past 40 years for sure or whether you want to call it since the end of the Cold War I don't particularly mind whether it's since you know Reagan Thatcher on the economic sense or whether it's since the end of the Cold War but we have unleashed an idea that the private sector should never be reigned in and I don't believe in reining in the private sector I believe that just you have to have two elements together with the private sector and not just government or the regulator and business likes to only talk about the regulator and why she or he are bad whereas I think that the bigger picture is also that we are there with a conscious thought as to what it was is that we should want from our societies and from our businesses which are integral to our societies that sounds like a great point of conclusion I'm aware we have a couple of minutes left but also it would be a shame yeah absolutely thank you not to go with that great summation thank you so much Ilana and James for this great fascinating conversation we don't have any more questions for today I think so yeah we can probably call it a day so thank you again for being here today and I will see you all next month for our next conversation with strategy thank you so much everyone for thank you thank you Ilana thank you Ilana bye thank you bye bye


Recently I introduced the concept of life monastery as a way to look at life and to live it with much more sacredness and attention to our spiritual growth. And I want to just spend a few minutes reflecting on what that actually means practically speaking. So just like in a regular monastery you have the disciplines of rituals that happen several times a day and that's also what we create in our own life monastery. We create regular discipline of rituals for the heart, for the mind in service to the growth of the soul. And those rituals are up to each person's spiritual resonance, spiritual path. Some people will meditate several times a day or at least once a day. Some people will pray. Some people will read a sacred text. Some people journal, dance, walk in the woods or in nature. But there are rituals that are done not as to somehow just to follow a tradition and a dry tradition but no. Because this is life monastery, it's your life. You get to determine what those rituals are and you understand the meaning underlying those rituals. For example people who pray or say grace before they eat, often times they've done it all their life and it becomes a rote thing, you know, they just kind of do it out of habit. It's a ritual but it's based on tradition that was handed down to them and it doesn't carry the kind of personal meaning that it could if you were the one to design your own ritual based on what is deeply meaningful and sacred to you. So this is what I invite you to do, to design the rituals for your mind, heart and service to the growth of your soul in your own life monastery. What would you love to be doing on a regular basis when you wake up in the morning during the midday, in the afternoon and in the evening and before bed and as you fall asleep? All of these are moments that help you to come back again and again to your own life monastery so that it helps you to bring sacredness into much of what you do throughout the day. That is the work, the true work of the life monastery is to bring your sacred meaning, purpose, practice, awareness, perception into every moment of the day, into whatever it is that you're doing, whether you're at work or you're at home, you're talking to somebody, you're doing chores, all of it can either contain, can either not contain any sacredness and simply be a habit or something you're trying to get done without, with absence of consciousness or it can be one where you are breathing and infusing some spirit into that moment. And this is, this is being part of your own life monastery is something that you can feel free to keep private. You don't have to tell others. You may wish to tell a few others for accountability or to discuss what that might mean for you, especially if they know you well and can help to suggest ideas or to guide you. But it's certainly not something to be too proud over, to lord it over others like you're more special than others because you're doing this thing. It's just, it's a private practice nobody has to know unless it's helpful for you to better connect to it and stick with it. But each person has their own rhythm for what this means for them. And yet the fact that you're here watching this, listening to this, we have our own little tiny community of practice here and you are welcome to comment below if you want to. Commenting below might mean that others could see your comment and if you don't, if you want to keep it private then don't comment below. But feel free to comment below if you want to share what your life monastery practices are for the benefit of others who are going to be watching this and seeing the comments and for my benefit as well. If you want to send a private message, you can. I can't guarantee that I will respond but I will certainly be reading it and I'm grateful for you for participating here. So anyway that's all for today. I hope this is helpful in some way. May this inspire you to whether or not you join your own life monastery or create your own. I hope this will help you to live your life with greater connection, deeper connection to your divine essence, to your universal and ultimately loving source. So thank you for being part of this.