The Strategist
by Art Kleiner

I realize that Peter didn't say, for whatever reason, the most important part of the puzzle: Barbies are replaced by real sex as girls get older. Or, at least, real clothes.

Riding in the back seat of the mini-limo with Peter Schwartz, I am struck once again by his most engaging quality - his willingness to speak frankly, to reveal himself in whatever he says. One expects exactly the opposite in a man whose beard, obscuring his face, is his most prominent feature, his sort of trademark. (Writing this, I realize that I actually don't remember if Peter was cleanshaven or bearded, and it was only a couple of days ago. I have to be more observant, in general. Of course, at the time I didn't realize I would be writing this.)

I worked for Peter on a book, The Art of the Long View, that still sells 20,000 copies or more per year; it was the world's first step-by-step guide to scenario practice, and it codified a way of thinking and talking that was seen, beforehand, as intuitive, uncodifiable, ineffable, forever mysterious. That's the way that the great showman of scenario planning, Peter's predecessor and mentor Pierre Wack, had (deliberately or not) cast scenarios, and that's the way it had been perceived. Anyone who knew the methodology could anticipate the future; they could pull off the kinds of coups that Pierre and Peter had done, foreseeing the rise of the oil price in the 1970s and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, respectively.

(Someday I would like to compile an anthology of all the writers who foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union. I'd include Warren Bennis and Philip Slater's book The Temporary Society; and Peter Drucker, who credits himself, at least, with having written in advance about the fall of the USSR. Who else? Didn't Jay Forrester write, somewhere, that the centralized control of both the giant state and the giant corporation must inevitably wither? All of these writers have in common a kind of belief in inevitability, a belief that with enough practice they can recognize the large-scale patterns of their time, albeit not in fine detail. All (!) they need is a coherent enough theory, a way of framing events, and a justification for discarding those that don't fit. It would be interesting to see the prognostications all together, so we can better judge whether this represented a true, unquenchable insight that came up again and again, irrepressably, or whether it was simply an example of a stopped clock hitting the right time twice a day.)

Napier Collyns, who is in the front seat listening to Peter and me talk, had explained to me the basic premise of Peter's new book. And for a period of time I had imagined the unlikely possibility that Peter and I would collaborate, as true collaborators. But as Peter explains his idea, it's clear that this could not happen, not because Peter is reluctant (he collaborates on books regularly) but because this book is clearly His stuff with a capital H. He wants to write a book that demystifies the strategic process, the process of decision-making. He wants to lay out a step-by-step guide for strategy in the same way that he (with my help and the help of a couple of other people) once laid out the step by step process for scenarios. By this time we're heading over the Triboro into Manhattan, and I discover that I very much like talking in the back of this car. I like the skyline of upper Manhattan, a forgotten skyline that you only see from the Triboro and the Metro North bridge, the east river against a sullen backdrop of grey towers. I'm thinking, selfishly, of the many half-promises I've made for helping people write books, and how betrayed they might feel if I took on THIS project instead. Why can't I just give in and do all of them? Which would I want to do? Which would feel doable?

Last time, Peter and I and then-Doubleday editor Harriet Rubin holed up in a room at the Royalton for three days. The Royalton is Ian Schrager's hotel, the heir to Studio 54, appointed with quirky but elegant taste. We pounded out three days of tape on soup-to-nuts scenarios, and then I wrote it up during the following few months. It was comparatively easy. This time, Peter says, he needs a few months to codify the practice he does on strategy.

"And you're sure," I ask him, "that the process is replicable -- that it can be adapted from one situation to another?"

"Yes," he says, after a slight hesitation, "but only a slight one. I'm certain of it."

This is the kind of unconscious arrogance that I've come to know in Peter. I admire it precisely because it represents a different way of reaching an understanding from anything I can pull off. I had meant my question as a spur to self-doubt, as an opportunity to reflect -- are we getting into something too audacioius to pull off? Are we, by making the ineffable explicit, doing more than anyone CAN do?

But Peter was trained as an aeronautical engineer ("I've done rocket science," he has famously said. "And scenario planning is not rocket science.") And in that moment of hesitation, he has been processing the question. His biocomputer has been ticking off the ramifications, literally, point by point, probably calling forth a reasonably large sample of his strategic work, spinning through his memories of them, calibrating the results. The output is that four word sentence. "I'm certain of it."

I don't doubt him. I warn him, however, that strategy is not like scenario planning in one sense: many more people have been trying to make it work, and they will look askance at his upstart attempt to demystify it. That kind of talk never stops anyone with Peter's temperament, and indeed it seems to spur him on. He flatters me: That's where I'll come in, with my knowledge of the literature and the practice. I feed into that, a bit, talking about Boston Consulting Group. We talk about Michael Porter. We hypothesize that strategy, in a turbulent world, is qualitatively different than it was in the stable era of 1973. I don't tell him that, when I've helped other people write about strategy (for instance, in The Dance of Change), that I've felt most of the material was so highly abstract, so ethereal and intellectual, that I've literally thrown bratty temper tantrums and snarled at my collaborators that they were deliberately obscure.

Anyway, I know that Peter Schwartz is not like that. He's much too candid, much too gifted at down-to-earth intellectual nuts and bolts. And indeed we spend the rest of the ride, and our subsequent talk at his hotel (once again, the Royalton), doing what Peter does best. Telling stories. He talks about the redesign of Barbie, which related to a scenario project he'd conducted with Mattel. Surprisingly enough, the years that girls spend playing with dolls have been declining. Research shows that girls leave the dolls behind and move earlier and earlier on to other pursuits.

"You mean computer games?" I ask.

"Not just that," he says. "All the pursuits of older girls."

"Oh," I say. "Like sports."

"Well, that," he says.

And, he says, parents hate the pneumatic Barbies; mothers in particular seem to hate having their daughters play with training devices for bimbo-hood, even though that's why the dolls are attractive to girls in the first place. So Mattel is not slimming down Barbie's breasts so much as beefing up the rest of her, making her a little bit thicker all around so the breasts are less, well, disproportionate.

"Gee," I say. "She won't be able to fit into her old clothes," and Peter cracks a smile.

A few days later, I tell a friend, a woman in her 40s, this story. She tells me how her mother wouldn't let her play with Barbie, how she played with the dolls at friends' houses, and how they used them to play sex games between Barbie, Ken, and their friends. And I realize that Peter didn't say, for whatever reason, the most important part of the puzzle: Barbies are replaced by real sex as girls get older. Or, at least, real clothes.

The other noteworthy part of our conversation, the part that I would need to write if I were ever to put a character like Peter into a story, is his description of Steven Spielberg. He consulted on Deep Impact, which I haven't seen -- and which he graciously exonerates me for not having seen, since I AM the father of a baby less than one year old! Now he's doing another scenario project with Spielberg, and he talks about the director's down to earth niceness, but most of all his elite gift, his facility for listening to a conversation and immediately translating it into visuals. "We'll just be talking," Schwartz says, "and Steven will say, 'Oh, I see that as looking this way,'" and imitating the director, Peter puts up his thumbs and forefingers in the familiar 35mm picture frame, and looks through them at the back of the car seat. As I listen, I think that this is much like what a ghostwriter does, and Peter has the same thought: "It's very similar to what you do, taking an idea and knowing immediately how to make it work on the page."

We leave the conversation with me resolved to think about taking on the job. It will be tough to say no, and tougher still because I don't know quite what I want. People like Peter are self-imposed bottlenecks; they meet with Spielberg and Mattel, they strategize. The people who work for them live through them; a bit of the glory of the event rubs off. My role, no matter how framed, would be to translate Peter's insights and access into something even more accessible, something that readers could cohere to. I don't want to travel immediately into Peter's rarefied heights; I don't want to step through that door with my own uncertainties, my own awkwardnesses, my own form of hesitation in which I DO very much doubt myself. I want a developmental path, a way to build my own capability for holding my own with the Spielbergs and Mattels of the world.

I think that's actually what many people want. In a world where the disparity between the favored and unfavored is growing, there are two choices: To be a decision-maker, a Schwartz or Spielberg or Tier A person, or to be the kind of person who exists to support them. Tier B. Is that an overly reductionist view of the way things work? Perhaps it is, but I watch people I know climb the developmental path: Aaron Barnhart with his newsletter, morphing from a down-and-out freelancer to a renowned TV critic; or Bill Isaacs, developing his ability to turn dialogue into a tangible practice; or Peter Schwartz himself, who has certainly grown in his impact and presence, and in the substance of his thinking, since I last worked closely with him in 1991. There are no developmental paths handed out to people any more, or precious few of them, and those confined I guess to Harvard and Yale grads who make it directly, through a mentor's help, to the State Department or McKinsey. (That's the Horatio Alger way, where success always depended on lucking into a mentor.) We of the 1990s, however, no matter how old we may be, are looking to build our own developmental paths, no matter how exhausting we may find it. And the exhaustion? That comes from choosing the path oneself, from knowing that no mentor has chosen it, from knowing that our knowledge about the consequences is imperfect, and we will always regret what we have given up or NOT chosen to do.

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