Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Coalface Credentials

Coal mines are tough places to work, especially if you’re working the mining equipment at the exposed seam of coal deep underground—the coalface. In Australia and some other places, the expression “at the coalface” means you’re doing something, not just talking about it hypothetically or speculating about it from a comfortable distance. Given the nature of this book, I think you, the reader, deserve to know something about me before we get too much further.

I don’t come from a traditional consulting background. A former seminarian, I studied political science at Chicago, worked for a large oil company, and entered politics before joining a think-tank and, much later beginning my current professional career in management consulting. Even in 1992 (the year I joined A.T. Kearney and founded the Global Business Policy Council) there were those who felt that an insufficiently technical and business-focused background was not a good fit for the hard-edged world of global business. Twenty years on, how much more difficult is it for a young liberal-arts type to enter the professional world?

On the other hand, technical knowledge becomes obsolete quickly, while the ability to think critically and write and speak well—the skills a liberal arts education provides—pays dividends for a lifetime. When polymath Mortimer Adler helped found the Aspen Institute in 1950, critics doubted that CEOs would have any interest in reading great literature and probing the “big questions,” ...