HOW TO CATCH A SPY
Not many of us have met a spy.
Well, that’s what you think.
If the spy was any good, you would never know he was a spy.
Old China Hand, the iconic bar on Lockhart Road in Hong Kong, was said to be a hangout for the espionage community.
This may evoke an image of sleek James Bond types gathering to practice tradecraft over perfectly made martinis.
If you actually visit the Old China Hand and can make it past the smell of despondency and despair to go inside, what you will find is a lot of overweight expats drinking pints from 10am on weekdays.
And yet, apparently there are spies in Hong Kong. In January 2018, an ex-CIA agent was arrested on suspicion of selling state secrets to China. He was arrested by the US government when he landed in JFK. He wasn’t arrested in Hong Kong because, thrillingly, espionage is not defined as a crime in Hong Kong!
The New York Times reported that due to the leaks from this arrested CIA agent, perhaps more than a dozen CIA operatives in China were MURDERED between 2010 to 2012. What?! This stuff still happens?
When Edward Snowden stopped over in Hong Kong on his way to Moscow in 2013, he revealed that the CIA operated out of the US Consulate General in Hong Kong. One is more likely to see a spy when getting one’s passport renewed than when visiting the Old China Hand.
And basically, I don’t recommend ever visiting the Old China Hand.
Which leads us to my main theme: how to catch a spy. At least in Hong Kong apparently they are all over the place, so this could be a useful skill. Certainly more useful than knowing how to catch a raccoon.
The way that you catch a spy is…get him to do some math.
Huh?
Many of you reading this speak more than one language. So in a language that isn’t your native one, divide 832 by 14. While you are doing that equation, say verbally, out loud, each step in the process.
As you will quickly realize, this is basically impossible. No matter how good your non-native language is, when it comes to math, you will revert to your native language. (Some of you, like me, might find that you can hardly do that equation in your native language.)
As much as we engage in our jobs thinking we are “innovative” or “creative” or “disruptive,” the fact of the matter is that we have some baseline ways of doing things that we consistently fall back on, otherwise known as “habits.”
The cliché aphorisms that fill my LinkedIn feed like “change your habits change your life” (poster of soaring eagle) sound good and are fundamentally true, and also profoundly difficult to accomplish.
I read a story recently about stretch goals and Jack Welch at GE.
Jack ordered one of his airplane engine factories to reduce product defects. The plant manager came back to him with a plan to reduce by 10% over one year. This was hard but doable by streamlining existing processes.
Jack ripped up the proposal and told the plant manager he wanted a 75% reduction.
That was impossible with the current systems, so the plant had to radically change how they did everything, starting with the employee hiring process.
They had to analyze the profile of the kind of engineer that was most successful at delivering defect-free products.
They had to change their screening to reach out to those skilled engineers in the market.
Then they had to teach the hiring managers what profile to look for.
Then they had to train the hiring managers in new interviewing skills that would let them assess whether the interviewee had that profile.
Then they had to make more attractive compensation offers.
Then they had to make sure that they had good benefits and career progression, so that once hired, the engineer didn’t leave.
And hiring was just one of the processes they redid. To achieve 75% reduction in defects, they had to start from zero and redo EVERYTHING.
The factory hit their impossible target.
Incremental, linear, 10% improvements are possible by tweaking the existing processes.
If you want radical 75% improvement, you need to fundamentally change the whole system.