Harvard Business School - Day 36 to 39

Monday, 12 Sep 2009 to Thursday, 15 Sep 2009
The days here are starting to speed by very quickly. There is still lots of work to do both during the day and in the evenings but somehow each day seems to disappear so much quicker than it did at the beginning of the course. Tomorrow we will only have two weeks left before we leave!!
The weather here is transitioning very fast between summer/fall and winter. Just a couple of weeks ago it was mid twenties and shorts and t-shirt weather now it is struggling to make double figures. The days are shortening and the treees are starting to loose their leaves. They would expect to have their first snow within the next month and in Boston once down it is there to stay for winter. You suddenly understand the difference between a temperate climate like NZ and a continental climat like the US, it is the seasonal extremes that differentiate the two.
Today one of the cases we had was on the FBI and how they were found short after 11-Sep-2001 (911 in their speak) terrorist attacks on the twin towers and pentagon. In the wake of this attack the FBI had to re-invent themselves  and no redefine and expand their intelligence capability as well as their traditional law enforcement role. In attendance at the case was the FBI's head of National Security. A recent interview with him has teh following to say:

After 20 years with the CIA, Phil Mudd joined the FBI in 2005 as deputy head of the Bureau's National Security Branch, tasked with transforming the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency, more like Britain's MI-5. In this interview, Mudd discusses his work at the FBI, progress to date, the FBI's new paradigm for preventing terrorism and the nature of the domestic terror threat. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted June 2, 2006.
He was an interesting, animated and thought provoking individual.
In the afternoon it only got better. HBS had arranged for the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller to speak to us. There are 170 odd people on the Advanced Management Program and we all filed into a different lecture theatre than normal, presumably because it was underground and had only two entrances/exits. There was A LOT of security present. If John Key was here he would have had an inferiority complex. Robert is the 6th director of teh FBI (J Edgar Hoover hogged the role for nearly 50 years!!).

Mueller www.fbi.gov/libref/directors/directmain.htm joined the FBI on 4 September 2001, so things got very busy very quickly for him post 911!! He spoke very candidly about how the old metrics for measuring the success of the FBI was around catching criminals while in the new post 911 world it is around having no more terrorist attacks on US soil. This is quite a different focus when you think for the most part that law enforcement is reactive and for prevention to work it has to be reactive.
What was really enlightning and to a large degree reinforced what we have already learned (or knew) is that the issues involved in changing the focus and mission of the FBI are very similar to any organisation. Jost for the record the FBI has 32,000 employees, of which 13,000 are special agents and they have a budget of US $7.5b per annum.He spoke a lot about changing the organisation and repioritising what they do. Their priorities are now:
1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack.
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage.
3. Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes.
4. Combat public corruption at all levels.
5. Protect civil rights.
6. Combat transnational and national criminal organizations and enterprises.
7. Combat major white-collar crime.
8. Combat significant violent crime.
9. Support federal, state, county, municipal, and international partners.
10. Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission.