Subject: Snowflake Update
From: "Neil Callahan" <[email-masked]>
To: "'Chris Heinz'" <[email-masked]>, "'Hunter Biden'" <[email-masked]>, "'Eric Schwerin'" <[email-masked]>, "'Devon Archer'" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:58:31 -0400

Hi guys,

I had a very good working session with Curt today.  He reviewed all of the
country reports we sent over from DB and Eurasia group.  His commentary was
good and at times amusing.  He said the "Ian Bremmer, Welcome back from
Summer" report, was in essence not worth the time to even read it.  So the
bar is extremely low, and the flip side, the market's propensity to "pay a
lot" is also undeveloped.

Curt also said that all the issues addressed by the reports were essentially
low risk issues that would have a minimal impact no matter what the outcome.
None of the reports addressed any difficult issues.  So by design, they
cannot really add significant value.

Within IPS there has been quite a bit of discussion, an in academic fashion,
Curt, Ronnie and Thad are independently drafting their own "sections" if you
will of what the offering should look like building off of our progress last
week.  Essentially Curt is responsible for the building blocks and core
tools/elements, Thad is responsible for the editorial and Ronnie is taking a
shot at the big picture/positioning.

We worked through each quite well.  And this all builds on out 3 step
approach we laid out - country report, key political debates, and client
specific questions.

1.        Building Blocks

a.       Think of the vernacular about the weather report - temperature, dew
point, barometric pressure and at times hurricane, blizzard, type language,
gauges, markers.  So our "weather system" will have the building blocks that
will be consistent for each Country report (and lend themselves to being
automated. . .) and how we look at elites and individual political actors.  

b.      This will also allow us to "teach" clients how to use the tools and
to anticipate how to interpret.

c.       Today's political risk reports in the market are interesting, but
completely inconsistent and mostly a meandering random walk of information.

d.      Curt is driving this piece

2.       Editorial

a.       Thad is driving how we "assess" the data and identify the possible
outcomes and start to "handicap" which outcomes are likely in the context of
all the other relevant political issues.  

b.      We talked a lot of "saliency" (how important is an issues really)
and the sequence of how political issues are addressed.  As in the US -
sequencing Healthcare, then Fin Reg then Climate Change caused the Democrats
to run out of time and political will - what if Fin Reg went first, would
all 3 have gotten done this year?  

c.       So "scenario" analysis would be a part of this.

3.       Positioning

a.       Ronnie is driving this and I think his ideas are very interesting
and could get the whole world interested in talking to us.  The basic idea
is, we have a perfect understanding of what occurred surrounding a
particular event 2-3 years after it happened.  Look at all the books,
documentaries, research, etc. on 9/11, the Financial Crisis, etc. - 2-3
years out we have an incredible understanding of what happened and why and
what all the after effects were.  So this is T + 24-36 months for perfect
understanding

b.      What if we were able to have a capability to provide T + 2 weeks for
perfect understanding of an event?  So 2 weeks after 9/11 or 2 weeks after
the Fall of Lehman Brothers - we'd have an accurate view into why it
happened, what led up to it and what are the likely outcomes already in the
systems that will/could work their way through over the next time period.
If we had this capability, we'd literally rule the world.

c.       So I think this is brilliant positioning, because the promise is so
enticing and simply explained, that someone managing risk would be a fool
not to try it out.

We also talked about an additional capability of putting and action plan in
place to address / influence events - so more of an implementation of an
influence program to drive and outcome and then using our tools to measure
the impact and effectiveness.  IPS does this today, and we could have a
sister capability to created influence recommendations and to go into the
field and try implemented the drive outcomes.

We discussed Nigeria and Chevron.  He was very excited and thought the
complexities of Nigeria would allow us to create a very compelling country
report.  He said it would take him (personally, working alone) about 6-10
weeks to do a Nigeria report.  So Nigeria could be country #2.

I encourage him to ask Thad to send the Term Sheet back.  He said that us
being persistent with Thad with follow up is a good thing and encouraged us
to continue doing it.

So good progress.  More to come.

Best,

Neil

 

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Neil Callahan

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