Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist (including 5 years at the U.S. Embassy Moscow, Russian Federation) with the U.S. Dept. of State during 2002-2016, and is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the official views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
OPINION — The recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline and subsequent payment of a $4.4 million ransom in bitcoin to a Russian hacking group (‘Darkside’) has highlighted the role of negotiations in such cases. Doing so requires understanding the leaders of such groups and their motivations.
Analytic technologies exist allowing for understanding the leaders of nation-states, criminal groups, and terrorist groups, as well as hostage-takers, insider threat actors, and cyber criminals. Such analytic tools can have practical applications in business negotiations, especially high risk/high reward negotiations involving potential investments in emerging markets and frontier economies.
When I have given talks to senior national security personnel, academic scholars, and business leaders regarding a leader such as North Korea’s leader Chairman Kim Jong-un, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, or China’s President Xi Jinping, the question that always comes up is, “can we do business with him? Is he a rational actor and reliable negotiation partner?” Similar questions arise in business settings involving massive private investments, regarding the leaders of emerging economies such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and others. In these situations, investors desire to limit their risk exposure due to geopolitical factors, uncertainty and ambiguity. Leadership analytic methodologies can serve to mitigate risk, and thereby have their place in due diligence, reputational intelligence, and other types of business negotiations.
In emerging economies and frontier markets with larger degrees of opacity and control under one leader, and a ‘system’ subservient to a given leader, such analytics matter even more. This is true even in countries such as Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, or Xi’s China. Particular challenges implicate extractive economies, rare earth products, and supply chains therein. Risks of supply chain disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, political/economic instability, nationalization of foreign assets, selective implementation of rule of law, cultural factors, or absence of rule of law are also key variables worthy of analysis.
Another question is whether ‘soft power’ – on a national scale – can influence a leader and his/her inner circle? The latter has significant resonance in many emerging and frontier market countries, where larger powers such as America, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Russia compete for influence, even more so during and after the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic.
A key point in negotiations is that personal relationships, rapport, and empathy matter. This means picking the right negotiators, persons with listening skills, empathy, a strategic (not merely tactical) view of intelligence, patience, and a high tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty. Likewise, investors in frontier markets value executives who embrace uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity, and who are willing to get their boots dirty. As the American billionaire investor Gabriel Schulze suggests, “Opportunity is often found on the edge of our comfort zone.”
