CEOs of major corporations need to make hugely consequential decisions every day, but many start their mornings in fragmented and reactive information environments. Compare that to the President and other senior US national security leaders who often begin their day when their intelligence briefer delivers the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). The PDB briefer provides a curated engagement to help their principal understand the issues of the day; the briefer might share insight on the motivations of a key foreign leader, walk through the nonobvious implications of a recent development, or offer a path to pose questions directly to the Intelligence Community. The PDB briefing model offers a compelling template for companies that want to improve the information and decisionmaking environments of their key leaders.
The PDB has been around for more than 60 years. It is the pinnacle of the Intelligence Community’s analytic support, delivering the most important and high-quality analysis and intelligence reporting. Perhaps more importantly, it pairs a senior leader with a briefer whose sole job is to enable their principal to understand everything they need to know about national security issues for that day in about 30 minutes. The briefer becomes intimately aware of the principal’s world – who are they talking to later that morning, which NSC meeting do they have to attend in the afternoon, what policies are they trying to advance, and where are their blind spots on national security threats that could harm Americans. Through those daily conversations, the briefer helps the principal identify the questions to ask to get to the heart of a complex issue and sometimes passes those questions to the IC in the form of taskings that will result in a follow-up written response.
The briefer uses their mastery of analytic tradecraft to explain the argumentation behind each assessment in the PDB. They provide context and offer the principal a confidential sounding board to talk through policy quandaries. They deliver bad news effectively and dispassionately by expertly walking through the strength of the sources underlying key judgments. In short, having a daily briefer gives the principal an opportunity to better accomplish his or her goals.
In the private sector, executive leadership teams are often left to their own devices, triaging emails from the day before, trying to make sense of dashboards showing the most recent overnight data, and trying to read a few different news sources to get a handle on a threat to the company’s wellbeing that seems important even as the key implications remain hazy. CEOs might meet with a chief of staff, which helps, but that role is built to clear obstacles, drive decisions, and put out the day's fires — work that runs on deadlines, unlike readiness to answer any major question the CEO could raise, even the ones they never ask. So no matter how capable the chief of staff or how large their team, that readiness is the first thing the calendar crowds out. An executive assistant can walk through the schedule but can't explain why tomorrow's agenda is built around the wrong question. Everything feels reactive because it is.
The PDB process offers a better way. Imagine a major company that creates a small team of senior managers that understands all the inputs flowing to the executive leadership team from across the company—data from sales and marketing teams, supply chain updates, cyber threat assessments—and can identify what the leadership team needs to know each morning. Just like the staff that creates the PDB’s content, these managers would work with internal stakeholders to create a set of products delivered to the leadership team with a predictable rhythm while facilitating the production of ad-hoc “breaking news” style internal assessments. The team would work with a set of briefers drawn from the company’s most promising midlevel employees – rising stars who have demonstrated exceptional abilities to make sense of huge amounts of data and understand the needs of someone in a leadership role, and who have unquestionable judgment and discretion.
Both groups would work together to produce and deliver the briefing package for the CEO and other executive team members. The CEO’s briefing package might be the smallest but would include the most important internal company information combined with external news pulled in by the briefer overnight. It would form the core of the briefing package for every other leadership team member so each would know what the CEO is reading each morning, allowing them to be better prepared to answer questions from the CEO while also giving them additional material relevant to their core roles – the chief marketing officer might get extra news reporting on trending influencers while the chief financial officer might get a rundown on the latest indicators of how the Fed might vote the following week. Strong companies will protect both teams from institutional pressure by making their mandate for objective delivery explicit – one way to handle this would be for the briefing team to report to the board to help protect their independence.
On any given morning, the CEO’s briefer would explain the electoral dynamics affecting how a visiting governor will ask for concessions from the company at their breakfast meeting; unpack the data in a recent HR study on employee retention rates; highlight the mitigation of a recent cyber intrusion event; and unpack the political dynamics in a major foreign market that could lead to retaliatory tariffs. The briefer can go deep into all of these issues because she spent all night working to understand them. If she can’t answer the CEO’s questions, she’ll issue a tasking to the right department, which will deliver an answer the briefer can use by the next morning. Before she leaves for the day, she’ll give a download of the briefing to the chief of staff, record feedback on various items in the briefing to share with key recipients and review the menu for the next day’s briefing items with the production team.
As the saying goes, when information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. As AI shifts the cost of information and even analysis toward zero, a key constraint on senior decision-making shifts to something more scarce — a trusted human whose sole mandate is to be prepared to help a leader be ready to start their day in an environment in which seeing what’s around the corner is both increasingly important and difficult. The PDB briefing experience creates a partnership between principal and briefer that extracts the most value from the least amount of time, which is inarguably the most valuable resource for any senior leader. Companies facing fast-moving, loosely connected threats, where being caught flat on any single one is costly, will find that having a corporate PDB briefing team is less a luxury than a wise investment having leaders who are exquisitely prepared to meet each day.
Phillip Consentino recently retired after a 25 year career in CIA’s Directorate of Analysis in which he served as managing editor of the PDB from 2019-2022.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.
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