Tom White

International opportunities remain vast for those brave few willing to expand beyond local borders and limited markets. Put simply, it’s what the “Smart Money” is doing. Data shows that larger market participants such as QED have shifted their focus more on markets outside the US in recent years.Given this international opportunity, deal flow and d... See more

Diplomacy, in Cooper’s view, is high-stakes drama. An admirer of Shakespeare, he approaches it as a playwright would. Or a screenwriter. For example, here’s how he sets the scene for Kennan’s epoch-making Long Telegram, the embryo of the U.S. policy on containment: “February, 1946. Moscow. George Kennan is sick in bed . . . His ambassador is away a... See more

CIA analyst, Martin Guri described the vast amount of information that has engulfed us with this dumbfounding statistic:More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new informati... See more

On Failure: I think seeing failure is really important. It’s important to learn the lesson of what didn't work, sometimes more so than learning the lesson of what did work.On Networking: Replace the word networking with relationships. Networking feels transactional; nobody wants to be networked. Your job in your 20s is to forge relationships and re... See more

Those interested in diplomacy will read this book with pleasure and profit. And indulge its idiosyncrasies. Cooper’s analytical skill lies in reconstructing complex chains of events; his synthetic talent, in making sense of it all. The latter was pronounced in his earlier work, Breaking. Here he adds analysis. His is an intellectual apparatus opera... See more

“Niccolo is a good diplomat: he is interesting to talk to; he listens carefully, writes well, thinks ahead.”