"How to Process Information"

From the Asia Times' inner Workings blog:

Want to be a smarter investor? Think like a high-level intelligence analyst. Ignore the business book shelf and get hold of Herbert Meyer’s guide to analyzing intelligence.

When I ran research groups at Credit Suisse and Bank of America, a good deal of my job consisted of forcing analysts in different areas of research to listen to each other and absorb information outside the narrow perimeter of their purview. There’s no direct financial incentive for Wall Street types to do so (research personnel are paid by a narrow product constituency), so it required some effort. But it produced superior results. Parochialism is the bane of all research organizations and the US intelligence community is no exception. America’s official intelligence product has been dreadful of late. But it was not always so....MORE