What Is Security?

The Do Tank

Rich Hearney looks like the actor a casting agent would dispatch to play the part of a retired four-star general and former Stanford football star. Square jaw? Check. Commanding bearing? Check. Healthy, vigorous tan? Check. Gleaming black shoes? Check, check.

"We're not a think tank," barks Hearney. "We're a do tank." Hearney -- that is, General Richard D. Hearney, USMC (Ret.) -- is the president and CEO of BENS. He went from the playing fields of Stanford to the battlefields of Southeast Asia, rising in the ranks of the Marine Corps, earning a chestful of medals for his heroics, and, finally, winning the coveted four stars that appear on the uniforms of only a few-dozen officers in the U.S. military.

In 1997, Hearney served on the National Defense Panel, a congressionally mandated commission that issued a slick report titled Transforming Defense -- National Security in the 21st Century. "It was greeted with a snappy salute and promptly put on the shelf," Hearney says. "I will never participate in another blue-ribbon panel. Our attitude at BENS is, Let's get something done."

That pragmatic spirit derives in part from founder Weiss. After making millions mining manganese, Weiss started the group in 1982, guided by an amusing but unassailable principle: "Being dead is bad for business." Corporate leaders joined the group to add their voices to the then-life-and-death tussles over nuclear policy.

Since then, BENS has become broadly respected, if not hugely influential. It prides itself on being different from the capital's other report-generating, conference-holding, wonk-employing idea factories. BENS isn't a waiting room for out-of-power politicians or academics on sabbatical. Its members don't use it to try to land defense contracts or to lap at the trough of corporate welfare. It doesn't contribute money to political campaigns.

Nor does BENS do any original research with its $4 million annual budget. Instead, it tries to enact the ideas of others. Chief of staff Johnston describes traditional think tanks as R&D -- and BENS as sales and marketing. The group tries to enlist business leaders in the cause of national security -- not to think great thoughts but, as Hearney says, to try to get things done.

For example, early last year, BENS organized a meeting of banking regulators and financial executives to exchange advice on how to follow the terrorist-money trail. The contacts made there led Citibank to cut its ties to a terrorist group that was doing business with the bank.

As the year unfolds, BENS will continue its work on new threats. "We have been the beneficiaries of a strong sense among businesses of wanting to give back," says BENS vice president for strategic development Doug Wilson. "We will be both a channel and a template for building public-private partnerships." BENS has led a delegation of executives to meet with Tom Ridge, director of the federal government's new Homeland Security Office. The group will conduct more bioterrorism scenarios. And it will bring together similar groups -- luring them across the boundary between the public and the private sectors -- to explore cyberterrorism scenarios. "We are a catalyst in the true sense of the word," says Millis, who once specialized in the Soviet bioweapons program for the National Security Agency. "We trigger reactions but don't appear in the final product."

War Is Business

The Cold War had its "wise men" -- towering figures such as Averell Harriman and John McCloy, businessmen who whispered in the ears of power, made lofty pronouncements, and spun grand geopolitical theories that helped the country wage a titanic struggle with another superpower. That was then.

Today's Gray War doesn't need wise men but pragmatic people: women and men of action, who can get things done. The Gray War needs speed. It needs agility. It needs talent, leadership, lightning-fast communications, sophisticated finance, and efficient supply chains. In short, it needs business.

In less jittery days, business magazines like this one tossed around military metaphors: Business, we all said, was war. But today, such metaphors seem cheap, even silly. We now have a real enemy, not a metaphorical one. And if we stop and stare long enough, the enemy looks eerily familiar. It calls from cell phones, sends email updates from laptop computers, and recruits newcomers on the Internet. It relies on an intricate, international financial network, where money often crosses borders as blips of light rather than as bags of cash. And its leader has rejected old-school, top-down management for the speed and flexibility of a flattened hierarchy, preferring to articulate a broad vision and let others execute the grim details.

Maybe we had it backwards. Maybe business isn't war. Instead, in this freaky new world, maybe war is business.

Daniel H. Pink (dpink@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor. Learn more about BENS on the Web (www.bens.org).