Colonel John Hughes-Wilson's case studies — Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Tet, Yom Kippur, the Falklands — argue that intelligence rarely fails at collection. It fails at dissemination, reception and institutional incentive.
“Never Split the Difference” offers an inside look into the world of high-stakes hostage negotiations, translated into tactics for personal and business use. Chris Voss, a former FBI negotiator, shares strategies that center around empathy, active listening, and tactical mirroring to sway outcomes. This book is an essential guide for anyone aiming to improve their negotiation skills and interpersonal effectiveness.
Fraud rises when budgets tighten. Pressure goes up, headcount comes down, and controls that quietly depended on someone having spare time stop working. This weekend read sets out where exposure concentrates during a downturn and which defenses actually hold: strong internal controls, systems that flag the patterns people miss, a crisis plan written before it is needed, and a culture in which raising an anomaly is not a career risk.
Counterparty risk is the exposure you take on from the people you transact with — their solvency, their conduct, and their own counterparties. It rarely announces itself, and it is usually priced at zero until it is not. This guide sets out what counterparty risk actually covers, where it hides in ordinary commercial relationships, and how to assess it without stalling the deal.
Intelligence work is usually written about either as thriller or as scandal. Henry A. Crumpton, a veteran officer of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, wrote neither. “The Art of Intelligence” is a practitioner’s account of how sources are recruited and run, how decisions get made on partial information, and how often the hard part is not collecting what matters but persuading anyone to act on it.
In “Beware of deal-killers: Six common due-diligence pitfalls”, published on Canadian Family Offices, Tobias Jaeger of Falcone International names the six places family offices most often lose money: the management team, co-investors, regulatory change, third-party vendors, the deal structure itself, and cultural and language gaps. Each one is straightforward to check and routinely skipped, usually because the deal is already moving.
ESG has moved from a reporting exercise to a due diligence question: investors, lenders, and acquirers now price environmental, social, and governance failures much as they price financial ones. That shifts the burden onto verification — whether the claims in the report survive being checked. This piece covers what ESG risk looks like in practice, and where the gap between stated policy and actual conduct tends to open.
Pre-investment due diligence is the cheapest part of any deal and the first thing compressed when a timeline tightens. As structures grow more complex, experienced investors still miss the detail that undoes the transaction — usually because nobody was given the time to look. This piece covers what proper pre-investment diligence includes, and what it costs to find out afterward instead.
FIRAv2 is Falcone International’s online risk assessment for business leaders who want to identify and measure their own exposure before someone else does. This guide covers how to work through it, how to read the score that comes back, and how to turn the result into something your team can act on rather than a document that gets filed.
Falcone International has launched FIRA v2, a free online risk assessment for leaders who want a structured read on their own exposure. Twenty-five questions produce a scored report that names and ranks the weak points rather than describing them in general terms, so the result is something you can act on rather than file.
A vendor of many years began paying more than it owed, then asked for the surplus to be forwarded to accounts named nowhere in the contract. The CFO who queried it was one authorized payment away from being the person who moved the money. What we established, why sending the money back would have been the wrong move, and the warning signs any finance team can check unaided.
An investment firm had capital on the table and a concern about where it had come from. Declining is expensive and visible; accepting the wrong money is expensive, invisible, and permanent. How three independent lines of inquiry converged on the same answer while the firm still had the choice.
Most business planning treats politics as background noise until a border closes, a currency is restricted, a sanctions list expands, or a local partner turns out to be politically exposed. Geopolitics rarely appears on a risk register, and it is one of the few risks that can invalidate an entire market entry at once. This piece covers how political change reaches the balance sheet, and what to watch for.
The candidate for a top-level appointment came recommended by the company’s own senior executives, and there were five business days before the decision had to be made. Five days is short enough that it does not compress the method, it replaces it. How we re-planned around the deadline, and what surfaced in regional press that no screening database indexes.
Background checks protect against legal and financial liability, confirm that qualifications are real, and keep the workplace safe — but only if they are run before the offer rather than after it. Criminal and employment history checks establish whether the record matches the résumé, and whether the person you are about to give access to has a history that would change your mind. Most of the cost of skipping one arrives months later.