Doing Business with Hackers, Terrorists and Dictators

Dr. Kenneth Dekleva writes for The Cipher Brief following the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline and subsequent payment of a $4.4 million ransom in bitcoin to a Russian hacking group (‘Darkside’), which has highlighted the role of negotiations in such cases. Analytic technologies exist allowing for understanding the leaders of nation-states, criminal groups, and terrorist groups, as well as hostage-takers, insider threat actors, and cyber criminals. Such analytic tools can have practical applications in business negotiations, especially high risk/high reward negotiations involving potential investments in emerging markets and frontier economies. When Dr. Dekleva has given talks to senior national security personnel, academic scholars, and business leaders regarding a leader such as North Korea’s leader Chairman Kim Jong-un, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, or China’s President Xi Jinping, the question that always comes up is, ‘can we do business with him? Is he a rational actor and reliable negotiation partner?’ Similar questions arise in business settings involving massive private investments, regarding the leaders of emerging economies such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and others. In these situations, investors desire to limit their risk exposure due to geopolitical factors, uncertainty and ambiguity. Leadership analytic methodologies can serve to mitigate risk, and thereby have their place in due diligence, reputational intelligence, and other types of business negotiations…

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