“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.
Now is the time of monsters.” - Gramsci & Žižek
I was sitting up the back of the cavernous French theatre at INSEAD when my AI professor flashed this striking quote on the screen. He was waxing lyrical on the New Arms Race, a modern Manhattan Project - the race between China and the USA to create AGI.
In this world, carnivores now roamed the lands, and countries like the EU and Australia would be mere herbivores. Eaten, or ignored.
I scribbled the note down and forgot about it until last month, when I met Dr Michael J Green. We were at a roundtable under Chatham House Rules, but I wrote that quote down again in big bold letters. And underlined it.
How do you survive in a world where you can’t tell if you’re ordering from the menu or you’re the main course?
Dr Green gives us a recipe in this month’s episode of The Reinventor’s Mindset.
The White House Was My PhD
with Dr Michael Green (CEO, US Studies Centre)
The full episode is available now on Spotify and Apple
Mike is one of those dream guests. We covered so much ground, it was hard to decide which golden thread to pull on - geopolitics, leadership under uncertainty, mastery and purpose. As we dove deeper, I realised I’d felt this debate before.
Inside my own head. For months.
When I began to develop The Reinventor’s Mindset, I imagined a companion for leaders. The Reinventor’s Playbook. After all, what good is reinventing yourself if you can’t then lead your team to the promised land as well?
As I tried to write it, the triteness of it all felt like swallowing sawdust. How can there be a recipe for personal and professional success? It seems absurd. If there was one, we would all be successful. And if a leadership playbook was so simple, we would all be taught from it in our first induction session.
I wrote it anyway. Three times.
Version one came out of that INSEAD classroom. Nine pillars, each mirroring a framework I’d already lived. The logic was tight: you can’t lead others through a transformation you haven’t done yourself. I wasn’t sure if it was a manual or a mess.
Version two died by a bedside lamp in China, when my fiancée asked me why I kept creating more frameworks, rather than sharing the ones I already had.
Version three died when I coded my own podcast interviews and found that half of what I’d written down never showed up in anyone’s actual leadership story.
Here’s the part I only noticed writing this. The Reinventor’s Mindset was never a formula for success, it’s a call to action. And an antidote to the status quo. With the final framework itself, Keep Treading Water, recognising that there is no finish line.
It took me three versions to read my own handwriting.
Wrong twice
Michael Green was in the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001. He’d spend five years on the National Security Council (NSC) running Asia for Bush Jnr.
If anyone had a playbook, it was the people in that building. Twenty-five years on, he’s the first to tell you it was wrong.
“We were right in the sense that terrorism was a serious threat and we fought it and we won. But we were wrong that this was the defining framework for the era.”
The next administration tore up that frame and wrote a new one - climate cooperation - and was wrong again. Not about the threat. About who’d show up.
Two administrations. Two playbooks. Both written by the smartest strategists of their generation, both confident they’d found the shape of the era. Both displaced by events.
I found that oddly comforting.
The 1950 car
In my corporate life, we spend a lot of time separating complicated problems from complex ones. Complicated problems have a right answer. There’s a manual. Follow the steps and the car starts.
Complex problems don’t have a manual. Someone still has to decide.
Green’s version was blunter.
“The blueprint for problem-solving that we honed over the last seventy years is kind of like the blueprint for building a 1950 car. It’s just not fit for purpose.”
Marrying open trade to national security worked for seventy years - brought old enemies into the fold, lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. But the same interdependence can be weaponised, and the manual had nothing to say about it.
I put it to him that you always need a playbook - it’s just that the playbooks of the past aren’t the ones we need for the decisions in front of us now.
“That’s it,” he said.
Which is the trap. You need one, and it’s always immediately wrong.
They lowered their voices
So what survives, if the rules don’t?
Four and a half years on the NSC. 9/11. India and Pakistan at the edge of nuclear war. Taiwan. North Korea. Coups. Green’s bosses were Condoleezza Rice and Steve Hadley.
“In four and a half years they never said a cuss word. Once. And when a crisis hit, they slowed down and lowered their voice. They didn’t raise their voice. And it just affected the entire staff.”
Everyone in the building took their tempo from the two people at the top. Escalation, met with deceleration. The inverse of the panic cycle.
Notice what that is? It isn’t a rule. It doesn’t tell you what to do about North Korea. It’s a practice - something you do the same way regardless of what the crisis turns out to be, because you can’t know what the crisis will turn out to be.
Rules describe a world. Practices survive one.
The person holding it
If the playbook has to be continually rewritten, then eventually the rewriting reaches the person holding it. We don’t defend our playbooks because they’re right. We defend them because we’ve become them - the strategist who called the era, the executive whose playbook was his bible. Letting the rules go means letting go of the version of yourself that wrote them.
Green would say that’s not his story. He’ll tell you his core hasn’t moved since childhood - service, duty, appreciation, inherited from a Marine father and a grandfather who gave him dating advice on the porch. What he’s reinvented, over and over, is everything around it: the portfolio, the crisis, the country. There’s a kind of leader who transforms systems and holds still.
I’m not that kind. Most of the people I interview aren’t either.
But then again, not many of us are black belts like Green. In the art of Iaido, where his sensei - a seventh-degree master - told him what the word actually meant:
“In English it’s called black belt, which sounds very impressive. But the Japanese word is shodan, which means first belt. And he basically said, you’re nothing.”
Reinvention isn’t a project with a launch date. It’s not a playbook you finish. It’s the belt that tells you, at the top of the discipline, that you’ve reached the beginning.
The old world is dying. The new one is still struggling to be born.
I’ve stopped trying to write the manual for it.
What rule are you still defending because you wrote it?
- AJ
