Introducing Bismarck Brief
Dear reader,
The world can be understood. This may seem obvious to the serial consumer of news, but for the wrong reasons. For the careful observer, the claim should be true, but only for the right reasons. After all, if you want to understand the news, it’s perhaps best not to read the news at all. News cycles often favor noise and ephemera, while the path to enduring understanding of the fundamentals at play goes by a slower and deeper route.
In 2017, I founded Bismarck Analysis to help companies, governments, philanthropists, and investors better understand the world in which we all live and operate. Understanding the world is a prerequisite for pursuing the right strategy to accomplish your goals. The lens through which I view the world, Great Founder Theory, proposes that the world is a landscape of institutions, both functional and not, robotically pursuing objectives set by their founders. Live players navigate this landscape and may found institutions, or use other methods, to pursue their unique goals, affecting the world around them. To understand these institutions and players is to understand the world as best as we can.
Confidentiality is sometimes key for providing a space where strategic actors can be authentically studied and assessed. After all, an accurate appraisal of a strategy may in and of itself alter or endanger the strategy, if made widely known. As a result, Bismarck Analysis has released only a handpicked selection of our analytical products to the public. But not all analyses are necessarily so sensitive. Much of our work examines industries, institutions, individuals, and ideas that are broadly understudied or deserve more attention from key actors. Much of our analysis draws out lessons that would be valuable to our clients not only when uniquely held, but when dispersed to a broader range of actors in wider society, who could use them to improve the functioning of their own personal strategies, social niches, and organizations.
I am therefore pleased to announce the launch of Bismarck Brief: every week, subscribers will receive an intelligence-grade analysis of a key industry, organization, or live player from around the world. Bismarck Brief will be a paid newsletter, though you are invited to subscribe for free to receive updates from the Bismarck team. I will lead topic selection personally, but will be deeply informed by the tastes and expertise of the entire Bismarck Analysis team. Rather than novelty or “newsworthiness,” Bismarck Brief will aim to provide insights into the players who are most responsible for shaping the power and institutional landscape of the world. Our philosophy in determining which players and institutions to analyze is informed by our collective years of experience conducting institutional investigations, our internal shared body of knowledge based on previous work, and the idiosyncratic focuses of our analysts, formed by a wide variety of backgrounds in government, industry, and technology.
The case study model forms the core of our research method, since every subject of analysis is necessarily far too unique to be explained in purely statistical terms, or only by reference to broader trends. Each Bismarck Brief will thus be an in-depth case study into a discrete industry, institution, or live player, examining the origins, ideologies, functions, competitors, future prospects, and more, of the chosen subject, with proposed implications for wider society. In the case of an industry review, we will likely give overviews of a number of related players in an ecosystem, but institutional and player analysis will be solely focused on a single subject. Through an analysis of the most important necessary facts, the Bismarck Brief will provide strategically useful conclusions and give the reader a wider, deeper, and more timely understanding of the global strategic landscape. I invite you to subscribe today and join us on this ongoing exploration.
Best regards,
Samo Burja
Founder and President of Bismarck Analysis
