Larry Keeley is one of those guys with a job that, the more he tries to you explain to you what it is that he does for a living, the more you think, people pay you for that?
He consults with companies about innovation, about how to organize themselves to be more competitive, more inventive, foster new ideas, that kind of thing.
So February of last year, he's giving a talk about all this to some executives who have gathered at a fancy golf course in Florida. And after the talk, two military men in the audience ask him to lunch.
As they're being served, one of them asked what he knew about the bombing of the World Trade Center building. So he's asking me if I knew any of the details. And I said, no. And he started to tell me the gory details about the analysis of that bombing. And of course, what they use are people who go in afterwards and do forensic analysis of a calamity. And what was fascinating about the forensic analysis is that the forensic teams didn't quite agree. Some said the bombs were placed 12 centimeters away from where they would have needed to be to destroy the major support column in the North Tower.
Others said, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. The bombs were four centimeters away from where they needed to be to destroy that column. And it turns out that one of the guys I'm lunching with is a major general, George Close, a brilliant guy. And he turns out to be hand-picked by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to think through something called the revolution in military affairs.
