Using the Edge to Build Capabilities (JFK Assassination Edition)

For anyone to have successfully assassinated Kennedy, a few things would be needed.

• 1. The ability to assassinate -- meaning the actual capability to execute someone.
• 2. The ability to stifle an investigation from outside the government (i.e. to ensure there was no public demand and no real investigate journalism) to ensure the criminals escaped
• 3. The ability to stifle an investigation from within the government to ensure the criminals escaped

How can one organization possibly accomplish such a wide array of goals?

Answer: By not doing them. By outsourcing. Or, better yet, by "joint ventures" -- i.e. finding mutually advantageous goals that people would, by their own choice, want to do. The mafia, for instance, had plenty of reasons to hate Kennedy. So did anti-Castro Cubans. So did the military-industrial complex. So did Kennedy's vice-president, Lyndon Johnson. So did the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover.

In the edge economy, mutually advantageous joint ventures is an efficient way of building new capabilities. And as John Hagel told us, accelerating the pace of capability building is the only sustainable edge.

The CIA's established alliances with the mafia, as well as anti-Castro Cubans who believed a removal of Kennedy would get them the invasion to Cuba they wanted, gave them the resources they needed to pull off military-style ambush on Kennedy involving multiple shooters. The CIA's established relationships with media outlets via Operation Mockingbird gave it the capability to ensure a media coverup. Inside the US government, Hoover and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson played along and suppressed the investigation; this was likely done by choice, as neither Johnson nor Hoover wanted Kennedy around. In addition, the patsy the CIA setup to take the fall for the assassination -- Lee Harvey Oswald -- was a former asset of both the CIA and the FBI, thus ensuring that silence in those organizations and complicity to a coverup would be easier to obtain; for if they did not participate in the coverup, they ran the risk of their affiliation with Oswald being exposed.

The ability of elements within the CIA to employ an edge-based strategy in which it leveraged assets external to itself and focused on finding partners whose interests were aligned (i.e. getting rid of Kennedy) is at the heart of how the CIA was able to organize a carefully coordinated assassination.

The web 2.0 lesson: what are you looking to accomplish? How can you use the edge to accomplish this? Who can you partner with? Who has the same interests that you do? Investments in edge competencies -- in creating value by using assets external to your firm -- will be the operational investments that yield the greatest returns. The edge-based strategy for assassinating Kennedy offers a powerful example of this idea.

Next time, we'll talk about how the edge-based strategies can be used to reduce risk, and how elements within the CIA exploited this notion to minimize their risk in the hit on Kennedy. In the mean time, here's the last five minutes of Kennedy's famous inauguration speech.