I typed the words into the pristine white search field, hoping they didn’t land me on the NSA’s no-fly list: “How to manage a terrorist organization.”
There is a lot of academic work out there on what constitutes terrorism; the psychology of terrorists and terrorist acts; and the military precepts of asymmetric warfare. There’s not a lot on the basic management issues faced by your run-of-the-mill al Qaeda cell.
But that’s exactly what Princeton professor and former Naval officer Jacob Shapiro studies. The author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations and numerous academic papers on the topic, he examines terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and others through an organizational lens. I called him to pick his brain about it. What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.
HBR: Why look at terrorist groups through a management lens?
Shapiro: One area where it’s very useful is in identifying the constraints terrorist groups face. For instance, one of the things you saw with Islamic State in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 was that most of the foreigners that are coming in to fight for them had very modest levels of education, at least as reported by the group itself, and very few useful skills. They had to invest a lot in training according to recently declassified HR documents.
So you think, “Wow, there were huge numbers of Iraqi men in 2007, 2008, 2009 that had to develop military skills, whether they had to develop them to fight for a particular side or for self-defense. Why do they even need all these unskilled foreigners?” It has to be they’ve had a tough time recruiting Iraqis. So looking at what their “talent pool” was back then can help reveal the constraints the current incarnation, the Islamic State or ISIS, is likely under now, and help you understand where you might clamp down on them.
But why use a business lens rather than, say, compare them to a traditional military structure?
Militaries are exempt from many of the concerns of other kinds of organizations. I think the critical thing that makes terrorist organizations seem more like businesses than militaries is that [in a terrorist group] you don’t have a cadre of people who live their lives within the organization. You don’t have well-defined career paths. What you do have in terrorist groups is a lot of turnover. So the groups that do sustain themselves over time and become a durable threat are the ones that put in place relatively low-cost business practices and coherent succession plans and all the things a business with high personnel turnover would need to sustain itself.
So what makes Islamic State so “successful”?
Organizationally, one thing that is striking about Islamic State, looking at its lineage — from al Qaeda in Iraq to Islamic State in Iraq to ISIL to ISIS to Islamic State today — there is a fair amount of continuity in leadership and management. If you look at the documents that group produced in 2008, 2009, 2010, they were quite structured in how they did things (or at least it looks like they were). They were fairly systematic in tracking personnel, spending, income, all the things you need to track to realize economies of scale in a large organization. That’s something you need to do any time you want to organize large numbers of people to act collectively. Management without record-keeping is really hard. You can’t keep a thousand fighters in your head.
I’m sort of surprised terrorist groups are so bureaucratic.
They seem to use bureaucracy to make sure everyone is toeing the party line and to prevent splinter groups from breaking off. Terrorist groups have disgruntled and disobedient members just like any other organization, so the leaders try to rope people into a particular way of doing things by setting up standard operating procedures and making sure those are followed.
I do remember an example of one captured document in which Ayman al-Zawahiri castigates a Yemeni cell for essentially a sloppy expense report: “Will all due respect, this is not an accounting… you didn’t write any dates, and many of the items are vague.”
He is a notorious micromanager. The thing is, there are a lot of examples like this in the documents that have been captured. For instance, some ISI documents from 2007 sent out to local cells included a standardized form for reporting on your fighters and expenses, along with a set of instructions on how to fill it out. Among these were rules that the fighters had to keep their receipts and obtain two signatures for every expense. Maybe my favorite example is a memo sent out by the ISI media office in 2006 that basically said, “In order to help us produce better martyr videos, please fill out this form, copy it, and send it back. If you don’t have a copy machine, let us know, we’ll get the forms to you.”
I say this somewhat tentatively because this is a serious matter and I don’t want to make light of it. But there is something sort of funny about that. When you talk to people about these issues, is there gallows humor that people can’t resist? There seems to be something almost Monty Python-ish about it – in a way, it’s absurd.
People do react that way a lot, I think to the inherent mundaneness of it. But if you stop and think about what it takes to run one of these organizations, well you realize of course they must do this stuff. Bureaucracy is just endemic to the human endeavor. Writing things down is an incredibly powerful technology for managing complicated stuff.
But the good thing about the bureaucracy is that there is an inherent constraint in how big you can grow as long as someone is paying attention. If you’re facing competent governments, when you get to a certain size you start kicking off a level of information that attracts attention and which government forces can use to target you and degrade your organization.
To understand them, it is useful to think about terrorist groups as normal organizations. You examine them group by group — what is their goal, how do they use violence to advance that goal, and what’s their operational environment? Then you can think about their constraints, and about how would an organization deal with those constraints, if it were staffed and led by extremely committed, but deeply misguided, people.
SARAH GREEN
Sarah Green is a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review. Follow her on Twitter at @skgreen.
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