The two-term State Department veteran makes his Google plans official.
I reported last month that ’21st century statecraft’ specialist, Jared Cohen, would be leaving his role in the State Department and heading to Google to form a new Think/do Tank called ‘Google Ideas’. Today that became official.
Cohen talked to Foreign Policy about his time at the State Department and his new gig at Google. On the last page, he finally gets to the new work:
FP: Going forward, tell us about your future work at Google.
JC: I am going to be director of a new division at Google called Google Ideas. And it’s basically a think/do tank. Much of the model for it is built off of my experiences on the Policy Planning staff. It’s not designed to be, “Let’s pool all of Google’s resources and tackle global challenges.”
In the same way Policy Planning works by bringing together a lot of stakeholders in government, out of government, and across different sectors, so, too, will Google Ideas do something very similar. And the range of challenges that it may focus on include everything from the sort of hard challenges like counterterrorism, counterradicalization, and nonproliferation, to some of the ones people might expect it to focus on, like development and citizen empowerment.
What I’m interested in is the SWAT-team model of building teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges. So the reason I say it’s a think/do tank is you need a comprehensive approach to think about and tackle challenges in different kinds of ways. In government, we used to refer to a “whole of government” approach, meaning work with multiple agencies to leverage ideas and resources; Google Ideas will take a “whole of society” approach.
FP: What can you do at Google that wasn’t possible at the State Department?
JC: There are things the private sector can do that the U.S. Government can’t do. The big thing is the resources and the capabilities. There are not a couple hundred [computer] engineers in the State Department that can build things; that’s just not what government does. You don’t necessarily have some of the financial resources to put behind these things. It’s really hard to bring talented young people in; there are not a lot mechanisms to do it. On some topics, it’s very sensitive for government to be the one doing this.
With Google’s size and scope growing exponentially, Cohen’s job will be a big one. I look forward to following his work.