Hey everyone and welcome to our throwback episode. In our throwback episodes, we are reintroducing you to some of our most popular episodes. This is great for new listeners who want to learn more about the work we've done in the past. And it's a great refresher if you've been a listener for a long time. Enjoy. Everybody, we have a very special guest with us today. We have Michelle Flournoy.

She is the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Obama administration and the co-founder

and managing partner of WestExec Advisors. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. It's great to be with

you, Comey. Yes, it's great to have you. So we went over your resume a little bit, but let's go a little bit more

in depth. Tell us about a little bit about your career before we jump into the episode.

Sure. I've spent my career across three different sectors. The first part of my

career was mostly in the think tank world, doing policy-related research and analysis,

trying to come up with good ideas for the U.S. government and national security. And then I had a

chance to serve in government, first in the Clinton administration, and then later, as you mentioned, in the Obama administration, both times in the Pentagon, working on defense strategy and policy.

And then I've also had some private sector experience. I spent three years with Boston Consulting Group trying to understand what good looks like from a business and change management perspective and large organizations, because I certainly didn't see that in the Pentagon in terms of how the business enterprise was run.

And then I started West Ex-Second Fisors about three years ago with a group of partners really trying to kind of bring a new

approach to geopolitical risk and strategic advisory work for mostly U.S. companies working overseas.

That is fantastic. And the word that kept on coming up was strategy. And that's one of my

favorite words. And I can see throughout your career how

you've been able to implement that successfully. And then here in these conversations that we're

going to analyze in this episode, I can see as well how strategy played a big role. And so for the

listeners, this is just a little bit of an outline of what we're going to do. We are going to

go through four case studies of difficult conversations that Michelle has gone through throughout her career.

And so we're going to analyze what was done well, what could have been done differently, and we're going to learn a lot through this.

And so the first story is really exciting.

It's the difficult negotiations and difficult conversations that occurred around the bin Laden raid and the decisions that had to be made.

So, Michelle, can you tell us a little bit about that?

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