steve@breakwaterstrategy.com
As a Partner at Breakwater, Steve brings his core expertise in strategy and decision making to the most complex challenges facing organizations at the intersection of economics, technology, politics, regulation, and human understanding through narrative.
Alongside a thirty-year academic career at the University of California Berkeley (where he has a joint appointment as Professor at the School of Information and in the department of Political Science), Steve has advised global firms, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world on risk analysis, strategy, and communications, using a diverse set of qualitative and quantitative methods fit to purpose. Recognized as one of the world’s most expert practitioners of scenario planning, Steve has worked with more than 50 companies and organizations to develop this discipline as a strategy planning tool in uncertain and turbulent business environments. He started his advisory career at the boutique consulting firm Global Business Network in the 1990s and in the 2000s worked with The Monitor Group to help clients navigate transitions in information technology, finance, health care, consumer goods, and other sectors transformed by digital and by evolving global and national political economy.
Steve served as special political advisor to the first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He was Director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley from 2003 to 2009, and in 2015 he founded the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley, where he directs a multi-disciplinary research program on emerging digital security issues at the intersection of new technologies, human behavior, and risk calculations made by firms and governments. His best-known book, The Success of Open Source, was the first extensive study of how the open source software community works. His most recent book Bloc by Bloc: How to Organize a Global Enterprise (2019) explains how economic geography is evolving around machine learning, and the consequences for multinational organizations in the post financial and Covid crises world.
Steve brings a research-based innovation discipline to strategy and communications problems, along with a deep commitment to creative engagement with how people understand their environment, change their minds, and ultimately change the world through narrative. Steve lives in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City with his partner Regina and two Burmese cats named Napoleon and Mrs. Peel. All four are life-long-suffering fans of the New York Football Giants.