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Stories
3-Minute Briefing: Nathaniel Fick (MBA/MPA 2008)

Fick: Leading a voluntary, collaborative approach to technology governance without stifling innovation. (Photo by Stephen Voss)
As a Marine, I led some of the first units in Afghanistan and Iraq. What I loved about that experience was the intersection of a mission with building and leading teams. I came to HBS to develop the tools around that work, but in a very different context.
On the physical battlefield, we used to talk about the last 100 yards, where it comes down to just a few people and their rifles on each side. In diplomacy, it’s similar in the sense that it’s just two people on either side of a table.
The first principle that I bake into my thinking on any emerging technology is that we need to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we wish it were. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle with these technologies.
There’s a multilateral hunger for the United States to take a leadership role in establishing and enforcing norms to mitigate risk, whether they’re risks to public discourse posed by social media or the risks AI poses in areas like biosecurity or cybersecurity.
When I saw the movie Oppenheimer it struck me that 12 years passed from the Trinity test to the IAEA’s establishment in 1957. We don’t have 12 years. Our governance approach will need to be different and much more hands-on than in previous generations of technology.
We’ve worked with seven of the leading AI companies to establish voluntary commitments on safety of large language models, cybersecurity, and ensuring consumers have a full understanding of when they’re getting AI-generated content. “Voluntary” because it doesn’t stifle innovation—and it’s fast.
The transformative power of AI can be immensely positive. Eighty-five percent of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 are off-track. What if we think about using AI to address climate crisis modeling, agricultural productivity, medical diagnostics? We need to make innovation our North Star.
I’ll travel from South Asia to Central America to Eastern Europe to the West Coast, then repeat; I don’t even get jet lag anymore. I like to get up early in whatever city I’m in, run five to seven miles, and figure out how I’m going to tackle the day ahead. It’s very settling.
People want some autonomy at work. They want to develop mastery. And they want to have a sense of purpose. I’ve tried to implement that at the State Department—to give people the freedom to figure out the best path while ensuring everything we do is anchored in the why.
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