You know what it is like to create and run a business successfully in a market environment that is highly competitive and requires that everyone on your teams understands and contributes to the mission that you have defined. Executing the current business is difficult enough without the ever present and pressing complications of competition. Yet, competition is real and what others do makes a difference to your success or failure. Competitive intelligence can help you navigate through the complexities of the competitive environment better.

Alignment leading to tangible results in market share, revenue and profits is what you are after. Your goal is strategies that mobilize the organization and point the right way forward. There are five common imperatives that you have and several ways that competitive intelligence can help you.

• Protect the current business. Operational issues are important because today’s business funds tomorrow’s investments. Current products must be sold. Current customers must be serviced. How are you doing compared to your major competitors? Would benchmarking show more that you have more advantages or disadvantages?
  Compare selling and business development strategies with competitors, benchmark your operations and analyze customer decision-making criteria.
• Mobilize the organization. No important competitor is passive. Dedicated people at those companies are working to shape the future in their favor rather than yours. Their strategies are being implemented and you need to know what they are and what they mean to your strategies. One person cannot possibly do this alone. However, a well trained and focused team can do it and win. What would it mean to you to have your organization highly tuned to the competitive environment?
  Provide periodic competitive news and alerts, implement information sharing tools and train teams to identify important competitive intelligence issues.
• Track the competitors. The long term vision of where your company needs to go concerns your senior management. Decisions about resource allocations, R&D investments, M&A and so on are based on the products that must be developed for future competitiveness. Scenario planning, war games and vigorous strategy discussions arm your teams. When you see the landscape accurately, your confidence increases. What if you knew your competitors’ likely next moves with high confidence?
  Implement an on-going gap analysis process, execute tradeshow intelligence activities and institutionalize periodic competition focused briefings throughout the organization.



• Prepare for the Future. Analysis prepares you for the critical decisions about how to position your company in concrete terms for long-term success. You are well aware that you have to make bets. Whatever you need next year must already be started this year. There are decisions to make about investments in processes, relationships, product development and technologies. What will give you the greatest chance for success?
  Initiate forward-looking strategy analyses, expand competitor analysis to include culture/process/resource tracking and formalize trends/standards influencing.
• Deliver Results – now and in the future. Once you reach a conclusion then the work of convincing and aligning others begins in earnest. You have to argue for funding, decision latitude and resources. In the meantime, your key leaders must understand, adopt and share the strategies you have defined even while continuing to deliver results. How do you get to the proper blend of managing current operations and changing to meet future challenges?
  Marry the competitive intelligence information to the strategy planning cycle, provide escalation processes for off-cycle surprises and implement ROI measures to track strategy (and competitive intelligence) performance.

Competitive intelligence can help you be a better general manager. It complements much of what you already do. It helps you where you lack information today. More than that, it can help you make better decisions with more confidence than before.

Business strategists and competitive intelligence professionals deal in ideas. At first it may seem that having a good idea is the biggest challenge. Later we come to know that affecting people successfully with those ideas is a much greater challenge. It’s wonderful when we work with people that accept our ideas readily.

Sometimes though, we run up against people that resist our ideas.

You know the type. Despite our honorable intentions, elegant solution and impressive presentation, they remain unmoved. More than that, they sometimes can get quite hostile. They seem to resist the very possibility that we have a great solution. Maybe their hostility or resistance is passive. It can take us a while to even figure out those people.

After battling the passive folks it is almost a relief to confront someone that openly and vociferously opposes us. Ah, let the battle begin, we think. My ideas versus your ideas and may the best ones (mine, of course) win! There is a big problem with this scenario. (Well, maybe there is more than one.)

It is extremely difficult to overcome someone’s resistance when we think of it as “resistance.”

People are masters are detecting our strategies and adjusting their “wall” to deflect unwelcome ideas.  You try to argue with them. They might argue back, withdraw from the discussion or retreat to fight you another day. Many people will seem to agree with you and only later will you learn that their agreement was not sincere. The one certainty is that they remain unconverted to your idea. You will not be allowed to win because it means that they will have to lose.

Try transforming your image of resistance into one of “safety.”

Jerry Weinberg of Weinberg & Weinberg gave me this lesson a few years ago. At the time my head was bruised from all of the times that I beat it against a wall. The wall, of course, was all those idea resisters. How dare they withstand me, I thought! My ideas were good ones. They only wanted to see me fail which turned my bewilderment into anger and resentment. Then Jerry gave me transforming idea that the issue was their “safety.” What I was advocating affected their safety because it threatened them with change. The change that I wanted to occur was not something that they had asked for or welcomed. Coming to grips with how to effect change is the acid test for “idea” professionals.

Helping others work through their safety issues can actually improve your idea.

So I began to rethink how I approached others. I realized that my best ideas would languish without the agreement of at least some of the people that felt unsafe. I began to ask them about the possible impacts of my ideas. Did they have any thoughts about mitigating the side effects of my proposed idea? Were there things that could be modified in my original idea that would better consider the culture of the organization? In their opinion, what was the right pace of change? Were there ways to test my idea in some incremental fashion? Amazingly, by asking these questions, my idea and its implementation always got better. Adversaries became allies and co-owners. They began to trust me more and to help rather than fight me. My blood pressure went down and my forehead healed.

It’s good to have ideas. It’s good to make beautiful presentations. It’s good to find solutions.

It’s better to work through change with people together.

The days of command and control organizations (at least in high technology) are long passed. We have a few examples where knowledge workers can do powerful things when they are operating with confidence rather than fear. Your job and mine is to make sure that while we love our ideas, we also make sure that we are helping people feel as safe as possible with what we proposed. Yes, there will be discomfort with change. But harnessing the creative, contributory energy of others is the measure of a successful idea person.

Do you agree?