But first my trusty VW Bug had to get me there.

I set about to show everyone (especially my parents) that I could handle all of the preparations. I plotted the route for my 4 day journey. I decided on everything that had to go with me to college and made sure that it would fit in the car. Most of all, I prepared the car.

I checked the tires, the windshield washer fluid, the oil levels and so on. Boy, wasn’t I being thorough? And without any help to boot. About that time, my father asked if I had checked the sparkplugs. Well, I hardly needed any help from him or anyone else. I was a grown up and besides, didn’t he see what a great job I was already doing? “I’ll take care of it!” I snapped and he left the subject alone.

The departure day finally came and I drove off south through Colorado. Goodbye to living full time with the family. Hello to the college life. Independence day had arrived and I was doing just fine.

The first day was uneventful. I made it through the mountain passes of southern Colorado (barely) and arrived late in the day in Dumas, Texas. Somewhat nervously I checked in to the motel while halfway expecting that they would tell me I was too young to be traveling alone. All I remember about that night was the excitement of being on the road. I couldn’t sleep so I got up at 4 AM to start the next day’s travel. I left the motel in the dark that Sunday morning planning to travel a great distance that day (wouldn’t everyone be impressed with my accomplishment).

That’s when it happened.

My VW engine began to misfire. It jerked as I tried to get up to highway speed. I was mystified about the cause. This had never happened before. What was I going to do? I limped into Amarillo looking for a miracle. Unfortunately, there were no car dealers open at 6 AM on Sunday morning. I decided to keep going for a while. Later that morning I stopped to call home. Specifically I wanted to talk to my brother because he knew a lot more about cars than I did (or do).

He asked me, “Did you check the sparkplugs?” Uh-oh. “Actually, I checked everything but the sparkplugs before leaving home,” I replied sheepishly.

Sometimes in corporate life we are diligent to check many things.

We check with our organization to make sure that we are following the right processes and are appropriately aligned. We check our budgets and priorities to ensure that there is agreement between the two things. We check within our team to clarify roles and expectations. We check with our bosses to understand how our performance will be evaluated. So many checks and they are all important. But, what if we forget to check something critical?

For instance, suppose we forget to check on what the competition is doing or we poorly understand the overall competitive environment. When this happens, the organization begins to misfire. There are 10 signs to look for that indicates such misfires.

1. It is common that people throughout the organization cannot name the important competitors.
2. The existing strategies cannot be stated succinctly and convincingly.
3. Competitive intelligence is a distributed part-time task with no focal point person.
4. More energy goes into perpetuating a stagnating business rather than deciding on a better business.
5. Competition is talked about infrequently and without great insight.
6. There is a growing sense of being behind the competition and slowly reactive to new information.
7. Long term strategies, future vision and challenging objectives become discredited as do their advocates.
8. There are multiple versions of competitive analyses dealing with the same topic.
9. The number and severity of competitive surprises is increasing.
10. There is a growing sense that the understanding of existing customers is degrading.

If these conditions are evident, it is time to change.

From that roadside phone booth (no cell phones in those days), I realized that maybe I should have checked the sparkplugs. After buying new plugs and stopping early for the day, I set about inspecting the old sparkplugs. Well, when I took them out and looked, I could see that they were all corroded and badly in need of replacement. Once the new plugs went in, the car ran like a charm. (After I recovered from embarrassment, I apologized to my father.)

Here is the lesson that I took from all of that.

Things misfire for a reason. Wishing the cause away is not sufficient to correct the problem. Ignoring the problem because it is embarrassing does not help. And, sometimes it helps to simply ask for help from someone that knows more. Finally, with the root cause addressed, things can work well again.

This is the challenge in competitive intelligence for many companies. Their misfires causes need to be corrected and they can be with the right help. Great performance is important and with all that is going on in the economy, it is a life threatening issue to operate at less than peak efficiency.

Maybe you need to check your “sparkplugs” too.

Slab foundations are solid blocks of poured concrete on top of which the structure is erected. There are several important characteristics that a slab foundation must have in order to support the house that is being built.

• It must be shaped correctly for the house. It is costly and difficult to alter the basic shape after it hardens.

• Although it looks like a solid mass of concrete, it actually conceals a great deal of infrastructure including electrical conduits, plumbing and cables (which provide strength).

• Everything attached to or embedded in the foundation must be in the right place (again, it is hard to change things fixed in concrete). For example, the plumbing for sewage should emerge where the bathrooms are planned to be.
• Finally, after doing all of the necessary things, it is important to preserve your flexibility for all of the remaining elements of the home. For instance, the placement of the second story wall for the guest bedroom is not to be tied to something in the design of the foundation.

The foundation serves its purpose even though it is not a visible feature of the home. The structure above obscures what is beneath it and many people give little thought to what they don’t see. However, you absolutely must pay attention to your CI foundation. And the quiet time after your first management presentation is a good time to establish what will support all that you do later.

Skip the foundational work, however, and the compliments will quickly be replaced with sympathies for the expensive rework that will be required. After the sympathy, you will start to hear the whispered questions about how could someone forget the foundation?! This can cause damage to your prestige and credibility. It’s embarrassing, expensive and (this is the good news) avoidable.

So where are we in our journey to create a competitive intelligence function?

You have taken the initiative to build a competitive intelligence function. Spotting a “pain” (step 1) you approached a senior manager to offer your services (step 2). They are interested! Show me something they say and off you went to respond. Since you are just starting, you know that you cannot provide the ultimate benefit immediately. Making virtue out of necessity, you figure out how to provide some value and, more importantly, you whet the appetite of your senior leader by giving them a tease (step 3) of what could be done. The meeting is a success and you are pretty sure that you will be doing more CI work for the senior leader. You have some time to reflect about what to do next

The next step is to frame the foundation for all that is to come. There are three things to do to make sure that your foundation is what is needed for long term success.

1. Create the Blueprint

This is where you begin to imagine what the full vision for the CI function will be. One thing for sure is that it will be customized to your environment. That is, it will be constructed to meet the needs of the people of the organization. Like an architect does before designing a home, you will begin asking people about what their hopes are for competitive intelligence. How do they like to get information? What are the critical times for receiving intelligence? What do they already have or know? When and why have they been disappointed in the past? All of the answers help you to identify how to construct the program. They will suggest the mechanisms for delivering information, the schedules that make the most sense, the sensitivities to avoid and the dreams that the leaders have for their success.

Don’t make this too hard. Simply talk to people and record their responses. List the concrete responses to what they have told you. In most organizations, common culture and experiences will help you because the responses will cluster so that you can focus on a smaller number of items. Note that you are not implementing all of this now. You are simply making plans so that what you do in the near term will not preclude something important that comes later.

2. Establish Your Principles

Make sure that you know what is important. These are your principles that are relevant throughout the lifetime of a CI function. Among the many reasons that principles are important is the simple fact of pressure. As you become known for your CI contributions, you will begin to feel great pressure. The pressure to produce valuable interpretations will exist, of course. You will also be confronted by other pressures such as ethical issues (“can we use this information that I got from a former employee?”), shortcuts (“we don’t have time to double check our sources”) and misuse (“it just needs to look pretty, I don’t care what it says”). Here are some principles to consider.

• I will always focus on value to senior leaders and the business strategies. This doesn’t mean that others won’t benefit but it does establish priorities.
• I will conduct myself according to a code of ethics (see the SCIP code of ethics). Now is a good time to identify who can give you legal support as issues arise.
• I will properly and consistently characterize (e.g., assumptions, facts, speculation, recommendations) the content that I provide. This establishes and maintains your credibility.
• I will orient all I do toward helping effect positive change. A CI function implicitly challenges what is happening inside your company as you analyze the competitive environment.
• I will always remember that people (i.e., leaders, colleagues, others) matter most. People are the source of the best information, they are required to support and accept competitive intelligence and all change comes through the efforts of people.

3. Make Broad, Fruitful Relationships Possible

This may seem redundant. And, it is.

Your success or failure will be based on your personal relationships. This may seem counterintuitive in the age of complex information systems, databases, web searches, analytical tools and academic research. All of these things have a place but in absence of a robust foundation of relationships, your failure is more likely than not. Here is a partial list of relationships that will be critical. You need to begin now thinking about how to nurture each set of people.

• Sponsoring management/leaders – do you understand their needs?
• Other managers – who owns what strategies and might be overly sensitive to what you are doing?
• Peers – how can you provide value to them so that they willingly contribute information and reflection?
• Sources – how can trust and reciprocal value be established?
• Support – how can you get their help to build the information infrastructure and provide other (e.g., legal) services

Three steps for framing a solid foundation – blueprint, principles and relationships.

Next topic is “Establish Some Standards” because just doing the work is not enough.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Does it seem like a lot to do?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence

1. Find The Pain
2. Get The Job
3. Tease The Vision
4. Frame The Foundation
5. Setting Some Standards
6. Introduce The Brand
7. Accumulate The Tools
8. Back To The Vision
9. Secure The Budget
10. Build The Presence
11. Expand the Brand
12. Go For the Value
13. Recruit A Staff
14. Go On The Offense
15. Evangelize The Mission

Here is my list of things to do to “doom” a competitive intelligence effort. It behooves a person involved to work to avoid these circumstances if they want to be successful.

• Bury it in the organization – This is a failure indication because it means that the CI likely has little access to management and what they are thinking. Sometimes this happens when the CI is seen primarily as a sales and marketing tool rather than as a strategy enabler.

• Concentrate on tactical questions – A CI function gets few chances to establish its value. Given limited resources and time, tactical issues can consume all of the available capacity. This will limit the strategic impact of the CI and be of less value to those that need to sponsor the effort.

• Highly filter information in both directions – It is difficult to provide perfect information or anticipate all that is needed. Excessive filtering means that there is little ongoing calibration between CI people and management. Without calibration, it is likely that the CI effort will diverge from what is most important to management.

• Focus on undifferentiated information - It is easy to accumulate information. It is harder to provide insight that is useful. As the quantity of information increases and the insight decreases, the value of CI is lessened.

• Staff with people that have little credibility in the organization – People trust people. At least, they trust certain people. The CI function must be trusted and valued for their insights. Without that credibility, information, reports and analyses will be ignored.

• Avoid measuring its value – At the end of the day, competitive intelligence is an overhead function. Its value will always be debated and the function will be subject to elimination without measurement of its impact. A profession CI person will regularly be seeking quantitative and qualitative feedback from management about the impact of their effort.

See my presentation on Competitive Intelligence Lessons at http://tinyurl.com/dbuyb7.