As I wrote about in “The Three Basic Competitive Intelligence Questions”, the simple formulation of “What? So What? Now What?” regularly resonates. People tell me that they finally understand competitive intelligence after internalizing those three questions. While that is encouraging, the questions are a framework with only the hints of specific actions.

“Just tell us what to do,” they say. “You’ve convinced us that competitive intelligence is important and that there is a lot to know about doing it right. Give us a three step approach that we can wrap our arms around and remember. We want something tangible to do!” they demand.

“Okay, okay, I’ll give you some steps,” I say. (Unsurprisingly, these steps correlate to the three questions in the framework.)

Here are three tangible steps that most anyone can take to get moving. If these issues are well covered, then there is a good start at competitive intelligence. Furthermore, after one pass through these steps, a company will understand competitive intelligence far better than most any simple formulation.

1.  Make Sure You Know Where You Are and Where You Want to Go: It is surprising how many companies cannot articulate their strategy. Or, if senior management can locate the strategy statement, it is common to find that many others are misunderstanding or misapplying the strategy. Strategy helps an organization understand its direction. And, at least with competitive intelligence, it is a critical point of comparison with the competitive forces in the environment. A poorly understood strategy baseline means that an unmanageable number of factors must be considered. Conversely, a clear strategy narrows the focus into something workable.

2.  Aim At Something Valuable:  I often hear of companies collecting gobs of information that goes unused. Sometimes, that unused information contains incredible value. The problem is often that no one posed the right question at the beginning. The “right” question has attributes of value to strategy decision-makers, answerable in the needed time with acceptable risk and potential to drive change. Poor questions, on the other hand, yield unused answers.

3.   Do Something With the Good Answers: There should be a high bar for competitive intelligence that affects strategy. Quantity of data is not enough. Quality is not either if it is misdirected. However, a “good” answer cannot be ignored when it is the result of a methodical, targeted competitive intelligence process. Hence, from the beginning of the effort, there must be an implementation mindset activated by a good answer. “Activation” means that it changes strategy in a way that, ultimately, is measureable. I like to ask this question, “Assuming that I could provide an answer with acceptable risk, how would you use that information in your strategy decisions?” When a customer cannot answer that question, it points to a potential failure point.

There is an incredible amount of detail for each of these three steps. A mature competitive intelligence group knows to do much more than I have listed. However, for companies or work groups that are just starting, three simple steps will work well for them to gain experience and get something valuable. The goal is not to be perfect. Rather, the goal is to actively make better strategies through competitive intelligence.

They simply need to “just do it.”

Do not trust my predictions.

This was from nationally known people that had made it their life’s work to forecast what was going to happen in the global economies. Their companies made crucial decisions based on currency fluctuations, growth rates in various countries, the movement of interest rates and many other issues that were their province to study, interpret and report. Why, will all of their knowledge and decades of experience did both feel compelled to say humbly that their predictive abilities were suspect?

The obvious answer, I think, is that anyone that consistently ventures to predict the future in detail will often be wrong.

Hearing them state their predictive limitations made me think about the success of competitive intelligence predictions. Do we in competitive intelligence consistently and successfully predict significant future competitive events? My answer is “yes” and “no” to that question.

Competitive intelligence futurists will say (with some justification, I think) that some things are predictable. Look at many clear trends today and project their impact tomorrow. It is old news now but five years ago it was “new” news to spot the rapid spread of social media and its impact on people and businesses. The ubiquitous availability of wireless, low power and highly connected devices continues to drive many market responses. Renewable energy and all that implies seems to be in its infancy. Demographic or geopolitical trends point to a small set of probable outcomes in some areas. In these areas and others like them, it seems possible to make broad predictions successfully.

However, most customers of competitive intelligence are usually looking for other answers.

The answers that they want are nearer term and much more precise in timing and direction. How will my product fare in the competitive market? Which businesses should I enter/exit? What competitive gaps do I need to close to improve my company’s performance? What disruptive business models will likely affect my business model? Where should I deploy my resources in 2011 to gain the greatest competitive advantage? If precise predictions were available to answer any of these questions, they would be quite valuable.

It is not for lack of trying that we do not have these answers.

Indeed, we often try to predict. We make guesses (I emphasize, “guesses”) for our customers and clients. We point to outcomes that we consider are most likely. We strain to shift the competitive signals from the background noise to deliver keen insights to management.  Then, after formulating an opinion, we confidently attempt to persuade others that our view is right (or, at least, highly probable). After all, what good is competitive intelligence if it does not have the spunk to stand for something? What good is it to waffle, hedge and obfuscate?

The truth is that we do have to stand for something; it is just not our predictions.

Management does not believe our predictions anyway. They already know two things before you or I show up to deliver our competitive intelligence product. First, predictions are hard even for the smartest people. Like our brilliant economist brethren, we can know many things but that is hardly a guarantee of omniscience. In fact, sometimes the very depth of knowledge may add to the difficulty of identifying the broad trends that actually might be useful for predictive purposes. The second thing that management knows is that they do not want predictions from competitive intelligence people. It is management’s job to make future bets and competitive intelligence people are seldom equipped to offer superior business insight.

What does management want from competitive intelligence if it is not predictions?

Simple. They want competitive intelligence people and their products to stimulate better thinking about the pressing business challenges. They want information, models and insights that improve management decision-making. They want their organization to be sensitized, mobilized and energized to compete better and win more. They want tangible, near term advantages that reflect well on their ability to lead. Finally, they want rewards for their personal performance. If competitive intelligence helps on these matters, then it will be highly valued among managers.

Our competitive intelligence challenge is to understand a myriad of issues, to help our customers and clients efficiently sort through those issues and to act humbly as we acknowledge the limits of our capabilities.

I humbly submit that I do not know what you will think about these points.

The respondents answered five basic questions about strategy facing their organization or work group in the year ahead. The fourteen organizations mostly represented high technology companies ranging in annual revenues from $30M to greater than $10B. However, there were also startups and nonprofits included.

Here were the questions that I asked.

1. What is your relationship to strategy decision makers in your company or work group?
2. What types of strategy do you influence or decide in your company or work group?
3. How would you assess your company’s or work group’s strategy effectiveness?
4. What critical strategy challenges does your company or work group face in 2010?
5. What types of strategy help would help you most?

From the (admittedly) small sample, several interesting responses jump out.

Most of the people were involved in strategies at the business or product level. The survey included fewer that had responsibilities for financial, mergers & acquisitions or alliance strategies.

Each person ranked their strategy efforts across a few categories on a scale from one to five (5 = best performance). The categories included developing strategy, communicating strategy, executing strategy, reacting to competitors and so on. I averaged the ratings across all categories for each company to produce a composite rating. The distribution is shown below. The fascinating (though not entirely surprising) finding is that more than 50% of the organizations were rated no better than average (3 = average performance). Average is not likely to be good enough in 2010 (if it ever was).

Looking more at the detailed ratings, it becomes clear that most organizations rated themselves higher on the front end activities of strategy (i.e., developing, communicating, executing) and lower on those on the back end (i.e., ongoing management, evaluating, reacting to competition). To the extent this is true, it reflects a great vulnerability that a strategy may start strong but finish weak in the organization or market place.

Given where companies rate themselves, where do they see the challenges in 2010? The number one response was that they needed ways to gain new competitive advantages. Would not that require above average strategy performance? Or, maybe it would require better competitive positioning. Then, throughout the year, would not strategies need to be evaluated better to support adjustments to the strategies? The net is that the recognition of the challenge is dead on but that current performance of many organizations inhibits them from successfully closing their strategy gaps.

Assuming that they could have anything, what kind of help would people like with their strategies in 2010? I speculated before the survey that most might want help formulating the strategy. For example, what are the new products to introduce and how should they be marketed? Perhaps many would want help analyzing the competitive environment. Neither of these two possibilities garnered the most responses. Instead, most people simply wanted someone with experience to talk with about their strategy and to reflect on their plans.

There are many smart people working diligently on business and competitive strategy in 2010. It is not news to them that the environment is tough or that their companies’ have high expectations about the strategies. Neither is it news that their strategy efforts need to improve. For those people, the best thing to do may be to talk to someone that they trust to reflect with them about what to do better.

The anticipation came because raises and bonuses were doled out in January and February. The dread was that I had to meet with my manager or supervisor to get my annual performance review. (It was never clear if these meetings were more painful to them or to me.)

Having been on both sides of the review, I know that many of the meetings were neither helpful nor satisfying.

Why? There is the usual fallacy that feedback given once a year (versus frequently) is effective. (Have you ever noticed that the once-a-year variety is often focused on what happened in the last month?) Another common failing occurs when the review meeting is a one-way communication. That is, the manager “announces” to a passive employee the corporate numerical judgment of the employee’s performance. What about those numbers? You know, the manager gives you a score in each performance area. They tell you that your organization skills are a four. Meanwhile, your innovation rating is 3.75. What do you do with such scores? We could go on and on about the weaknesses of these systems. My blood pressure is being to rise just recalling those days. Repeat, must be calm …

Still, the ideas behind the annual feedback cycle are laudable.

One principle is that the employee deserves honest feedback about their performance. It is even better to have an ongoing feedback dialog throughout the year. Secondly, it is equally important that the organization declare what is important. Many times, the definition of performance categories and scales for the performance signal what is important. Ideally, the categories are highly tailored to specific jobs. That way, the feedback is far more targeted and (potentially) useful. When done well, the review transmits useful information in both directions.

What would a good review for a competitive intelligence person look like?

This is the review that I would give if I was the strategy manager (customer of competitive intelligence) and the one I would like to get if I was the competitive intelligence manager. It contains a difficult set of questions. They are difficult because they are intended to focus on value and impact versus activities and tools. There are 10 fundamental performance areas abd 50 questions to discuss.

Do you have other ways to evaluate competitive intelligence? What categories or questions would you change?

Download a PDF version of this post here.

You worked through multiple assignments to deliver results and overcome challenges. At each career step, your responsibilities increased and so did the expectations. More and more people looked to you to set the strategies and determine the directions to follow.

Now, after all that time, the entire company is yours to lead. You have arrived.

Others look at you and think that you have the most latitude because of your high position. If they only knew the truth. So many things constrain and concern you. The employees look to you for leadership and countless decisions about priorities, promotions and their own job security. Customers constantly want more and on better terms than before. Investors want the share price to increase and their investments to pay off. Analysts want above average growth and a story about ongoing differentiation. Meanwhile, your many competitors only want you to fail and are doing their best to make that happen.

Somehow, you have to orchestrate this complex combination of constituencies and competitors.

There is not one answer to this balancing act. You naturally will integrate inputs from your team and the environment to settle on what seems best. One source of inputs is competitive intelligence. Competitive Intelligence can help you to organize your external perspectives and align your team to compete better. Here are five ways.

• Monitor the environment. The competitive environment is not static. Known competitors are adapting their strategies. Potentially disruptive companies are emerging. Other standards, social, demographic, technology and regulatory trends affect all of the actors. Usually, understanding the future better gives you more confidence to prepare more effectively. Competitive Intelligence systematically monitors market dynamics, significant trends and likely competitors’ responses to frame your strategic options better.
• Establish priorities. You have to get this part right because you cannot frequently change priorities. Of course, many factors affect priorities including knowing the market niches you want to protect and those that you want to attack. Especially when attacking, it is important to know where you need to improve your products, processes or resources. With that knowledge, you can hold someone accountable for the required improvements. Competitive Intelligence supports gaps analysis and closure processes to make sure that the organization is constantly working to overcome important disadvantages.
• Make decisions. Your decision-making is often complex. Where others might see or wish for simplicity, you have deal with a myriad of factors. Your position requires you to make the difficult decisions that affect many people. Thus, organizing frameworks, models and scorecards become essential tools for you. Sorting through issues to find what is most important while deemphasizing the less important is a constant duty for you. Competitive Intelligence provides regularly evaluated market and competitor information and models that highlight critical issues to inform your decision-making.
• Motivate the organization. In competition, it is often best to identify the competitors and the specific challenges that they pose. Properly framed, you can use this information to explain your strategies within your company. Furthermore, you can set competition-based metrics to serve as performance goals. Tangible competitive threats helps link your strategic goals and tactical or operational mindsets of the rest of the organization.  Competitive Intelligence helps you to explain competitors better by documenting their strategies, product plans, customer targets and more in specific ways that leads to concrete actions throughout your organization.
• Evaluate strategies. You and your team have set the strategic direction for the company. Regularly, you convene meetings to talk about the progress. Are the strategies working? Are the competitors doing what we expected? Has something about our significant assumptions materially changed? How is each part of the organization functioning to beat the competition? There are multiple important metrics. One of those is how your competition reacts (or does not react) to what you are doing. Competitive Intelligence supports scenarios planning, strategy forecasting and competitor strategy reports by maintaining industry models and competitor profiles.

Your job is difficult but challenging. It helps when you get good and useful inputs. One critical source is a competitive intelligence function that provides information tailored to support your strategies, decisions and role.

Your job is to champion one or more products for your company. Each product needs to be successful in a marketplace crowded with existing competitors. New threats emerge over time that you have to anticipate and proactively manage. Development teams count on your guidance to build the product with the right features. Your general manager relies on you to help deliver the needed revenues and profits. All along the way, you have to understand the environment, explain your recommendations and justify the company’s investments for your product. This is not a job for the timid.

Competitive Intelligence Helps With the Challenges

• Understand the market need. Every product attempts to fulfill a need in the market. Sometimes features represent this. Other times, the segmentation is determined more by price, distribution or something else. Often, a complex combination of market characteristics makes success possible.
  Competitive Intelligence paints a market landscape showing major forces and trends that affect your company’s strategies.
• Characterize the competition. There are products that do much of what your product hopes to do. There are companies that are established, customers that have made choices and strategies that are being executed that affect your potential success.
  Competitive Intelligence illuminates the formulae used by others (including their weaknesses) allowing you to refine your market understanding.
• Define the product. Feature lists are important. More than that, you need to define what is important and compelling about the product. Then, there is a process to document and present this to internal teams for their comment.
  Competitive Intelligence compares products and explains the critical differences to justify product directions.
• Develop the product. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. Your task during development is to guide the teams responsible and answer a myriad of questions. Decisions and tradeoffs are constantly required of you.
  Competitive Intelligence supports decisions making during product development by constantly supplying updated market and product information to you.
• Promote the product. Even before the product development is complete, you have to talk with prospective customers, ecosystem partners, distributors and press to promote the product. Your messaging is critical to proper positioning and a positive reception.
  Competitive Intelligence answers the question of why your product makes more sense than the competitors’ products for your prospective customers.

It is hard to be a good product manager. Why not take every advantage of competitive intelligence information? See an expert and get started.

I get it that they need specific information about competitors. I also know that clients or managers want to increase their confidence in their decision making. And, commonly they want to feel that they won’t be blindsided. Most of all they want help to make wise choices about the future that will reflect well on their leadership.

So what role should I play? Information source? Critic? Counselor? Oracle? Or, maybe, friend?

I can hear you through the computer right now (disagreement and skepticism transmit well). Yes, you think that the first 3 or 4 possibilities often fit. But, definitely not the “friend” role. That is entirely too soft a description that no client or senior manager would provide in a job description. They want bottom line results and value those that directly (directly!) contribute. Tangible, measurable and preferably quick results would be their highest goal.

Yet, I wonder about that. Not understating the need for results and concrete benefits, I think that we sometimes miss the human element of leadership and what it needs most.

Many times leaders are trying desperately to keep ahead of the game. There are rivalries within the company which are threatening their position. The people that work with them are constantly angling for attention and favor. Competitors, of course, would be gleeful if they failed. The Board is constantly evaluating their performance and it is easy to understand that most won’t advance. It’s a jungle and thriving within that jungle is tough. One needs help but where will it come from?

There is not one answer to that question.

The traditional organizational answer is that help will come from people that align their performance with the leader’s agenda because they are incentivized to do so. Since their pay and bonus are determined by the leader, their compliance and support is assumed. This motivation is powerful and not to be ignored.

However, competitive intelligence is an especially interesting role when supplied by an outsider or consultant. The reward system is different but so are the opportunities. Freed from the periodic review cycle and not presenting an alternative agenda, the CI consultant’s access to a leader gives them a unique chance to contribute to the success of the leader. Gone are their fears of being replaced, outmaneuvered or criticized by someone in the organization. Instead the focus can strictly be on getting help.

This is where being a “friend” can make a huge difference.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t think being a “friend” in this context means planning family vacations together. It doesn’t mean that you can avoid delivering tangible value effectively.   And I don’t think that you announce to the leader that you intend to be their friend!

It’s the friend behavior that is important.

The best friends that I have in my personal life have demonstrated that they are trustworthy even when there is a short term cost. They have not neglected to encourage me or to point out where I am going astray. Their recommendations are grounded in understanding what I value and they consider the long term impact of anything that they say or do. Mostly, they sincerely get pleasure out of seeing me succeed. My success takes nothing from them. On the contrary, together we navigate through life that has innumerable ups and downs. They stick with me when others don’t.

There is a parallel in business.

There is a yearning (usually unspoken) among leaders to have friends. Friends that want them to be successful and can be counted on in tough times. Straight talkers that understand the difficulties of the job and the immense challenges. Colleagues that help them solve problems that are vexing and deal with issues that seem intractable. Consultants, I dare say, that honor the leader’s agenda and yet challenge it productively to improve it. In short, they want a business “friend.”

My realization over the years is that relationships, emotional and intellectual, fuel great achievement.

So what are four hints for a competitive intelligence professional to be a “friend” to a client or leader.

1. Learn to listen for the emotional content. This means that you should attempt to get not only a description of the deliverables that are required but also the feelings that prompt the need. Observe how the leader talks and reacts. Is it defensive, aggressive, confident or questioning? Every signal gives clues to unstated needs. Meeting those needs in addition to answering the explicit CI questions will make you special in the eyes of the leader.
2. Observe the environment. It is very useful to observe the leader’s peers and reports. Their postures, words and interactions will speak volumes about the problems that the leader has to deal with every day. The leader will be constantly thinking through how to use the results that you deliver with that group. If you can be helpful with this, your services will be highly valued.
3. Speak the truth. Of course, you say. But the fact is that the leader is often not told the truth (or the whole truth). Maybe it’s because of the environment which discourages boldness. Maybe it’s because the people are too attuned to their own promotions rather than the leader’s. Sometimes people simple are “out of practice.” You can provide unvarnished observations if you muster the personal courage to do so. This will make you standout.
4. Give more than you are paid for. This may seem like economic foolishness. After all, you may have been engaged for a specific purpose at a specific cost to the company. Why give more when they aren’t explicitly paying for more? Simple, it shows that you are atypically interested in the leader and their success. This is what “friends” do and why friends are called back for more projects.

By nature I am a private person that doesn’t make friends easily. Still, I know that having friends and being a friend are enormously enabling in my life. People that pass the “friends” test are granted access to many things that were previously guarded.

I can be many things to leaders that hire me for competitive intelligence but thinking and acting like a friend is the greatest value I can provide to them. It resonates with what they don’t often state but consistently need.

Okay, what do you see or hear that makes you agree (or not) with what I said?

1. We already do competitive intelligence (but it is not helping us).
2. We can’t afford it (but we can accept the costs of not doing it).
3. We don’t believe it can help (because we think we are already are doing everything we need to do).
4. We tried it before (and it didn’t deliver valuable information).
5. We need certainty (and there is some risk in the answers).

I recently met with a marketing manager from a high technology company. We talked about the many challenges that his company is facing. It was clear to me as we talked that he is a very smart and accomplished manager grappling with tough questions (who isn’t?).

How to differentiate their products? How to branch into value added services? How to anticipate the technology and architecture roadmaps for their major customers? How to compete against emerging low margin competitors? How to direct and leverage their R&D effectively? All of this was against the backdrop of multiple years of losses and declining revenues for the firm.

Aside from the general macro economic pressures affecting most everyone, it was clear that the company had some very specific pressures all their own. I heard about the history of competitive intelligence at the company. It turns out that people throughout the organization had some responsibilities for monitoring competitor’s products (this is the common form of competitive intelligence).

Eventually we got around to discussing the kind of competitive intelligence that would answer (or help answer) the questions that we posed. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” I suggested, “if you could get answers with some reasonable confidence to all of those questions?”

“Yes,” he said, “but it would be impossible to get the answers.”

It was then that I was struck by the realization that many people that might benefit from a well organized or improved competitive intelligence function never get started. There are many reasons that they cite but five stand out.

1. We already do it. Usually this means that the responsibility is distributed among many people whose opinions and interpretations are not correlated or summarized. Hence, the coverage of important topics is very uneven. When these conditions exist, it is my experience that there is a recurring dissatisfaction with the effort. The antidote is to prioritize the questions from the strategy leaders and ask if the current approach is answering those questions.
2. We can’t afford it. This attitude is not a failure among business management alone. It is shared with CI professionals that cannot quantify their value to the company. The missing element is almost always the missing appreciation for the value of effective competitive intelligence. Maybe it is because CI people work on things that are “easy” but not “valuable”? (My definition of “value” for competitive intelligence is credible answers to important questions that when answered well may lead to changes in business strategy.)
3. We don’t believe it. See reason 1 above. Sometimes people think that the poor result of what they are already doing means that is all that they can expect from any competitive intelligence effort. After all, our smart people already track the competition and make strategy. How could someone else do better? If they could do it better, how would that reflect on us? Competitive intelligence (when it works well) may be viewed as “internal competition” rather than as a help to strategy leaders in a company. If it is seen as a threat rather than as support for improving competitiveness, it will not be valued by those that need it most.
4. We already tried it. Every leader and manager worth his or her salt keeps track of the competitive environment. Typically, these people have risen to the top of their organizations and are very, very smart. They have at least passing familiarity with common models used for competitive intelligence. They know about SWOT diagrams, maybe they have heard or Porter’s Five Forces and they can already read a competitor’s annual report. However, they may not be familiar with the disciple and problem solving approaches of professional competitive intelligence. Or, maybe they have been given subpar performances by those who have other specialties. Either way, the past colors their ideas of what is possible in the future.
5. We need certainty. Confidence is a precious thing. A confident company can move decisively when a less confident company either doesn’t move or moves slowly. Competitive intelligence is all about confidence. Difficult questions (i.e., “the most valuable ones to answer”) have important answers with varying degrees of certainty that ranges from 100% (we absolutely know!) to 0% (we have no idea). It is in the middle where the challenge exists since that is where most every answer falls. Would an answer that has a 70% likelihood of being true be useful? Some companies would say “no” and that is a problem. If the confidence bar is set at 99%, it almost surely guarantees that competitive intelligence efforts will fail.

In most every case, it takes an enlightened leader to ask the right questions to and demand useful answers from the competitive intelligence function. From the CI professional, it takes great attention to delivering the value (not “easy”, factual summaries) needed by strategy leaders of the business.

These are the conditions when competitive intelligence capabilities will be developed or improved and make a useful, recognized impact on the business strategy of a company.

(Don’t you love it when someone reduces all of the complexities of life to simple categories? And yet, clearly some things fundamentally divide people into camps.)

Standards, or more precisely stated, the expectations that we have for ourselves are one of these dividing lines. Here is the illustration that I like to use. What do you see below?

There is a bar suspended between two posts, of course. Now, if I told you that you had to move between the two posts but not disturb the horizontal bar, you have two choices. You can go under it or you can go over it. Choosing not only where the bar is set but also how you pass through says something about you. And that is what separates all of us into one of two camps.

First of all, think of the bar as representing the set of expectations that we have for ourselves and our work.

Everyone has expectations which soon become evident to those that we spend time with regularly. The expectations (and our ability to deliver on them) largely defines our personal and professional brand. Where you set the bar for competitive intelligence is exceedingly important. Why? Because you will find that you are touching on important subjects involving important people that might drive important changes in the organization. By definition, this requires high expectations of you.

There are 3 areas where you need to decide on high expectations.

1. Integrity – Decide right away that you will have the highest integrity in all of your dealings. Easy to say that this your goal but know that your integrity will be challenged. Directly and indirectly you will be tested to see if you are fair, honest, trustworthy and so on. Fail one of these tests because you are not prepared and there will be little forgiveness. Here is an example of giving The Right Answer to the Trap Question (which happens to be an integrity test).

2. Value – Some people love to do analysis. They are enamored with the techniques, tools and the intellectual stimulus of grinding through data. Others love the presentation of information. Nothing pleases them more than assembling 50 beautiful slides full of animations and transitions. Talking to people and exchanging views is another seductive activity that some CI practitioners enjoy. While all of these things are worthwhile and important, they are all not meaningful when they do not deliver value.

My definition of “value” for competitive intelligence is credible answers to important questions that when answered well may lead to changes in business strategy.

To create an enduring competitive intelligence function, you must deliver value. Satisfaction with anything less means that you will be looking for another job soon.

3. Work Quality – No one (that I know) sets out to do poor work. Nevertheless, poor or mediocre work often is performed by people throughout the corporate world. Sometimes this is enabled by lack of review of the work or by skillful self-insulation of the effects of the work. The evidence of poor work for a CI person may be in shoddy research, haphazard analysis, ineffective presentations or neglected personal relationships. You do not have the option of performing poorly and it is best to understand that from the beginning. The quality of all that you do must be top-notch because it is expected when moving in strategy circles. Your standard must be that of senior leaders that are held accountable by stockholders, senior management and employees.

Setting the bar is step one.

Step two is deciding whether you go over it (meet or exceed expectations) or whether you go under (do the least possible to get by). This is the difference between the high jump and the limbo.

You must sign up to set the bar high and then choose to go over it. This is the only standard that will work over time. It is the only way to effectively influence meaningful change in the business strategy of your company. (Save the limbo for the pool party to celebrate your success.)

Setting some standards is about you and what you choose to aspire to as you develop the competitive intelligence function. The three critical areas are integrity, value and work quality. Once you have done this, you are ready to begin introducing yourself and what you hope to accomplish to the rest of the organization. This will be your competitive intelligence brand.

Next topic is “Introduce The Brand”.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Which ones do you think are especially important?

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

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