From “Everything You Know is Wrong” by The Firesign Theatre (1974) – Comedy Group

Twenty five years ago I worked on a top secret military project for my company. It had been going on for some time when I started and, as far as I know, it is still going on. It was a fascinating application of technology that I would have loved to talk about with my family and friends. I was proud of what we were trying to do, my small role in the project and, of course, the ultimate application. Unsurprisingly, I am bound by employment agreement and federal law to not discuss what I did or the product that we were building.

Competitive intelligence is similarly difficult to talk about.

Just imagine that you have completed a CI project for your company or for a client. Because of your superior methods, uncommon insight and excellent timing, you uncover something that results in a significant competitive advantage for the company. Who are you going to tell? What are you allowed to say? And, what is the impact on your future work of these answers?

Therein lies the problem. It is hard to talk about CI successes.

Yes, you can discuss the success with your management sponsor. Maybe you can share your successes with colleagues at the same company. Perhaps you can abstract some lessons for more general audiences. Nevertheless, a detailed discussion of what you did is commonly antithetical to your role.

That is, a company or client is unlikely to want others to know explicitly how or when they gained a competitive advantage.

Why? Because the competitors may adjust their own strategies in response, the duration of the advantage may be lessened, the original analysis techniques may be copied or the exposure will give competitors insight into the company’s own strategic thought processes. Even when these reasons are not articulated, they are powerfully felt disincentives to talking in detail about competitive intelligence successes.

While being quiet makes sense for a company, it impedes the development of CI professionals.

Just think about the example of a great artist. Suppose that their paintings are magnificent expressing emotion and imagination that is compelling and distinctive. The artist’s technique is a textbook example of all that is good in painting. The national museum has an exhibition ongoing for the artist. However, because of competition with other museums that are trying to draw the same crowds, the national museum allows no pictures of the paintings, no discussion of the artist’s techniques and no advertising about the exhibit. If the artist is solely dependent on the good graces of the national museum, then their public career may well be stunted. At the end of the day, would that really benefit the national museum?

Competitive intelligence professionals need exposure to prosper and develop.

Here are five things that are needed to advance the general art of competitive intelligence.

1. We need our myths. These are the established (usually older) stories that tell dramatic success stories. In military intelligence, there are many such stories from major conflicts. From WWII, there were the code breakers in England, the capture of the Ultra device in Poland from the Germans and the ambush of Yamamoto in the south Pacific.
2. We need professional associations. There, likeminded people can gather to exchange encouragement, advice and credentials. Obviously the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) exists for this purpose. This is not enough. We need to be linked to professional associations frequented by our customers (i.e., American Management Association, Association for Strategic Planning). We shouldn’t miss that our generic (not just our captive management) customers can help us understand the critical competitive issues of our industry and appreciate the skills needed to decipher this picture.
3. We need a marketing campaign. CI people are often analytic, introspective people as well they need to be. Faced by a mountain of facts and a hazy view of the future, those personality traits equip CI professionals to make sense of it all for others. The only problem is that CI people seem to like to talk to other CI people the most. But the success of Competitive Intelligence is dependent on customer understanding. We need to know what our customers value and expect. Then, from this knowledge, we need to think like marketers rather than analysts. Marketing people are adept at telling stories that hook their audiences because the stories make emotional, value oriented connections.
4. We need iconic figures. Lee Iacocca became the symbol for a resurgent Chrysler in the 1980’s (where are you now, Lee?). Michael Jordan was the featured representative of excellence for basketball in the 1990’s. There are many such people that come to embody an industry or a profession. Though others don’t reach the level of these icons, the very fact that they exist is a shorthand definition of success and a voice to speak about the profession to others.
5. We need to relax. Part of the problem is the ferocious clamoring for attention that permeates everyone’s personal and business lives. Sell, sell, sell is the common advice for individuals and companies. If you are creating a new market segment or brand, this makes especially good sense. The fact is that (lowercase) competitive intelligence is not new and it is not going away as long as there is competition. People seem to have an innate comparison facility that is honed to observe others. It is this impulse that competitive intelligence take to a more methodical and actionable level for companies. Simply, competitive intelligence will always be relevant and the adaptable professional will succeed whatever their title.

The summary is that (lowercase) competitive intelligence will always be important. It will be done better when (uppercase) Competitive Intelligence is developed and promoted the right ways.

Do you agree with these thoughts? What else needs to happen?

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

My experience in competitive intelligence (CI) is that organizations have favorite techniques to interpret the competitive environment. For example, many companies love SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) diagrams. These may be useful however they are clearly not the right approach to model or interpret all issues of the competitive environment.

When a small number of approaches are used repeatedly, it may signal what I call “analysis poverty” in the organization. Analysis poverty is the condition whereby a large variety of problems are addressed by a narrow set of analytical techniques. The impact of analysis poverty is that the organization will not likely understand the environment appropriately and they will dampen the impact (through misapplication) of the techniques that they know best.

Analysis poverty presents the competitive intelligence professional with some challenges.

1.  Education - This starts with the CI professional. It is important that he or she be regularly learning new approaches to understand the competitive landscape, model possible responses and mobilizing the organization for change. There are multiple avenues for expanding ones repertoire including the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals and training offered through organizations like the Academy of Competitive Intelligence.

2.  Training - By this I mean training in the organization. This is a far more subtle task that the self learning. Most senior managers have little time to test “untried” techniques for critical issues. The “accepted” techniques (even if misapplied) may be preferred to change. The CI professional must learn to introduce alternatives appropriately to this audience. Usually I have found low risk settings an excellent place to try one new approach at a time.

3. Leverage - It is a fact of life that some organizations value some types of work done by those outside of the organization (e.g. industry analysts) over that produced internally. If this is true, then the challenge for the CI professional is to find those sources that are considered highly credible. Then, using the validation of the external source, the task is to customize an organization specific example.

4. Testing - Even when new techniques have not been accepted for general use in presentations by the CI professional, it is often completely acceptable for the CI analyst to test what is new for themselves. This seems obvious but may be overlooked if the presentation of the results is thought to be the critical success factor. Actually, the derived insights will be more valued over time and if the new techniques enable such insights, then their value will be easily illustrated after the suitable testing.

There are a couple of books that I have used to stimulate my thinking about analysis techniques.

• Business and Competitive Analysis: Effective Application of New and Classic Methods (Fleisher/Bensoussan)
• Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition (Fleisher/Bensoussan)