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.

One of my favorite assignments has been to visit my alma mater and recruit graduating students. It’s been fun to sit across from them as they start their careers and give them a sense of what is possible in the corporate world. They are eager, bright and full of potential. Who knows what they will accomplish as they follow their passions and develop their skills?

I fondly remember my own college interviews. My interests came down to two very good choices of solid companies. Both did the kind of work that interested me. Both were in good geographic locations. Either might have worked out well. I chose the Texas company and never looked back. All these years later, I can state that I was well rewarded for my career there. I learned, contributed and gave back to the company many things.

The inducement to work for one company or another comes down to the factors that are important to you. As I mentioned, I cared about the focus of the company, my specific assignment, where I would live and, of course, the pay. More or less standard concerns, I would guess. That’s the way I was recruited and it was the way that I recruited others that were starting out in corporate life.

What about recruiting for the competitive intelligence function that you are building? Why do you need other people? What inducements make a difference to the people you want to recruit? And how is the best way to approach your candidates?

In the formation process of the competitive intelligence function, it will be essential to recruit help from within the company.

Here are three reasons why that is true.

1. There is too much to do for one person. A prior step of The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series dealt with expanding the scope. If that step was successful, you are now into areas beyond what you started doing. Engaging with other senior managers (besides your sponsor) will introduce a wide range of topics. Your choice will be either to accept the new assignments (which means that you will need more resources) or reject them because the people to help are not currently identified. I suggest that you accept and put a staffing plan together. More about this later in this article.
2. The needed knowledge (e.g., financial, marketing, technology, business development) is unlikely to reside in one person’s head. The exciting challenge of competitive intelligence is the diversity of subjects involved. The valuable competitive intelligence work comes from people that can integrate the disparate information into patterns and stories. Given a choice, this is where you want to focus. The implication is that you will work with a range of experts that have narrower focused than yours. Your task is to identify and begin nurturing these contributors. Make is easy and rewarding for them to supply you with information.
3. Less intuitively, it is important to cede ownership of some of the work to cement the support for competitive intelligence. Even if you could do everything, you wouldn’t want to do so. The reason is that you are after meaningful change in the organization’s strategies to make the business more successful. Most businesses involve many people that must understand and support change. And there are not people more interested in these topics than the people that feel ownership. Your job, after recruiting for scale and specialties, is to recruit owners. One way you do this is to give them some say in the direction of the analysis and the interpretation of the results.

How do you recruit someone to help with competitive intelligence?

If you managed things right, people all over the company are beginning to notice the competitive intelligence work that you are doing. Your name is known. Probably they have heard about your website and seen at least one of the analyses that you completed. Things are really bubbling and other senior managers are taking notice. Your initial senior manager sponsor is happy with what you have done and just a little proud of your work and their role in getting it started. Now you will expand your effort to go for the value (to the larger organization).

The next step is very important and sensitive.

Simply put, you have to move beyond your initial sponsor to deliver value to other senior managers. Why? Because effective competitive intelligence (CI) generally moves “up and over” in an organization (rather than remaining isolated in one group). This reflects the simple truth that long term CI value is needed by multiple senior strategy managers. Significantly, most are not getting such information that is researched, interpreted and delivered as needed.

Your goal is to get your initial sponsor’s help to facilitate a competitive intelligence discussion among their peers.

If you haven’t lived with senior managers up to now, it’s time for you to move into their neighborhood. Assuming that you don’t get promoted, the most likely way to accomplish this is to be invited and the best person to issue the invitation is the manager that you have already helped prosper. Once you are invited the goal is to establish relationships that can endure. In other words, you want a recurring invitation that goes beyond formal meetings (and that can be issued by more than one senior manager). Ideally, you will nurture relationships that result in unguarded discussions over time. It is through the informal discussions that you will discover the true pain points (or opportunities, if you wish) that present openings for CI to make a strategic impact.

My wonderful son stood in front of me excited to be retelling the adventures he had at church camp last week. He was full of words and stories. I just love hearing him talk about his experiences and answer questions. I asked him about his favorite food, the friends he made, the different play activities, the bus trip and so on.

Did he remember the things that his mother told him before he left on the trip? For instance, did he always put on sunscreen (the Texas sun is bright and very hot in July)? Yes, he assured me that he always had done so.

Did he remember to always wear his swim shirt to the lake? That’s when he averted his eyes, shifted his feet and changed his tone. “Well,” he said “I only went to the lake twice.” And then he grinned at me and I knew. TRANSLATION: Dad, I forgot about the shirt.

When you know someone really well, you can often sense their message from many cues that are more telling and accurate than their words. All of the other signals give them away. In fact, in a strange way, the actual words are distracting as often as they are informative.

Interpersonal signals abound among those we know best (and that know us). I use this often with close friends.

We might be listening to a speaker when one of us will signal the other with a lifted eye brow (TRANSLATION: can you believe this speaker?). A casual flicker of the hand (TRANSLATION: this is not important), a half smile (TRANSLATION: I’ll tell why it’s amusing later) or rolling eyes (TRANSLATION: we are wasting our time) can all be quite meaningful when interpreted correctly.

In competitive intelligence we can use the same signals (except that our subjects are other companies).