I was reading through the news the other day and came across the Time Magazine website. Time has posted an exhaustive set of Top 10 lists covering the past year (The Top 10 Everything of 2009). For instance, there is a list for the top 10 songs, a list for the top 10 movies and a list for the top 10 new species (glad someone is counting and ranking them!).

There are also lists about negative things. For example, there are the top 10 political gaffes, the top 10 worst business deals and the top 10 awkward moments. It is fun to read such things because  mistakes often standout as much or more than accomplishments. The mistakes are sometimes funny, occasionally painful and almost always useful for learning (even when we did not make them ourselves).

It has taken me a long time to value mistakes in my professional life appropriately. Although they can still make me feel bad and they are never my goal, I finally have accepted that they are the inevitable but needed fuel for improvement. Why not embrace them, learn from them and move on? Thus, my new motto has become:

Try many things, fail fast, learn quickly and succeed sooner.

In that spirit, here are my top 10 competitive intelligence mistakes. (Perhaps I will write my top 10 successes later.)

1. Ceded the presentation. I once led a competitive intelligence team that produced numerous studies for senior management. For a variety of reasons, I did not present our results during senior management meetings. Instead, another person took that role after we did the work. Who do you suppose got the credit and exposure?
2. Missed the education. One organization that I served loved SWOTs and so I faithfully produced them. It turns out that they loved SWOTs because they did not know about any other model for presenting results. Moreover, they were using SWOTs incorrectly! I missed the early recognition that senior management may need education about various models and their suitability for an analysis problem. It came back to haunt me when I later tried to introduce new models.
3. Skipped the review. In one case, my job was to coordinate others that produced competitive intelligence analysis. The problem came when the final presentation was readied for senior management whenever the author resisted reviewing the report with me. As a result, they usually made many easily corrected mistakes when presenting to senior management. Who do you think got the blame?
4. Avoided the relationship. As an introvert, my idea of a good time is not found in new relationships (especially high stress ones). Since there was always a lot to do while sitting in my office, I once systematically neglected the formation and nurturing of relationships among senior management. Do you suppose that senior management shared information, concerns and needs freely with those that they did not know? Of course not and a competitive intelligence function (that was me) suffered as a result.
5. Muted the alarm. It is easy to be busy establishing infrastructure, monitoring news and responding to discrete requests. That took a lot of my time in one assignment. What I missed doing was proactively analyzing the competitive risks to the organization. The net effect of my choice was to fail to deliver the most valuable, integrated intelligence to senior management. Instead of being strategic, I was satisfied being tactical and therefore did not raise the proper flags. Did anyone care about my beautiful website then?
6. Avoided the courage. Once I got started in competitive intelligence, it did not take long to realize that I sometimes had sensitive information for senior management. It was sensitive because it was not what they wanted to hear (so I thought). Many times, I talked myself out of walking to their office to give them such news. Frankly, it scared me to imagine their displeasure with me if I did that. In retrospect, I had it entirely backwards. Had I delivered the news well (and I was capable of doing so), their respect for my team and me would have vastly increased.
7. Did not claim the victory. We had an assignment to analyze a geographical competitor. The analysis showed how they were winning. For good reasons, my company decided not to compete with them and withdrew from the market. This was a success! I should have found ways to appropriately publicize the success among my customers. I did not. This left open the possibility in some people’s minds that we were not contributing value.
8. Acted too passively. There is a healthy pattern whereby competitive intelligence should respond to senior management requests. However, over time, much more assertive actions are needed. In one case in a large organization, I waited too much, preferred “perfect” analysis over effective early alerts and assumed that senior management was happy. They were not. That unhappiness was reflected in their overall lack of support for competitive intelligence.
9. Assumed too much. Senior managers are typically smart people. I thought that most of them knew a great deal about competition, competitive analysis and early warning. I found out quickly that the knowledge is often quite product focused. I made two mistakes with this. First, I began trying to deemphasize product analysis by balancing it with other views. It sounds reasonable (even now) but management was not ready for that. Second, I assumed that senior managers were active learners about business and competitive models. Guess what? Many of them are not. Ouch.
10. Stopped too soon. I began my work in competitive intelligence focused on analysis. Quickly I realized that presentation was also important. Too late, I got it that decision-making and, ultimately, changes were the right goals. I cannot tell you how many times I left a meeting after having presented beautiful analysis with the sense that senior management was poorly served. I know why now. They needed help understanding what to do and I had not provided any such assistance.

Thankfully, I do not make these mistakes much anymore. Instead, I am on to my new set of mistakes. Perhaps next year I will only have enough material for a Top 5 list? Somehow, I doubt it.