Enough already! Your work life is busy enough without someone telling you that you need to do still more things. Demands from your bosses, subordinates and customers inundate you. There is barely time to check your email, never mind respond to the flood of requests, meetings and other required activities. And then there is the business environment where survival alone seems to be a high goal. “Please” you want to say. No more. Not now. Not for me.

On the other hand, the vulnerabilities in business have never been clearer to you. Many good people that you know are out of work and suffering. You have dodged the bullet so far but you know that your company needs to do better. If the company does not win, your job may be the next to go. You remember a time, not so long ago, when ambition and possibilities motivated you more than fear. You enjoyed that time. It was a time of hard competition but winning, not just surviving, dominated your thinking.

It is time to think about winning again. It is time to take the measure of the competitors left standing and to attack. It is time to put together strategies that comprehend the market realities, accentuate your company’s strengths and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses.

How will you do all of that?

Let the CEO hatch the grand schemes. Let the General Manager make the management presentations and get the credit. Let Marketing create their wonderful stories about the future. Let the Product Manager be the face that most associate with the product. Your job, simply put, is to make their dreams possible. You, and your teams, organize the people, harness the technologies, execute the processes and deliver the products that fuel all of those dreams.

Most of the time, you have to focus on the concrete. There is not time to think fancifully or speculatively about the future. Taking your eye off the ball means that something could slip and that would result in many unhappy people. You take pride in avoiding such disappointments. You are reliable, conscientious and inclined to precision.

Still, you are not oblivious to what is happening in the world and among your competitors. Their engineering organizations are trying to beat yours. Some of the things that they do are outstanding. Their technology bets are sometimes different from yours. Product teardowns have given you insight into their product architecture and there are things to admire. You wonder if you doing everything that needs to be done to win. What should you be learning and changing to stay in front? How would you know?

It is a balancing act. Keep the processes humming while surveying the competitive landscape occasionally to understand where and how to improve. It would be great to have help with this. Perhaps Competitive Intelligence could help. Here are some possibilities.

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It took you years of hard work to reach the corner office.

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.

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Everyone else is working on the current products and the near-term tasks. Meanwhile, you are responsible for what comes next. Your focus is the next wave of products and the technologies that they require. You are monitoring key standards bodies, investments made by competitors and shifting loyalties of the key customers. There is pressure to make sure that the company is preparing correctly for this future. Your job depends on making the right calls and convincing busy people that you are right.

The bulk of the organization focuses on tactics. There is urgency in their actions. Near-term competition and priorities consume most of management’s attention. The last thing that most want is to be distracted with thinking about the future, especially when it might negatively affect what they are doing today. Your job, however, is to convince these busy people to change because of what is coming. They need to be convinced to balance what is pressing today with what is necessary to prepare for the future.

Few have the right combination of skill, motivation and shear persistence to do this job well. Here is what you must accomplish and how Competitive Intelligence helps with those challenges.

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