Would it make a difference who said it?

Of course it does. When President Obama says something people notice more than when you or I do.

It is the same way in corporations. By the very nature of their positions high level managers are entrusted with more latitude and responsibility. Hence, when they make a statement about the company, its prospects and its performance, people listen more intently.

This phenomenon ripples down the organization. For example, a senior vice president’s words are more significant than those of the director of product marketing. This effect is not a tremendous insight until a competitive intelligence professional makes good use of it. And here is how that is done.

First, you need the competitor’s organization chart.

Wait a minute, you say. I can’t get that. It’s proprietary information and I am an ethical practitioner.

What if you construct it from public information? Perhaps it wouldn’t be perfect or complete but most of the major slots would be filled. Six easy steps will get you there.

• Get a tool to help manage the information. I prefer OrgPlus from Human Concepts. This tool allows you to capture organization information in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet information can be imported into the program to generate graphical organization charts. Updates are easily managed either in the original spreadsheet or in the chart.

• Start at the top. Public corporations must identify all major corporate officers. You will also get the major divisions of the company. Additionally, I like to include the directors of the company since exploring their interrelationships is often insightful for acquisitions and mergers. (It is a separate useful task to map the director relationships.)

• Comb the records of major conferences. Many companies will send representatives to speak at major industry conferences. When they do, they will include their bio which will identify their title, division and key responsibilities.

• Check standards organizations. For most companies, there are important industry standards. An individual company may be a leader or follower in a standard but they will often send senior people to participate. Look at the committees and subcommittees for the company representatives.

• Search social networks. LinkedIn contains a treasure trove of business information. Every current employee is a clue that fills in an organization chart. Each should be added to your database.

• Google. Finally, use a search tool to look for presentations (PPT, PDF) given by company employees. Also do a general search by company and title (usually at the VP and below level).

Now you created this wonderful collection of names and titles and you have imported it into an organization charting tool, what’s next?

Simple, you apply the understanding that all utterances are not equal. The “king’s words” matter most. Put another way, the organization level and position suggest the importance of statements.

Here are some practical ways to apply this understanding.

• Examine press releases. Often, the importance of a release dictates which company official will be quoted. The most important notices will include quotes from an executive officer (up to and including the CEO). Less important releases will be signaled by the quotes from lower level employees (e.g., product managers). Though it is possible that a sly company might try to misdirect attention by downplaying a release, this is unlikely in my experience. The exercise of ranking press releases will attune you to how the competitor values its public statements.

• Track public forums. Public companies regularly present information to the financial community. This is usually the SVP, CFO, COO and CEO responsibility. There are other public forums including the conferences and standards bodies that are attended by lower level officials. If you know their place in the organization (e.g., division, level), you can surmise the interest of their organization. If you know their interest over time, you can use this information with other data that you have accumulated to improve your guesses of their strategic directions.

• Monitor comings and goings. The addition to or subtraction from an organization is always information. The arrival of a prominent outsider may signal dissatisfaction with the current organization. Or, maybe it signals a new strategic direction. Similarly, a departure may indicate that an existing strategy has lost its advocate. Admittedly there are many reasons for people changing companies. However, knowing more about their organizational context will suggest richer implications of the change.

If you create a company’s organization chart, apply the implications and track this over time, you begin to get a deeper sense of how a competitor works. After a while, you might begin to feel that you know the people (though you may never have met them). You begin to understand what drives them, to guess at the challenges they face to execute their strategies and to grasp their strengths and weaknesses.

This understanding is precious.

Now you can tell your own king how to compete more successfully.

A while back, I was softly singing a song when a teenager nearby overheard me. The song was one from the 70’s named “Signs“. The chorus is “Sign Sign everywhere a sign, Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind, Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign”. The teenager was amazed that I knew the song which mystified me. Then I found out that another group had remade the song in the last few years. The teenager (probably like I did when I was his age) assumed that everything is new. My experience is that few things are new but that many are rediscovered.

One thing that is true in competitive intelligence (CI) is that signs are everywhere. Contrary to the image of a spy sleuthing through trash or bugging phones, an ethical CI professional is swamped with publically available information. The question is rarely about the quantity of information but how to identify and interpret the valuable information.

For example, suppose you want to know if a company might be wanting extend a product line. Maybe they have a couple of products in the line which are not threatening to your business but any extension would begin to encroach into markets that you valued.

There are several things to do.

• First, make sure that you know all of their current products. Then, sort them into product lines. Create a timeline for each product line so that you know the rate of new product introductions.  Usually a company will make all of this information easily available on their website.

• Second, assign values to product lines. This can be a qualitative evaluation. The intent is to understand how important the product line is to the company.  Part of the valuation is also how important the product line is to you.

• Third, research how the company trademarks the product names. This is a straightforward exercise of querying the database at the US Patent & Trademark Office. Sometimes companies will trademark names in advance of the actual product introductions.

• Fourth, where intellectual property is involved, research the patent position of the company. It is often helpful to use a tool such as the one from Innography to organize and facilitate the search. The goal is to get indicators (“signs”) of where the company is investing its R&D resources since that often points to the types of new products that will be introduced.

• Fifth, look at the company’s partnerships and investments. Many times a company needs help to complete a product. Every time that they engage with another company, they are seeking some benefit. Tracking the relationships and the likely value of the relationship will give clues to the company’s future directions.

There are many more ways to see the signs. They are everywhere.

When looking at another company, that company’s future plans are important to know. The company may be contemplating entering or leaving a market. They may be creating products which increase their competitiveness. Product lines may be expanded or contracted.

There is no one measure (short of public announcements) that signals the future. However there are many activities and actions which may help produce a reasonable guess about future plans. Job postings are one type of signal that may indicate a company’s future plans.

Most companies are good about publishing their job openings. Some companies even provide information about the level of opening (e.g., director, senior engineer, VP) and the division or product involved. This information can be captured at three month intervals to help identify trends. The captured listing should be sorted by location (certain activities occur at specific locations, product/division and levels). You want to know the following.

• Are job listings increasing or decreasing? (might signal changing R&D investment levels)
• What specialties are listed most? Least? (might signal turnover or expansion)
• Where are the centers of activity and how does this map to known products? (might signal what is being developed)
• What new skills (i.e., those not needed for the company’s known products) are being listed? (might signal new product type)
• How are recent acquisitions/mergers affecting job listings? (might signal plans for integrating the new company)

There are cautions to observe with this type of information. First, a job posting is not a job. That is, the company is making no promise to actually fill a position just because there is a job posting. Second, without turnover numbers, it is difficult to directly understand that a job posting (if filled) represents a staff expansion or not. Third, for companies with large campuses, it is more difficult to match postings with specific products (unless they tell you in the posting).

Mining job listings effectively over time helps the analyst map out the competitor’s future product plans, identify their development centers and understand how they expect to expand (or contract) their competencies.

One of my favorite Dilbert’s is the one about the quills. The strip starts with the question (paraphrasing) “Why is it that the best analysis technique is always the one that the analyst knows best?” Then, the next few frames show how different specialists recommend their specialty to solve the problem (e.g., the hard driving manager says “we just need to kick some hiney”). The last frame shows a porcupine who says that we “just have to stick them with quills!”

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)