You are a busy person and taking time to read this is a significant investment for you.

You know what it is like to create and run a business successfully in a market environment that is highly competitive and requires that everyone on your teams understands and contributes to the mission that you have defined. Executing the current business is difficult enough without the ever present and pressing complications of competition. Yet, competition is real and what others do makes a difference to your success or failure. Competitive intelligence can help you navigate through the complexities of the competitive environment better.

Alignment leading to tangible results in market share, revenue and profits is what you are after. Your goal is strategies that mobilize the organization and point the right way forward. There are five common imperatives that you have and several ways that competitive intelligence can help you.

• Protect the current business. Operational issues are important because today’s business funds tomorrow’s investments. Current products must be sold. Current customers must be serviced. How are you doing compared to your major competitors? Would benchmarking show more that you have more advantages or disadvantages?
  Compare selling and business development strategies with competitors, benchmark your operations and analyze customer decision-making criteria.
• Mobilize the organization. No important competitor is passive. Dedicated people at those companies are working to shape the future in their favor rather than yours. Their strategies are being implemented and you need to know what they are and what they mean to your strategies. One person cannot possibly do this alone. However, a well trained and focused team can do it and win. What would it mean to you to have your organization highly tuned to the competitive environment?
  Provide periodic competitive news and alerts, implement information sharing tools and train teams to identify important competitive intelligence issues.

• Read the rest of this entry

It probably wasn’t until I spent time in Malindi, Kenya, that I got a visceral sense of what it meant to be in the minority. My skin was far lighter, my hair was different and my clothes seemed out of place. I was a “mzungu” (white person). The people were quite kind yet I knew that most of the social adaptations would have to come from me. For a relatively brief time I felt what minorities must feel all the time when they live permanently with people different from themselves.

What does skin color and social background have to do with strategic or tactical thinking?

Only the recognition that the world is dominated by tactical thinking and a strategist will always be in the minority. “Minority thinking” means that most of the time the strategists must adapt to the tacticians rather than the inverse. It does not mean however that strategists are less valuable or needed. And it does not mean that strategy is unimportant. But a strategist that only masters strategic thinking without understanding how to act tactically will most likely fail (or at best succeed sporadically).

The critical implication is that a strategist has a particular requirement to speak two languages. First, there is the native language of strategy. Second, there is the foreign language of the majority that is primarily tactical.

Say something strategic to most tactical people and it would be like a Kenyan saying something in Swahili to me. Aside from “hakuna matata” (no worries) and a few other phrases, I would be lost. Similarly, when strategy encounters a tactical mindset, the strategist faces the likely outcome that they will be misunderstood unless they follow some simple rules.

Here are 5 powerful rules that can help guide a strategist’s behavior and translate their message.

One of the things that intrigues me about competitive intelligence is the types of relationships that are required to be successful. Intuitively I think and empirically I know that people matter most. We get assignments from them, ask them to tell us their fears and deliver implicit commentary on their performance even as we report on the competitive environment.

I get it that they need specific information about competitors. I also know that clients or managers want to increase their confidence in their decision making. And, commonly they want to feel that they won’t be blindsided. Most of all they want help to make wise choices about the future that will reflect well on their leadership.

So what role should I play? Information source? Critic? Counselor? Oracle? Or, maybe, friend?

I can hear you through the computer right now (disagreement and skepticism transmit well). Yes, you think that the first 3 or 4 possibilities often fit. But, definitely not the “friend” role. That is entirely too soft a description that no client or senior manager would provide in a job description. They want bottom line results and value those that directly (directly!) contribute. Tangible, measurable and preferably quick results would be their highest goal.

Yet, I wonder about that. Not understating the need for results and concrete benefits, I think that we sometimes miss the human element of leadership and what it needs most.

Many times leaders are trying desperately to keep ahead of the game. There are rivalries within the company which are threatening their position. The people that work with them are constantly angling for attention and favor. Competitors, of course, would be gleeful if they failed. The Board is constantly evaluating their performance and it is easy to understand that most won’t advance. It’s a jungle and thriving within that jungle is tough. One needs help but where will it come from?

There is not one answer to that question.

One hundred and twenty years ago the scene in the American West would have been familiar. The scorching air would have been thick and dusty. The only street through the town of rickety boarded buildings would be crowded with cowboys and their horses. The one refuge from the oppressive conditions was the local saloon. And that was where you found all manner of folks. The tired cowhands, the frontier entertainers and the bad guys would be there. Everyone knew that the bad guys always came to the saloon looking for trouble. It was not a place for the unprepared or naïve because they were easily recognized and exploited. Winning for the bad guys was dominating the saloon.

Still, there weren’t many options for places to go. It was a given that sooner or later the good guys went there too.

So you might imagine going there with a friend. Ah, your friend. The paragon of truth and justice. A cowboy that was strong and good. He represented all that right about the world and that is exactly what made him a target. Others (the bad guys) could not prosper when he was there and they knew it.

As a friend, how would you prepare him for the saloon so that he could walk out alive?

There are 5 things that you might do.