I was eighteen years old, fiercely independent and ready to go to college. We were living in Wyoming at the time and the college was in Florida. The long road trip ahead of me was the first one that I had ever undertaken by myself. I would have to make all the preparations beforehand, all of the decisions along the way and, of course, I was responsible for how I performed in school.

But first my trusty VW Bug had to get me there.

I set about to show everyone (especially my parents) that I could handle all of the preparations. I plotted the route for my 4 day journey. I decided on everything that had to go with me to college and made sure that it would fit in the car. Most of all, I prepared the car.

I checked the tires, the windshield washer fluid, the oil levels and so on. Boy, wasn’t I being thorough? And without any help to boot. About that time, my father asked if I had checked the sparkplugs. Well, I hardly needed any help from him or anyone else. I was a grown up and besides, didn’t he see what a great job I was already doing? “I’ll take care of it!” I snapped and he left the subject alone.

The departure day finally came and I drove off south through Colorado. Goodbye to living full time with the family. Hello to the college life. Independence day had arrived and I was doing just fine.

The first day was uneventful. I made it through the mountain passes of southern Colorado (barely) and arrived late in the day in Dumas, Texas. Somewhat nervously I checked in to the motel while halfway expecting that they would tell me I was too young to be traveling alone. All I remember about that night was the excitement of being on the road. I couldn’t sleep so I got up at 4 AM to start the next day’s travel. I left the motel in the dark that Sunday morning planning to travel a great distance that day (wouldn’t everyone be impressed with my accomplishment).

That’s when it happened.

My VW engine began to misfire. It jerked as I tried to get up to highway speed. I was mystified about the cause. This had never happened before. What was I going to do? I limped into Amarillo looking for a miracle. Unfortunately, there were no car dealers open at 6 AM on Sunday morning. I decided to keep going for a while. Later that morning I stopped to call home. Specifically I wanted to talk to my brother because he knew a lot more about cars than I did (or do).

He asked me, “Did you check the sparkplugs?” Uh-oh. “Actually, I checked everything but the sparkplugs before leaving home,” I replied sheepishly.

Sometimes in corporate life we are diligent to check many things.

Where I live it is common to have slab foundations (How to Build a Slab Foundation) for homes.

Slab foundations are solid blocks of poured concrete on top of which the structure is erected. There are several important characteristics that a slab foundation must have in order to support the house that is being built.

• It must be shaped correctly for the house. It is costly and difficult to alter the basic shape after it hardens.

• Although it looks like a solid mass of concrete, it actually conceals a great deal of infrastructure including electrical conduits, plumbing and cables (which provide strength).

• Everything attached to or embedded in the foundation must be in the right place (again, it is hard to change things fixed in concrete). For example, the plumbing for sewage should emerge where the bathrooms are planned to be.
• Finally, after doing all of the necessary things, it is important to preserve your flexibility for all of the remaining elements of the home. For instance, the placement of the second story wall for the guest bedroom is not to be tied to something in the design of the foundation.

The foundation serves its purpose even though it is not a visible feature of the home. The structure above obscures what is beneath it and many people give little thought to what they don’t see. However, you absolutely must pay attention to your CI foundation. And the quiet time after your first management presentation is a good time to establish what will support all that you do later.

There are many things to do to be successful in a competitive intelligence (CI) function. There are some things that will likely doom an effort. When working in CI it is important to understand  both perspectives. That is, there are things to ensure and things to avoid.

Here is my list of things to do to “doom” a competitive intelligence effort. It behooves a person involved to work to avoid these circumstances if they want to be successful.

• Bury it in the organization – This is a failure indication because it means that the CI likely has little access to management and what they are thinking. Sometimes this happens when the CI is seen primarily as a sales and marketing tool rather than as a strategy enabler.

• Concentrate on tactical questions – A CI function gets few chances to establish its value. Given limited resources and time, tactical issues can consume all of the available capacity. This will limit the strategic impact of the CI and be of less value to those that need to sponsor the effort.

• Highly filter information in both directions – It is difficult to provide perfect information or anticipate all that is needed. Excessive filtering means that there is little ongoing calibration between CI people and management. Without calibration, it is likely that the CI effort will diverge from what is most important to management.

• Focus on undifferentiated information – It is easy to accumulate information. It is harder to provide insight that is useful. As the quantity of information increases and the insight decreases, the value of CI is lessened.

• Staff with people that have little credibility in the organization – People trust people. At least, they trust certain people. The CI function must be trusted and valued for their insights. Without that credibility, information, reports and analyses will be ignored.

• Avoid measuring its value – At the end of the day, competitive intelligence is an overhead function. Its value will always be debated and the function will be subject to elimination without measurement of its impact. A profession CI person will regularly be seeking quantitative and qualitative feedback from management about the impact of their effort.

See my presentation on Competitive Intelligence Lessons at http://tinyurl.com/dbuyb7.