If you managed things right, people all over the company are beginning to notice the competitive intelligence work that you are doing. Your name is known. Probably they have heard about your website and seen at least one of the analyses that you completed. Things are really bubbling and other senior managers are taking notice. Your initial senior manager sponsor is happy with what you have done and just a little proud of your work and their role in getting it started. Now you will expand your effort to go for the value (to the larger organization).

The next step is very important and sensitive.

Simply put, you have to move beyond your initial sponsor to deliver value to other senior managers. Why? Because effective competitive intelligence (CI) generally moves “up and over” in an organization (rather than remaining isolated in one group). This reflects the simple truth that long term CI value is needed by multiple senior strategy managers. Significantly, most are not getting such information that is researched, interpreted and delivered as needed.

Your goal is to get your initial sponsor’s help to facilitate a competitive intelligence discussion among their peers.

If you haven’t lived with senior managers up to now, it’s time for you to move into their neighborhood. Assuming that you don’t get promoted, the most likely way to accomplish this is to be invited and the best person to issue the invitation is the manager that you have already helped prosper. Once you are invited the goal is to establish relationships that can endure. In other words, you want a recurring invitation that goes beyond formal meetings (and that can be issued by more than one senior manager). Ideally, you will nurture relationships that result in unguarded discussions over time. It is through the informal discussions that you will discover the true pain points (or opportunities, if you wish) that present openings for CI to make a strategic impact.

I was in sixth grade. This was the first year of school that we changed classes to learn different subjects and we had 6 different teachers (one for each subject). My second period class was English and it was taught by an older woman that inspired fear in all of her students (including me). Luckily, we knew that she could only give us the dreaded homework assignments on the designated “English homework” nights.

One day she assigned us homework on the wrong night! No one said anything to her at the time. Who would have dared? Later that day when we were with our favorite teacher during sixth period, everyone began complaining about the English homework that we had been given. “It’s not right!” we declared together like a choir that was trained to sing in harmony.

Then, much to our surprise and consternation, our favorite teacher said, “I’m just going to get Ms. English and bring her right over.” The class became silent as we waited. A proverbial pin might have dropped and we would have all heard it at that moment.

When Ms. English came in, she glared at us all with her hands on her hips and asked “who said that I assigned homework on the wrong night?”

My business motto is simple.

“Helping Smart People to Think Clearly About Their Business and Competitive Strategy”

I chose that phrase because it captures what fascinates me about people and challenges that they face. There are a lot of smart people in the business. Experts at technology, manufacturing processes, financial models and so much more inhabit the corporate world. Yet, these smart people sometimes get “stuck” when they work outside their expertise.

In the high technology industries that I am most used to it is a merit badge of sorts to be considered “smart.”  Knowing facts, solving problems that others struggle with, completing tasks faster are things that separate smart people from the crowd. Over time this helps increase the confidence that the same smart people feel about their capabilities.

With so many smart people, we might expect strategies that are well considered and implemented. Many people that I speak with tell me that this is not the case for their companies.

So why aren’t business and competitive strategies better?

There are two reasons that I have observed in nearly thirty years of work.

In meeting with leaders from multiple companies, there is a common thread that I observe about the need for and lack of competitive intelligence in their businesses. Given the dearth of competitive intelligence insight, why don’t companies spend more time and money getting better at this function? There are five common reasons that I hear from companies.

1. We already do competitive intelligence (but it is not helping us).
2. We can’t afford it (but we can accept the costs of not doing it).
3. We don’t believe it can help (because we think we are already are doing everything we need to do).
4. We tried it before (and it didn’t deliver valuable information).
5. We need certainty (and there is some risk in the answers).