Masters of Competitive Intelligence

The past masters of competitive intelligence offer the following four pieces of advice:

1. Act on critical intelligence with speed - Nathan Rothschild.
2. You will need less information if you build on past experience - Warren Buffett.
3. See your competitors through the eyes of your customers - probably the clearest view of all - Sam Walton and Michael Dell.
4. Scan the market from all dimensions including the political - Richard Branson.

Several other tools and ideas are important with respect to competitive intelligence. One is the idea of transparency. An important lesson is that transparency in the context of competitive intelligence, does not just happen and it's not the product of architecture alone. You need to direct intelligence, to give people a place to send it and to provide a purpose. You need to direct it - find places and portals - such as a network or a war room where all becomes visible.

"I can find out anything within three phone calls" and there are six points of contact from anyone else is another key idea. Competitive intelligence needs people who are builders and developers of connections. Development needs to be in their blood - the "look around and just-three-phone-calls-will-do-it" types. There is also a deeper and more substantive competent to this - day in and day out, people emit signals that reveal their intentions and deepest desires. If we do no pick them up, it is because we are not paying attention. The reason for this is simple: we are usually locked up in our own worlds, listening to our internal monologues, obsessed with ourselves and satisfying our own egos. To the extent that you can drop your self-interest and see people for who they are, divorced from your desires, you will become more sensitive to their signals. This creates stronger relationships and broader networks.

The last thought concerns ground-level data - bean counting. People who enjoy and understand the information they collect. Helping to provide reason and meaning behind the network of connections. A bean counter from an intelligence perspective is the lifeblood of management decision making. You can find bean counters in sales, finance, purchasing, customer service, and product management. It's less the function in which you find a bean counter that's important than it is how companies use the insight they bring that is critical. Competitive intelligence and information means nothing unless you are adept at interpreting human behavior and psychology. Without that skill you will see in it what you want to see, confirming your own prejudices.