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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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VOLUME 1
ISSUE 19
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The seven deadly sins of intelligence professionals.
Michael Sandman, Fuld and Company, msandman@fuld.com
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Summary: There are (at least) two kinds of sins -- sins of omission and sins of commission. Forgetting your significant other's birthday is a sin of omission; giving him or her a sweater that's two sizes too large is a sin of commission. Here Mike Sandman analyzes the seven deadly sins of intelligence professionals. If your turn all seven on their heads, you have the seven habits of long-lived CI professionals.
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There are (at least) two kinds of sins -- sins of omission and sins of commission. Forgetting your significant other's birthday is a sin of omission; giving him or her a sweater that's two sizes too large is a sin of commission. Here are the seven deadly sins of intelligence professionals:
1. Failing to learn about your own organization (a sin of omission).
The inscription on the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece read: "Know thyself." The Oracle of Delphi predicted the future. You can't predict the competitive future unless you know how the players in the industry think and work. Knowing your own organization is the place to start.
Get out of your office and visit the operations areas of your company. Observe the scale of what's going on:
- How many people are there in the call center, the HR department, the R&D building?
- What technology tools do they use?
- What kinds of capital does your company have?
- How does a company in your industry buy, produce, distribute, and support its products and services?
Learn enough to answer the same questions about your own firm as you have about the competitor. Know thyself. (Gnothi seauton in Greek, in case you like to sound erudite.)
2. Jumping to conclusions (a sin of commission).
It's important to view single pieces of data or unverified reports as being no more than what they are -- uncorroborated and therefore not a sound basis for a conclusion. Sometimes we try to stretch a fact or even a rumor because it leads us to the conclusion we prefer, or because we just don't have anything else to go on, or because it's really exciting.
Rumor: The CEO of General Motors was seen having lunch with the CEO of Wal-Mart.
Unsupported conclusion: Wal-Mart will acquire GM and start selling Bucks in all its stores.
Exciting, isn't it?
3. Assuming other companies have the same assumptions that yours does.
Organizations build their strategies on a foundation of assumptions about the marketplace and their own strengths. And they often have corporate taboos --- beliefs held by top management that no one would dare to question.
Don't assume that others in your industry share your assumptions. If you want to understand why they have adopted a particular strategy or particular tactics as opposed to merely understanding what the strategy or tactics are, figure out what their assumptions are. (Read Ben Gilad's "Business Blindspots" if you want to understand more about this important problem.)
4. Failing to ask questions when you don't know something.
When you're the intelligence expert in your company, it's hard to admit that you don't know everything, but... you don't. If you're given an assignment you don't quite grasp, or if someone uses a term or an acronym you don't understand, ask questions.
We did an assignment years ago for Digital Equipment Corporation. The client said to our team, "We use a lot of TLAs around here. Do you people know what a TLA is?" Oh-oh. An acronym. One of the other team members started to nod in the affirmative, but I admitted ignorance. It turned out that the guy was testing us to see if we'd ask “What’s a TLA, Bob?”
"A TLA is a three-letter acronym." (What a great company -- they even had a TLA for TLAs.)
Always ask, even if you have to wait a bit and ask someone you won’t be embarrassed to ask.
5. Doing it all yourself.
Trying to do it all yourself is a sure recipe for failure. You can't, precisely because you don't know everything. Get help from your colleagues. Find people in each key functional area to talk to about their specific areas of expertise. If they're mercenary sales people you'll have to take them out to lunch, but if they're lonely engineers they'll take you. (Just kidding, just kidding.)
Equally important, don't try to do all the analysis yourself. Example: You have to analyze the 10-K reports of two companies. How many of you took a course in finance and accounting? How many of you enjoyed it? If you didn't raise your hand in response to that last question and you're putting together a financial analysis, ask someone in the CFO's office or the division controller's office to help you.
And don't stop with your own colleagues. Talk to trade journalists, industry consultants, people who've retired from the industry. Build a circle of sources and helpers. It takes time in the short run, but it will save you time and improve your work in the not-very-long run.
6. Failing to push back when the information you get doesn't make sense.
It's a sin to accept something someone tells you if it doesn't make sense and you fail to question it because you're too busy to check, or because the person is an authority, or because it's your boss. If you've avoided the other sins, you know your own company, you have thought through the assumptions of other players, and you have a circle of people in your organization and elsewhere you can check with.
If you can't question the boss too closely about something that doesn't make sense, ask someone else. If you don't think you have the time to check out things that don't make sense, rest assured that you'll have lots of time soon, when you're unemployed. (By the way, if you see another company in your industry doing something that doesn’t make sense, it should put you on high alert for something more significant and unexpected.)
7. Analyzing in a vacuum (the deadliest sin of all).
If you try to do analysis without knowing what decisions your intelligence users are trying to make, you're wasting your valuable time. It's not always easy to get intelligence users to give you a coherent reason for why they want something, but if you don't extract that information from them you won't be able to deliver useful analysis.
If they can't give you a coherent picture of the decisions they face, offer them your own trial balloon. "From what you're asking, it sounds like we're probably trying to decide how to allocate our R&D resources. Is that right? OK, what intelligence would help you do that better?"
If you don't follow this advice, your reports may be intellectually interesting, well-written, fact-filled, grammatically correct and even entertaining, but you will not get a big raise this year, and your position will be eliminated next year. (Hey, that's why we call them Deadly Sins!)
But take the positive point of view. If you turn all seven of these sins on their heads, you have the seven habits of long-lived CI professionals. So validate what you learn, ask for your colleagues' help in your analysis, get to know your own businesses' operations. You’ll be in CI heaven before you know it.
Background:
Mike Sandman is senior vice-president of Fuld & Company Inc., a competitive intelligence consulting firm in Cambridge, MA. Prior to joining Fuld, he was an operations manager in the composites industry. Mike has an extensive background in international business. He is lives in Brookline, MA, and is co-chair of the town’s Transportation Board. Mike often bikes to work through Boston traffic, which he claims is no more foolish than his persistent rooting for the Boston Red Sox.
Copyright 2002 Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals www.scip.org
SCIP.online, volume 1 number 19, November 8, 2002
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