Be AWARE - Research Secrets & More

Moving to Wordpress

2010-09-21T05:10:00.000-07:00

Not sure how many people have bookmarked this weblog. I've now moved my Blog to WordPress - and have written two new posts, with several more planned. I prefer the WordPress interface - it's easier to write, edit and make changes. The new site has all the same functionality as this one - plus additional elements. For instance, you can now subscribe and get told when I update the site. You can also contact me directly. So for future updates, go to www.find-it-out.co.ukHope you like the new look - let me know!

Reading the news

2010-06-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

In 1979 I visited Turkey for the first time. I like Turkey - it's a great and beautiful country with lots of history. It also shows how Islam and extremism don't go hand-in-hand and how an Islamic country can also be a liberal democracy. Like all free countries, it has its share of extremists who spout forth nonsense that would guarantee a jail sentence or death in the autocracies that govern most of the world. However that is not what this post is about - although Turkey is the seed for the post.

It was August 1979, and I was backpacking, staying in cheap hostels. A standard item of conversation back then was whether it was safe to travel through Afghanistan on the overland route to India. Turkey was one of the first stopping places on this route that travelled through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and on to India.

From a 1970s Trailfinders brochure showing suggested routes to India

Travellers were talking about the attacks on tourists journeying through the country and how some tourist buses had been shot at.

A postcard sent to me by a friend I'd met when travelling through Europe who wanted to go on the overland routes to India. Karla had hoped to go through Afghanistan but as I've highlighted, felt it wasn't safe. This postcard was sent the day before the Iran hostage crisis and shows the atmosphere in Iran at the time.

I knew nothing about Afghanistan at all and when I got back to the UK started to read up. There was very little in the press - and certainly no headlines. However reading between the lines, I realised that not only was there a civil war going on, but that this was threatening the Southern borders of the Soviet Union. The situation was unstable and something had to happen.

Over Christmas in 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan with the aim of bringing back order to the country. The Soviet aim was not to colonise the country but to prevent the ferment from spreading and leading to sectarian movements on the Soviet borders. However that is not how the world, led by the USA saw things. This was the time of the cold war. Any way that the West could score points against the Soviet bear was legitimate. The initial response was massive anti-Soviet propaganda, ignoring the initial context. Later on, the US funded the Mujahaddin fighting against the Soviets, including Osama Bin Ledin - a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

My response however was different. I saw that the Soviet incursion had been an obvious solution to a problem that they faced, and that the correct approach was to treat it as such, rather than as a global problem. Afghanistan had been a flashpoint that the world had seemingly ignored. It led, eventually, to the break-up of the Soviet Union, when it became impossible to hide the costs in both lives and money by the secretive Soviets. I believe that Perestroika and the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union was partially a result of the Soviet's Afghan adventure.

The point of all this is that newspapers publish

what their editors view as of interest to their readership
news when they have sufficient information for a story.

This is important for competitive intelligence, business analysis and common sense. Without this realisation people are likely to jump to incorrect conclusions based on what they read. The only way to read a newspaper is to question each story and ask why it was published - to understand the hidden agenda.

When there is insufficient information or where it is dangerous for journalists to publish a news story, then however potentially important that news story is, it won't get published. That is why so few bad news stories highlighting lack of freedom, atrocities and so on are published on the autocracies that rule much of the world. Instead, news focuses on countries where there is a relative freedom to publish, and journalists can report on what is happening unimpeded by the authorities.

If something is not fashionable then it won't be published or what is published will correspond to what people want to read. This is the case with much reporting on Israel. Israel is now seen as a "shitty little country" (as described by a former French Ambassador to the UK). It's definitely not fashionable to support it - despite the fact that it is the only full democracy in its region with a free and functioning press, Arab parliamentarians, and equal rights for all its citizens. It has also been at war for over 60 years - with its enemies being countries that, in general, are totalitarian and that imprison, torture and execute dissenters. It has been attacked with missiles fired daily at its cities, yet is lambasted when it responds - most recently by blockading the territories from where the missiles were fired (Gaza). Israel is condemned for trying to protect its citizens and for fighting a territory ruled by a group, Hamas, that is viewed as a terrorist group by Western countries, including the US, the EU, Japan and Canada.

In contrast to the situation in Israel - where every action is microscopically analysed and hits the headlines, much less appears on newspaper front pages and as headline news about the very recent massacres of Uzbeks in Kyrygyzstan. Virtually nothing came out about the Syrian destruction of the city of Hama in 1982, in contrast to the blanket reporting of the events at Sabra & Chatila in the same year. Even in this case, Israel is blamed for the actual attacks while in reality the massacre was carried out by Christian Phalangists in revenge for earlier attacks on them by the Palestinians. The reason for all these examples is that much less information was available from Syria and Kyrygyzstan. Both countries don't have the free press that Israel has, and in both cases, publishing such news could lead to the journalists being arrested, and probably tortured or killed. As a result very little is seen.

The same selectivity appears in the business press too. Currently BP is under the spotlight for its responsibility for the US oil spill. Although I'm sure that BP bears much of the blame for this disaster, very little has been written about the other companies involved including Transocean and Halliburton. Although BP was the largest shareholder in the well, Texas based Anadarko Petroleum owned a quarter and the Mitsui Oil Exploration Company via its MOEX Offshore subsidiary owned 10%. Transocean owned the rig and of the 126 people working on the rig, 79 were Transocean employees (against only 7 BP employees). Halliburton cemented into place the casing for the well that blew. In fact, the other companies bear some of the blame - if only by not ensuring that best practice was followed and allowing BP to cut corners (if that is what happened). The US regulator, the Minerals Management Service, that had approved the well should also shoulder some responsibility.

It is now fashionable to attack BP - with President Obama (showing an anti-British prejudice), referring to the company as British Petroleum, when the correct name has been BP for many years, reflecting the fact that more of its employees are American than British (BP has 23,000 US employees and under half that number of British employees. Of its 9 senior executive members there are more non-UK members than UK ones with four US positions). The problem is that sometimes it is better for those in power to hide the truth - whether they run a company or a country.

Competitive Intelligence means looking behind the news and doing an analysis to find the truth. That is not the role of newspapers. Their role is simple: to sell and make profits for their owners. If that means subjective reporting, then so be it. Fortunately the quality press sometimes does publish unfashionable news stories and carries out independent analysis. An excellent recent example is an article by Jose Maria Aznar - the Prime Minister of Spain between 1996-2004. Aznar writes (in the London Times - 17 June 2010) about Israel and how failure to support Israel threatens Western values overall. He states that the Gaza episode "is a distraction" and that "Israel is the West's best ally in a turbulent region". A shame that there is not more analysis of this type. As this is what true objectivity involves.

Proof of Aznar's thesis can easily be found. For example, a recent Twitter tweet lamented the loss to the Moslem world of Andalucia, and advocated the route of the martyr, and reaching for life in the hereafter in preference to life in this one.

@Jnoubiyeh the second we lost andalus we lost dignity. wars came 2 remind us again. We lost it was when we chose this life over hereafter

Unfortunately publicising such views are unfashionable and often suppressed - so instead we draw incorrect conclusions and victimise the victim (e.g. Israel) and praise the oppressor (e.g. Hamas).

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics & Facebook

2010-06-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

I've been impressed with the numbers of people using social networking sites - and the importance of social networking for marketing has become significant over the last few years.

Facebook claims 400 million users (i.e. nearly 6% of the global population that is approaching 7 billion people). I've always thought that this figure must include duplicate accounts - as I don't believe that most people in China, India, Africa and many other areas of the world have Facebook accounts (or even computers - although the numbers are growing). The World Bank stated that there were just under 300m Internet users in China and 52m in India in 2008. (There's a great graph of this at Google's Public Data tool - that shows that in 2008 there were around 1.5bn web-users).

Even taking account the exponential growth - let's assume that web users globally are now over 2 billion people - Facebook's figures imply that 1 in 5 users have a Facebook account.

I know of many people who don't have an account and some who refuse to get one. In my age group (over 40), I'd guess that the majority don't. So where this 400m figure came from and what it includes is a key question.

It now seems that Facebook has been boosting it's membership figures. I just read this article from one of my favorite sites (www.pandia.com). Apparently Facebook has been telling advertisers that it has 1.6m users in Oslo. The trouble is that the greater Oslo metropolitan area only has 900,000 people. Facebook apparently counts members by IP address - and I guess that it is feasible that this could include users who access the site via Oslo based web-servers. However not if you consider the next statistic given. The Facebook advertiser tool says that there are 850,000 Facebook users between the ages of 20-29 in Norway - which is 235,000 more than the total numbers (613,000) in that age group.

This over-inflation isn't just a Norwegian issue. According to CheckFacebook.com (a site that tracks data from the Facebook advertising tool giving Facebook membership numbers), almost 63% of online users in the UK now have a Facebook account. That's 27m out of a total UK population of 62m. In some countries it's even higher. Apparently all (100%) Nicaraguan, Qatari and Bangladeshi web users also have a Facebook account, as do 99% of Indonesians, 98% of Filipinos, 97% of Venezuelans, and 85% of Turks.

It's possible that these statistics are true. However, if so, I'm sure that they also include occasional and infrequent users as well as dormant and duplicated accounts.

One of the most important types of competitive intelligence analysis is to not take everything at face value. When presented with figures, it's important to sense check them - wherever possible by using other sources (e.g. official population statistics). Only then should such data be used in decision making. You should also ask whether there is an incentive to exaggerate or under-estimate statistics. If there is such an incentive, it is likely that this will be done, at least in the published data. Decisions made using such erroneous or manipulated figures will probably be poor decisions and fail to achieve the expected results. In the case of Facebook, the incentive in exaggerating membership figures is that they can then boost their attractiveness to advertisers, and consequently their advertising revenues.

Quotations & Competitive Intelligence

2010-03-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Seena Sharp's new book "Competitive Intelligence Advantage"

The book is good (at least so far) - and an easy read which is more than can be said for a lot of business books. More importantly Seena's approach corresponds with mine. She emphasises that competitive intelligence is not just about competitors but about understanding the total business environment and how it is changing, and using this knowhow to make effective business decisions. This means it's not just a how-to-do-it book like many of its competitors but a why-to-do-it book too. This is important. Many businesses still fail to understand why they need competitive intelligence. If you don't understand the need, why do it. Others see the focus as primarily on competitors - but they already "know" all about them so are "OK" (or so they believe). The book exposes this canard - and shows why surprise is so dangerous for companies.

Although so far, I have mostly praise for the book, there is one niggle. Making decisions on inaccurate intelligence is dangerous. It is always important to check facts first rather than to assume that just because something is common knowledge or sounds right it is correct. In the world generally, there have been many mistakes made based on information that turned out to be rumour or false. Part of the role of analysis is to verify information - and act accordingly. Failure to verify information is a route to strategy failure.

So what is my niggle. It relates to a quotation on page 20: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." This is a great quotation - and it is widely used. A search on the Internet turns up multiple examples - and most claim it was written by Charles Darwin, in his works looking at evolution. The problem is that Darwin almost certainly never said or wrote this. A few years ago, I wanted to use this quotation in an article I was writing - and needed to provide a reference. I searched through Darwin's complete works online and couldn't find it. I then contacted Nigel Rees, an expert on quotations who couldn't either. Replies to a post I made to the FreePint Bar suggested that the attribution was probably false (but nobody knew where it originally came from). The series of posts at FreePint both by me, and others, debunk a few more commonly attributed quotations too. (E.g. "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" was definitely not originally said by Mark Twain as many claim and possibly not by Disraeli either, as I and others had thought.

Whenever I use a quotation I try and attribute it - and give a reference for the source, where possible. Maybe it's because I'm pedantic or overly thorough. However I also believe it is part of the mindset needed for effective competitive intelligence. Just because something is commonly believed doesn't make it true and I wish Seena had either stated that the quotation was "attributed" to Darwin instead of being by Darwin - or found the source.

In fact, the source was probably a close follower of Darwin - such as JBS Haldane. And Haldane supplies a lesson for all involved in competitive intelligence: just because something is unexpected doesn't mean it won't happen.

A discussion between Haldane and a friend began to take a predictable turn. The friend said with a sigh, 'It's no use going on. I know what you will say next, and I know what you will do next.' The distinguished scientist promptly sat down on the floor, turned two back somersaults, and returned to his seat. 'There,' he said with a smile. 'That's to prove that you're not always right. Found at Today In Science History's page on Haldane - quoting from: Clifton Fadiman (ed.), André Bernard (ed.), Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes (2000), 253.

RIP Kartoo

2010-03-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

When I conduct training sessions on how to search I always emphasise that it's more important to know how to find information rather than to depend on a small selection of key web-sites.

Many searchers depend on their bookmark list but what happens when a key site disappears: if you don't know how to search you are stuck.

Searching isn't just going to google and typing your query in the search box. Expert searching demands that you consider where the information you are looking for is likely to be held, and in what format. It requires the searcher to understand the search tools they use - how they work and their strengths and weaknesses. Such skills are crucial when key sites disappear as happened in January with the small French meta-search engine, Kartoo.

Kartoo was innovative and presented results graphically. It enabled you to see links between terms and was brilliant for concept searching where you didn't really know where to start. Unfortunately it's now gone to cyber-heaven, or wherever dead web-sites disappear to. It will be missed - at least until something similar appears. Already Google's wonderwheel (found from the "options" link just above the search results") offers some of the functionality and graphic feel, and there are other sites that offer similar capabilities (e.g. Touchgraph). Kartoo however was special - it was simple, free and showed that Europeans can still come up with good search ideas.

Example of a Kartoo Search

Of course Kartoo isn't the first innovative site to disappear. Over the years, many great search tools have gone. Greg Notess lists some in his SearchEngineShowdown blog - and an article in Online magazine. There are more. How many people remember IIBM's Infomarket service - an early online news aggregator from 1995, or Transium.

In fact, it was learning that sites are mortal that led to my approach to searching: don't depend on a limited selection of sites but rather know how to find sites and databases that lead you to the information wanted. That's a key skill for all researchers and is as valid today in the Google generation as it was in the days before Google.

Google - public data explorer

2010-03-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

I've just been pointed to a new Googlelabs initiative - the Google Public Data Explorer. This promises to be a useful tool for finding public data in one place. (It's always worth keeping an eye on GoogleLabs as they often bring out new ideas and products. These are kept together until ready to launch - and can be found from www.googlelabs.com.).

The data is not new - although i think some of the presentation is. I don't recall being able to manipulate the figures from Eurostat so easily (but then that may be because I've not had to use Eurostat for a while). Eurostat - the European Union's statistic service - is large and complex (or was). With Google a couple of key Eurostat databases (unemployment statistics, minimum wage, consumer price index) now become easily manipulable. Other databases include OECD, World Bank and a number of US databases.

Hopefully many more databases will be added - and eventually the service may become a one-stop-shop for global statistics, replacing the need to visit various local country statistics services (e.g. the UK's Office for National Statistics).

Even though there are currently only a handful of databases available many of the most important types of data looking at GDP, population trends, health, etc. are available - plus interesting, but probably less critical examples, such as Internet users per 100 of the population. In this example, I compared the UK and US with two of the emerging power-houses - China and India for Internet usage. I found it interesting that the UK had more users per 100 than the US but not surprising that China and India were so low, despite the total web user numbers in China being higher than those for the US and growing rapidly. It would have been possible to add any of the countries on the left to the chart.

Unethical CI - out in the open!

2010-03-04T12:29:00.000-08:00

As a competitive intelligence specialist, we try to practice what we preach - and keep an eye on our own competitors. In most cases, we view ourselves as complementers as much as we are also competitors. There is enough work for all of us - and the market is far from saturated.

Part of the task of a Competitive Intelligence consultancy is to show companies that competitive intelligence is a necessary business skill - and that it is legitimate and ethical to outsource competitor research to external consultants whatever can't be handled in-house. (Reasons for outsourcing include lack of time, lack of skills and experience and the need for an objective view - which can't be obtained by doing research in-house). In fact AWARE views training in competitive & marketing intelligence as a key element of its business mission, so as to raise CI/MI skills.

There are many ethical competitive intelligence consultants apart from us - in the USA there is Market Analytics, Fuld and Aurorawdc to name three. In Australia - the Mindshifts Group, led by CI industry leader Babette Bensoussan is important. Within Europe there are similar consultancies. We link to a number of top CI consultancies on our alliances web pages.

Unfortunately there are also several companies that fall short ethically and even legally. I recently came across one - with a great domain name, but that's as far as it goes. This "business intelligence" company (which I won't name for now, for legal reasons), openly states that they engage in industrial espionage.

Secondary research - their "light touch" is legitimate if it doesn't employ hacking or password cracking. However their in-depth research placing moles into the target company is highly unethical and probably illegal (depending on the information supplied, and any non-disclosure agreements signed by the agent and their "employer").

Such behaviour brings all competitive intelligence under suspicion - which is part of the rationale behind this post: to expose such shenanigans.

Fortunately this "business intelligence service" doesn't come cheap and only very few (probably desperate) companies will avail themselves of such services. In fact the company actually implies this by saying on their web-site:

"We hope that you never need our services, but if you do, then you can be assurred of an excellent service."

Their charges range from £10,000 for the "light touch" research to £150,000 for their in-depth research (including "employee placement and surveillance"). Even this is not their top price. When looking at individuals, pricing ranges from £25,000 for "light touch" research verifying personal details, employment, connected people, etc. to £200,000 for fully in-depth analysis (lifetime checks, asset checks, lifestyle, etc.). Some assignments are charged at fees of up to £25,000 per day (although most are claimed to be a fraction of this).

To put things into context, we have never charged anything like £10,000 for pure desk research and from conversations with other consultants, they haven't either.

They claim that their "researchers" come from military, police and government service backgrounds - but they don't mention any business or marketing background. They seem to be ignoring, or perhaps do not even know the risks involved in industrial espionage and based on what they offer, I'd question whether they'd see the value in standard strategic analysis as a means for understanding competitors. (The US Economic Espionage Act, 1996 is just one risk. Even when companies don't go to law, there can be serious financial ramifications for espionage).

Instead of looking at public non-confidential intelligence that, when aggregated, can create a detailed picture of all aspects of a company they seem to prefer subterfuge. Such approaches may say what a company is currently planning but it won't help in understanding what the company is thinking or likely to do in the future

Interestingly this company is not as immune to standard CI investigation as they probably think. Standard secondary research suggests that they use a Plymouth, UK, based front company for finding work placements for their agents, and that their minimalist web-site has at least one hidden / secret directory - which can be found by searching for a robots.txt file.

The value of information

2010-02-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

I've probably said something like this before, but it's worth saying again.

This was part of a post by Amelia Kassel of MarketingBase - on the AIIP member mailing list.

I recall someone in a workshop I gave about using the Internet for CI about 10 years ago. I introduced the concept of fee-based databases and a young fellow from a business analyst firm raised his hand in front of group of more than 30 participants to stop me from proceeding. He didn't want to hear or learn about fee-based databases. He had tried them once and they were too hard to use. I asked what he did when couldn't find information he was looking for on the Internet and he didn't have an answer but said it didn't really matter.

I've also come across attitudes such as this - why pay for information when you can find it for free. That would be true and valid if the time required to find the information, and the work required to put it into a usable format, was the same. In reality this is rarely the case. The advantage of paying for information from services such as Factiva, Dialog and several other similar services is that you can save a lot of time. The information purchased will be formatted consistently - so it becomes much easier to edit for a report.

Further, relevant information is collected together so there is no need to check hundreds of potential sources. These services index thousands of sources in a way that users of the free services, including Google, can only dream about. As an example, on Factiva, you can specify that search terms appear in the first 50 (or 100 or whatever) words of an article, or within so many words of another term. They support full Boolean searching and wildcard searching far beyond what even the advanced search in Exalead offers.

If that was all such services offered then there could be an argument that with today's budgetary constraints, good researchers would first focus on the free sources. However many sources held won't even be available on the free web, as their publishers only make them available on a pay-to-use basis or don't keep full online archives. This means that unless the researcher has accounts with a multitude of publishers they won't get the material they need for decision making.

I think part of the secret of being a good researcher is knowing when to use free sources and when to use fee sources. I'm sure that a proportion of the information that is available on pay-to-use sources could be found for free - IF you looked long and hard enough. However employers pay you for your time - and just because something is free doesn't make it really free if you have had to spend a day finding it when you could have got it within 15 minutes by paying. Then there's the risk factors of NOT finding something at all!

People who feel it doesn't matter - that you can justify not paying for information - are actually high-risk employees. They may provide information that allows correct decision making to be made 80% of the time. Unfortunately the Pareto effect comes into play - and that 20% of the time they get it wrong represents 80% of the risk. Decisions made on inadequate data are likely to lead to serious consequences when they are wrong. Saying that you only did a Google search because Factiva cost too much won't save you or your company in such situations - as it will be too late.

CI versus corporate espionage: thoughts on an ABC News story

2010-02-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

I read this news item from ABC news 'James Bond' Tactics Help Companies Spy on Each Other" and had only one thought: that guy is totally unethical and wrong.

A few years ago, an Israeli colleague commented to me that in his experience, most of the ex-secret service operatives who try and enter the commercial world of CI fail. The reason he said is that they don't know the boundaries of what is legitimate competitive intelligence collection and what is corporate espionage, and illegitimate. He also said that in many cases, they also have no real idea of budgets and what is valuable to a company strategically versus the cost of obtaining it. Most never had a budgetary role when working for the various national security services and so could not do a cost-benefit analysis effectively.

This story shows both examples. Purchasing the garbage from an organisation is not only unethical but strikes me as wasteful. Garbage is thrown away for a reason - it's not wanted and valueless. The majority of companies today have shredders and routinely shred anything that would be seen as highly sensitive. True, the mid-level material may be chucked, but not the high-level stuff. (And those that don't shred deserve what they get - I'd be surprised that any Fortune 500 companies don't have shredding contracts!)

As for the other shenanigans implied - any company that employed a consultant to use such techniques deserves to get sued and end up paying more than they gained. The trouble is some do - and the list of companies that learned the hard-way that espionage doesn't pay is still growing.

So let me make it clear: espionage is wrong, while CI is a legitimate practice that uses only ethical means to collect intelligence.

This involves declaring your identity and NOT collecting information that would be classed as secret or confidential. As Issur Harel the Israeli spy-chief responsible for capturing the Nazi war murderer, Eichmann, is reported to have said:

We do not deal with certainties. The world of intelligence is the world of probabilities. Getting the information is not usually the most difficult task. What is difficult is putting upon it the right interpretation. Analysis is everything. James Bond is not the real world.

Attacking a castle - or a competitor!

2010-02-19T05:56:00.000-08:00

The leading management guru, Rosabeth Moss Kanter's, latest blog post discusses ways to attack a castle: Four Ways to Attack the Castle — And Get a Job, Get Ahead, Make Change.

Although the article is talking about job-seekers and change agents, the same applies to competitive intelligence and strategy, and I've sometimes used the same analogy in my training courses.

So how does attacking a strong fortress compare to competitive intelligence collection. Well - the approach that some still seem to think the best approach - is the full frontal attack. Go for the key contact and hope that they will speak to you. The problem is that these people tend to be surrounded by gatekeepers, guards and you may not even get their name, never mind getting to speak to them. This is the corporate equivalent of having hot oil poured down upon you.

Moss Kanter describes four other approaches that can also be used for CI collection.

1) Find other doors.
Rather than target the main entrance with your battering ram, look for a door that's not guarded. If you want to interview somebody, don't call switchboard and ask for the purchasing manager - as switchboard will ask what it's about and you will find yourself in an interminable voice-mail loop ending with a "send an email to suppliers@companyname.com". Instead, use networking tools - such as LinkedIn - to find the name of anybody involved in purchasing within the target company and ask to speak to them directly. Knowing the name means you get put through and bypass the switchboard gatekeeper.

2) Befriend the fringes.
Be polite. Switchboards get fed up with rude callers - so be friendly. Chat - and treat the operator with respect. They may know more than you think and you may get a name that way.

You won't get put through to the CEO or CFO or any C-level executive directly. Instead, you'll end up speaking to their personal assistant - the guard and gatekeeper for your source. Like the guards and gatekeepers of old, these people know who passes by, and what goes on. So rather than insist on the C-contact, be nice to the PA and chat to them instead. You may well find that all you need to know comes from them instead.

3) Go underneath
Often, going to the top won't help. If the information you require is sensitive, the people at the top know the sensitivity - including their PAs. They won't talk and you will get nothing. Rather, consider the people who report to them, or who have managers who report to them. Such people may not know the whole picture - but speak to several and you soon will. Each interviewee will feel flattered that you view their knowledge as important - and won't realise that the small bits of information they know, when combined with other small bits, can reveal the secrets the higher-ups would like to keep hidden.

4) Go around the castle
Rather than trying to contact the organisation directly, look for people who are now outside but know what goes on inside. These include ex-employees, obviously. However others may also know information - and be willing to share if asked in the right way. These can include your customers, your competitor's customers, their suppliers, as well as industry consultants, trade association staff and many more similar sources.

Collecting competitive intelligence doesn't always depend on looking for the obvious source. Like attacking castles, often the secret is to find the weaknesses that allow you to gain entrance, gather what you need to know and leave without anybody even noticing your visit.

A tale of two countries

2009-12-18T05:05:00.000-08:00

I've just read the story of James Bain who was freed after DNA evidence proved that he was innocent. Bain was apparently convicted on the evidence of a line-up despite other evidence not linking him to the crime he was accused of. Of course Bain is not white - and so the US justice system - certainly that from 35 years ago - was prejudiced against him.

Contrast this to the cries against the Italian justice system that has just convicted an American citizen and her Italian boyfriend of a brutal murder - also based on DNA evidence. In the case of Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito it wasn't just DNA evidence either. There were bloodied footprints, erratic behaviour post-murder with changing and inconsistent stories, evidence of antagonism between Knox and her victim, plus more.

Too often, the American legal system seems prejudiced against those least able to defend themselves - look at the differences in the ethnicity of people sentenced to death versus those who escape a capital sentence.

Now contrast this to the Italian legal system where a white, affluent Italian, and his white affluent girl-friend were treated equally to Rudy Guede, a black Ivory Coast accused - sentenced earlier.

The only bias here is not the Italian legal system but the Americans who believe that you can only get justice in the USA, and that the Italian legal system and the judgement is flawed.

If this was the only example of hypocrisy emanating from the US it could be excused - but unfortunately it isn't. Another example is the US "justice" system's hounding of Gary McKinnon - an Asperger sufferer who has been accused of exposing weaknesses in US military computers and so has to be sentenced so that those who failed to protect the system can get off free.

So what has this to do with competitive intelligence? Maybe nothing - on the surface. However if you think about, a lot. As it shows how important it is to remain objective - unlike with Gary McKinnon; to avoid prejudice - as was shown with the Bain case and also the objections to the Knox case; and to ensure that there are multiple lines of evidence before coming to a conclusion and making a decision - as in the Knox case but not in the Bain case.

Yauba - Big Brother isn't watching you

2009-06-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

Sixty years after George Orwell published 1984 many of the ideas have, unfortunately, become commonplace. There are speed cameras watching how fast you drive, and CCTV monitoring many UK towns. On the Internet, search engines such as Google monitor your searches - keeping the data for months. They know what operating system you use. AWARE doesn't record this information, despite showing some in our top bar, but many sites, and most search engines do).

Yauba bucks the trend by proudly announcing that it respects user privacy. Its privacy policy proudly states:

We do not keep any personally identifiable information.

Period.

Following the Iranian elections (June 2009) many Iranian dissidents and protesters have switched to Yauba, according to the searchengine blog site, Pandia.

"Ahmed Hossain, CIO of Yauba, tells Pandia: “Our traffic from Iran has jumped 300% over the past several days, as many of them are using the Yauba Search Engine and the anonymity proxy filter to access blocked sites and get news from foreign sources.”

Anonymity may be important for some people. However for most, it's search results that count. Although Yauba claims to be able to search semantically, differentiating between Java the island, Java the coffee and Java the computer language is this a meaningless boast?

In other words is Yauba worth using for those not looking to hide their identity.

The short answer is yes. Yauba searches various types of content - which are separated. As such it enables you to quickly find Acrobat files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, news, blogs, images, video, etc. in a single search. Each are kept distinct - and this is an interesting differentiator between it and other search engines. It also presents ways of refining queries and where there are alternative meanings it shows these - allowing users to pick the one they want.

Rather than use the search they suggest i.e. Java I put in Apple. The three meanings I thought of were

The fruit
The computer company
The music company founded by the Beatles

In fact, there are several more - as Yauba shows:

apple can mean:
Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer, Inc.), a consumer electronics and software company
Apple Bank, an American bank in the New York City area
Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation founded by The Beatles
Apple (album), an album by Mother Love Bone
Apple (band), a British psychedelic rock band
Apple Records, record label founded by The Beatles
Apple I, Apple II series, Apple III, etc., various personal computer models produced by Apple, Inc and sold from 1976 until 1992.
Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment, an Indian experimental communication satellite launched in 1981
Apple (automobile), an American automobile manufactured by Apple Automobile Company from 1917 to 1918
Billy Apple, artist
Fiona Apple, a Grammy award winning American singer-songwriter
R. W. Apple, Jr., an associate editor at The New York Times

Clicking on Apple (automobile) gives a number of results - not all directly relevant but some which were. There is also a brief encyclopedia type entry at the top of the page:

The Apple was a short-lived American automobile manufactured by Apple Automobile Company in Dayton, Ohio from 1917 to 1918. Agents were assured that its $1150 Apple 8 model was "a car which you can sell!". Sadly for the company, it would seem that the public did not buy.

On the right of the screen are various suggestions for alternative searches. For example, a search for apple gives:

Compare the clarity of this to the same search on google. (Admitedly the search is not sophisticated and a competent searcher would refine the term - but for testing, it's good enough)

It means that amateur searchers are more likely to find resuls for complex searches - fulfilling Yauba's claim to allow people to search without a knowledge of Boolean logic.

Also interesting is that a component of each search includes a real-time element - from Twitter and social news from Digg. The real time search element is useful as it provides another option to scoopler.

Sponsored ads appear to come from the Google network. There are also options to filter searches (although there is currently no information on what is being filtered) and a Lite version which seems to remove the refinement options and the top-level definitions (i.e. making it more Google like in its results presentation).

There is also an option to refine searches - alongside the search box.

Selection of one of the options allows further search refinement either by keyword

or domain

Overall I like Yauba. The interface is clean (and the black background makes a change from competitors).

Currently the site says it's only an early Beta / Late Alpha preview release so more work / changes can be expected. Hopefully these will include Help files explaining what the Lite search is supposed to do and what a Filtered search actually filters. Also, what syntax is acceptable - to refine searches. Does Boolean searching actually work, for example? On my brief tests it seemed to - as did phrase searching i.e. putting search terms in quotes. What about other options - could any of the advanced search options from Exalead be included. And will the site cover more countries, than the current small number (Italy, France, UK, India, Brazil, Russia and the .com site)? Yauba promises to cover more countries - I'm just surprised that there is no Chinese or German version as I would have expected these before the Italian version. I guess the Yauba team have Italian speakers but currently no Chinese speakers.

Forte 1 - truth or lie? A brief competitive intelligence case study.

2009-06-10T06:34:00.001-07:00

I received a phone call today from a charming lady who claimed to work for a company called Forte 1. I knew nothing about her company which seemed to want me to switch my business telephone line, and also said that they offered computers at great prices, and more.

Whenever I get a sales call out of the blue, a red-light goes on in my head. At the same time I'm not one of these people that will put the phone straight down. For a start, I view it as an opportunity to practice my competitive intelligence elicitation and interviewing skills - how much can I find out about the unknown company. Very occasionally also, they get it right - and do succeed in making a sale (when it's something I've wanted anyway and they offer a better deal).

In the case of Forte1, alarm bells started ringing early on. I was considering putting the phone down but really wanted to know a bit more about the company and its service offering, especially as I was interested in one service that was mentioned and if the company was bonafide, I could have become a customer.

Unfortunately the sales person wouldn't give me a straight answer. I suggested that she mail me information on her company and if it was suitable for my needs I'd recontact her. Instead she suggested I look at their web-site. This gave me the chance to check up on them - and it's an interesting lesson in what you can find on a company within 5-10 minutes, if you know how. It also showed that I knew more about her company than she did - confirming my suspicions that this may not be as genuine an offer as the salesperson was claiming. (However I don't really know - or care. If any Forte1 users want to comment on this post and give a client reference please feel free).

So what did I do? Well first, I went to their web-site - using Firefox (my browser of choice).

The page opened with some Javascript for displaying the date - that was written before the HTML tag - as in the screen print below:

That's always a danger sign - as it implies that the web-site's not been properly checked. The next thing was the text - for example

Who we are

ForteOne has applied a tactic of superb timing and entrepreneurial assertiveness to achieve success in the fields of communications through a vast array of business equipment solutions and information technology products and services.

Our goal is to build long-term partnerships with our customers and maximise the potential of our traditional business, through a combination of enhanced quality of service and creativity.

I'm not sure what this means. Although the words are English, the sentences are just a collection of management jargon put together to imply competence. For example, what on earth does entrepreneurial assertiveness actually mean.

My next step was to find out more about the web-site itself. Using Firefox's Page Info command (in the Tools menu) it turns out the home page was relatively new - from February 2009.

So how old was the domain name - over to www.checkdomain.com (one of many domain checking services). That shows that the domain was registered on the 23 September 2008, as was the parallel domain forteone.co.uk. The US .com domain is owned by somebody else and is bonafide - but my suspicions are still high with the .co.uk domain - incidentally registered by a Mr W Ahmed.

Next step - let's check the address to make sure that this is genuine. So over to Google and enter the postal code and address: "268 Bath Road" "SL1 4DX". Now that's interesting - dozens of hits come up, including the Slough branch of Regus - the virtual office company. Lots of small and SoHo businesses will base out of a Regus branch, but it doesn't add substance to the veracity of Forte1 - as their web-site description seems to suggest a large profitable business.

Now let's check to see if it is a real business - so over to Companies House and their web-check service. Enter in Forte 1 (expecting nothing but who knows) and hey-presto, up comes a real company - Company No. 06354706. So it is a genuine business after-all, assuming that this is the correct Forte 1. Only problem is that the address is different to the web-site (which doesn't include the company number).

In fact, there appear to be several changes to the record since this company was founded - in August 2007. It first appeared as Trus Com Ltd, then changed to Truscom Ltd before metamorphosing into Forte1 Ltd in October 2008. The company has also changed address twice - from a W2 4SA address in London to an address in Barnet on the outskirts of London.

However the key line connecting the two - and confirming that this is the same company comes on the 3 March 2009 - where a 288c "Director's Particulars" document is filed for Wesam Ahmed. Remember the name - the guy who registered the forte1.co.uk domain name.

So what about that W2 4SA address - is that another accommodation address.

Another Google search shows that there are 2 companies registered at

SUITE 4 REDAN HOUSE, 27 REDAN PLACE, LONDON, W2 4SA.

One is Motiontel Ltd listed on a D&B web-site, and the other is Nationtel Ltd listed on the excellent Applegate directory. Applegate lists the director - our friend, Wesam Ahmed again. Unfortunately a search on some of the people search sites doesn't give much - as there are too many people with the same or similar name to research in 10 minutes.

So where to now. Well let's see if our web-site shares a server with any other web-sites. If they have a dedicated server that's a good sign - and could indicate links between businesses. So over to Domain Tools and it's reverse IP lookup option. Enter in forte1.co.uk and it turns out that:

There are 5 domains hosted on this IP address.
Here are a few of them:

(In contrast, with forteone.co.uk there are 1000s - indicating that the server is shared and not dedicated).

Taking a look at Aracom.co.uk the look and feel are the same (including the same HTML error on Firefox) but in this case the site is under construction. However the fortecontactcenter.com domain is active - with a new contact address:

Smart Village Km 28 Cairo Alex Desert Road - Giza - Egypt

So it seems that perhaps Mr Ahmed is Egyptian - it's an Egyptian name after-all.

In conclusion - I can't (and won't) say whether or not Forte1 Ltd is genuine - with real products and services or not. Not having any experience of them apart from the phone-call it wouldn't be fair to make a judgement. However from what I uncovered I won't become a customer. Instead this can be viewed as a case-study in how it's possible to do a quick competitor analysis while speaking to somebody on the phone - in a few minutes. With more time I'd have looked to see whether Mr Ahmed had more companies under his belt, and whether any had failed. I'd have looked into more depth to see who else (if anybody) was involved and tried to find some customers to give actual opinions on how they performed. This is the sort of work we do for clients - rather than just to satisfy curiosity, as was the case here.

Google Squared - tabulate results instantly

2009-06-10T05:22:00.000-07:00

Google Squared is a new addition to the Google Labs portfolio of products being tested by Google. Launched on June 3, it looks as though it's aimed at offering an ability to get more from simple searches - perhaps a bit like WolframAlpha.

It's still very much a beta-test addition to the Google product range so there are bound to be some holes. What happens is that you enter a search term and a spreadsheet type page appears with various headings in the leftmost column, followed by a description and various other (generally) relevant columns.

It's an interesting way of using Google's data - i just wish that the results were more consistent and accurate. Entering in the search term Planets should be a perfect way of testing how the spreadsheet approach works - and unfortunately it doesn't, at least not completely.

The Planets search gives a list on the left of Earth, Jupiter, Pluto, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Neptune but misses out Mars and Uranus. Fair-enough - as there is the "Add next 10 items" link at the bottom (and also an "Add items" option). Adding the next 10 items however doesn't give the missing planets, but instead, Ceres, Charon and various other headings relevant but only indirectly (e.g. "Planets in Science Fiction" or "solar system").

The "Add items" option does better in that it gives potential choices - which include Uranus and Mars.

The next column contains an image of each planet although the one for Pluto, culled from the SouthernWatch blog is actually a diagram of Pluto with a slogan attached saying Pluto for Planethood.

I'm sort of surprised that it didn't include a picture of the Disney character.

The next column is a description - again taken from various places so not showing any consistency. The description for Jupiter for example, seems accurate - and is taken from Wikpedia:

Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian planets. ...

The problem is that different sources are used for different planets - with both Venus and Saturn being particularly obtuse - taken respectively from www.venus.com and www.saturn.com.

Only at Venus, find the sexiest women's swimwear and clothing. Shop online or request a catalog for sizzling hot clothing and swimsuits. ...

and

While you're shopping for Saturn vehicles, we've given you an easy way to keep information for the next time you visit Saturn.com. With My Saved Info, ...

The following columns give the orbital period, equatorial surface and mean density - with an option to add further items at the end. The problem is not knowing how accurate these are - and in fact they appear as eccentric as the planet descriptions with some containing units and others just a number. I'd certainly not want to use the values or any entries in any school paper or anything where I need reliable answers.

In summary, Google Squared is interesting and if Google manages to include some quality checking - perhaps by only using certain sites or back-checking to ensure that correct context then this could be a winner. Until then, i'll stick with WolframAlpha and Wikipedia for a quick look at multiple facts.

WolframAlpha

2009-06-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'm still not sure what to make of WolframAlpha - the new "computational search tool". I like what it can do - as a way of solving crosswords, or doing math calculations. For a lot of information it's probably easier to use than Wikipedia but i can't really see how it will help in most business type queries - at least it won't yet.

If you want to find a word where you know some letters it's great. Type in _i_i_i and you'll get the answer "bikini" and also "militia" - two words that match that pattern. Put in an equation and you'll get a graph, or a chemical or molecular symbol and you'll get information on the element or compound. Enter in stock codes and you'll get some company information but too often the result is "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." You'll get this if you put in British Telecom but WolframAlpha knows about BT as enter this and you get correct information on British Telecom's share performance.

I think part of the problem is that WolframAlpha is different and new. It's NOT a search engine (despite the hype saying it would be a Google killer). It's not an encylopedia although many entries are encylopedic. Instead, it's what it says on its description - it's a computational knowledge engine. Use it to carry out calculations or to bring up data that's in it's knowledge engine - but don't use it for much more. It's a useful addition to the search scene and will make life easier for some searches, but that's about it. For most searches I'll stick with Google and other search engines. For general information I'll remain happy with Wikipedia. However I will use WolframAlpha for information requiring some element of computation more complex or requiring greater detail than is available in Google's calculate functionality.

But it's not google - Bing goes Live!

2009-06-02T01:33:00.001-07:00

Another long wait between entries - I really must update more often. However recent events in the Search world and in the CI world mean I have no choice but to update. My thoughts on recent changes at SCIP will have to wait till my next post. This post will look at Microsoft's replacement for Live and MSN Search - with its new Bing search engine.

Searches at Live or MSN Search now redirect to Bing.com. I like the front-end - it's clean and colourful. However I couldn't find anywhere to change the front image - at least on the UK version that's still in Beta.
The US version does allow you to scroll back to previous images - with a little arrow option at the bottom of the right side of the screen.

The US version also includes hot-spots describing aspects of the picture, plus a side-bar offering more search options.

At the bottom of both versions is a link for help - interestingly still pointing to Live.com. Obviously Microsoft still has more work to do on this. The help section gives the format for advanced commands and also allows you to remove the screen background.

So how does Bing perform. For the searches I tried, the results are good - and there isn't that much to choose between Google and Bing. One difference i did notice is that URLs with the search terms used seem to come higher than other sites - so, for example, AWARE's web-site came to the top for a search on "marketing-intelligence". Also relevant is that the algorithm is sufficiently intelligent to realise that "CompetitorAnalysis.com" is a likely candidate for searches on "Competitor Analysis". I'm not sure the same precision exists in Google. Another odd feature is that some titles seem to be edited. For example some searches on my web-site content bring up the following title: "

Read an Article On Competitor Analysis On the Aware Website

This title doesn't exist on our web-site so has been taken from somewhere else - most likely from a link on a UK government business support web-site.

Where Bing falls is in the advanced searching and also the preferences. I like that you can set Google to display 100 hits at a time. Bing only allows 50. Bing also lacks some of the field / advanced search options available to Google. There are no wild-card searches (using the * character) or synonym searches (the ~ character) for example. However there are options that are not currently available in Google - such as the feed:, hasfeed:, loc:, and contains: options. These allow for searching for RSS sites (feed: and hasfeed:), location searches (loc:), searches for sites containing links to types of content such as WMA, MPG files, etc. - contains:. These options are not available in the advanced search boxes.

All in all - i like Bing and prefer its interface to Live. I like colourful pages, and have customised my Google page with iGoogle themes, and Ask with it's skins. Yet again, however, this is not a Google Killer - and perhaps it's not trying to be. The key thing: Bing is not google!

A number of other reviews on Bing worth reading:

Mixed reviews of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine - the Daily Telegraph
Bing Don't Bother - Karen Blakeman's review
Bing Launches - it's awful - Phil Bradley's review
Bing Bing: Microsoft's search engine unexpectedly live, but not Live - the Guardian

Cuil - not going to cull Google!

2008-07-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

For a change I thought I'd give my opinions on a new search engine that's being touted around.

Cuil is a new search engine that claims to have the biggest search index and give better results than Google owing to a methodology that looks at word context rather than page links.

There are already lots of comments on Cuil - for example, Webware's "New Search Engine Cuil takes aim at Google" or Karen Blakemen's "Cuil - not so cool"

I too played with Cuil - for around 5 minutes before I realised that this is very much a "what you see is what you get" effort - and I didn't see very much.

One of the first things I do when I use a search engine is change my preferences - to get 100 hits per page. I find a much more efficient way of looking through pages of results - and the time to look at 10 versus 100 on a single page isn't that much more. So I headed to Cuil's preferences page - and found that there was almost nothing to change. So you're stuck with a page of descriptions - and if they aren't right, you're forced to try the next page or a new search. Not clever! Then what about modifying my search - for specific types of content - title search, filetype search. Nada!

My top test keywords (generally "competitive intelligence" and various permutations of this) came up with the expected sites - but nothing new and not even all I'd expect - plus irritating logos attached to each entry that seemed to be stolen from images that seemed relevant.

My main complaint supports a comment on the Webware blog "Didn't we stop the pissing contest over number of pages searched about 10 years ago?". I concur totally. So what if Cuil has 120 billion pages. It's not size that counts - it's what you do with what you've got that counts. (I'm sure I've heard that somewhere before in a different context ;-) That's why Exalead is so useful - as it's so easy to customise, and refine searches. That's why Google is top-dog - as its interface is so simple and the results tend to be accurate. That's why Ask works - as it gives good results, with options to refine and it highlights news, images, encyclopaedia entries all together making search seem simple.

Finally their purported killer feature - relating search to the words on the page and their context. Isn't that similar or the same as the method Ask (or it's predecessor Teoma) uses, or have I missed something? (Or perhaps it only refers to the actual page rather than related pages which is what Ask does - if so, it's also 10 years out-of-date as just relating content to the actual page rather than linked pages was killed off by Google's linkage innovation).

So - not impressed. I still think that there's scope for a Google Killer out there, but Cuil ain't that Killer!

Emotional responses

2008-05-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

I've not posted anything for months - not because I've not had things to post, but because of work pressures, and perhaps also not having anything I thought worth posting.

That's not to say that things haven't happened - but others will have posted on the London Online conference, the SCIP annual and European conferences in San Diego and Bad Nauheim, Germany, and the AIIP annual conference in Pittsburgh. I attended all - and each was worthwhile in its own way. (My favorite was AIIP - but then this is such a great organisation anyway!).

In the last few months I've also been to China where I led a workshop on CI, and on a personal level, celebrated my oldest nephew's wedding in Jerusalem and saw the loss of my father a month later.

So what has prompted this post?

Well I try and link ideas to marketing and competitive intelligence. Those who know me will know that one of the areas I specialise in is competitive intelligence analysis and game theory. My talk at SCIP Europe (and also at the SCIP 2007 conference) was on Game Theory.

One of the areas I emphasise is that when looking at a competitor you should try and look at things from their perspective. Just because something looks stupid or illogical to you doesn't neccssarily mean that it is stupid and illogical. It could also be that the competitor is viewing something from a different angle to you - and that if you switched viewpoints it would make perfect sense. Developing an ability to switch perspectives could save you $, £, €, or ¥ as it should lead to greater anticipation of how competitors are likely to respond and thus better and more effective strategies. The assumption is that competitors behave logically, and choose strategies based on the information and knowledge they currently have.

There is, however, an exception to this. Sometimes a competitor can be blinded by hatred, greed, fear, or another strong emotion. In such cases their decisions are likely to be stupid and illogical as they can't see reality and instead, they base what they do on their emotionally biased view of the world.

As a result, when looking at a competitor it is also important to look for any emotional aspect in their decision making. Is this leading to how they behave or react? If it is, then you can use it against them to win out. Of course the same applies to you - and it's important that you make decisions that are not based on emotional reasons. Decisions need to be made based on facts, evidence and logic - anything else will lead to vulnerabilities that can be attacked by a competitor.

There are many examples of companies that have made poor decisions based on emotion: a classic is the failure of the 2000 Time Warner - AOL merger, which was partly driven by Time Warner management's fear of being left behind in a digital world. In fact many mergers fail as they are not really motivated by logic but more by fear of being left behind or greed - seeing acquisition as the best way to grow.

So when looking at a competitor, you need to

assume that they are behaving logically - try to see things from their perspective
consider that they may be acting emotionally, and not basing decisions on fact and logic.

Which of these two applies will depend on the pattern of decision making, the decisions made, and the competitor's management. Part of the job of the CI analyst is to step back from their own emotional perspectives and, dispassionately, look at the competitor and decide what has led to their decisions and strategies: logic or emotion.

I still haven't answered what prompted these thoughts.

Generally I try to understand the opinions and views of people with whom I disagree - and accept that often there is a valid rationale to these views. I fervently disagree with Islamic terrorist groups, and I totally support Israel. At the same time, I understand the view of the Palestinians and believe that they have a case. I understand the Islamic religious view of Hamas that Israel is occupied Islamic land and that only Islamic rule is valid. I don't personally agree with this - but I accept that from some Islamic perspectives (not all) this is logical as it follows some Koranic precepts. So I'm applying my rule above of trying to understand the other side, and looking at things from their perspective.

I can even apply this (with difficulty) to some terrorist actions in Europe and the USA. The attacks on 911 were reprehensible, evil and criminal. However using the above principles I can understand these actions - as they fall into a logical pattern.

Western Values represent an attack on Islamic values.
Western Values are winning out - even in Islamic society.
For Islamic values to triumph, Western values must be destroyed, so that the world realises that it's only true Islamic values that will lead to human peace and happiness.
What the West calls terrorism is actually a misnomer - and is, in fact, an attempt by true Muslim believers to alert their own governments to how they've been led astray, while at the same time to destroy the forces that are doing this - leading to a growth in Islamic values and beliefs.

What I fail to understand however, is how a follower of any religion can take advantage of people with mental problems and use them for terrorist activity. One of the basic principles behind all religions: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist... is the protection of less-well-off and weaker members of society. They teach that it is a major sin to take advantage of such people.

The recent bomb attempt in Exeter, England, when an Islamic convert who was reportedly mentally ill, with low IQ and suffering from Aspergers, was so radicalised that he was preparing bombs to use to maim and kill people, suggests that the people behind him were not acting under any religious framework at all - but were driven by emotions only: hatred and fear. Worse, they bring shame on true Islamic believers, and through their actions will lead even more people to see Islam as an evil creed that only destroys and has no respect for the poor, sick and down-trodden. This is false! So called "Imams" who believe that they can recruit victims like poor Nicky Reilly have desecrated Islam and the teachings in the Koran and Hadith, and should be denounced by all true Muslims as false.

New Beginnings

2007-09-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

September is an interesting time of the year. It is a time when the Summer is coming to an end, and the leaves are reddening and starting to fall (at least in the Northern Hemisphere - in the Southern it is a time when shoots start to appear, heralding the onset of Summer).

It is also the time when schools restart in the UK. Essentially it is the New Year for education. The astrological sign for the month is the scales or balance - Libra.

So September is a month when things change - and we need to find a balance. A balance between the seasons. A time when the old knowledge gets replaced by the new in the new school term.

In Jewish culture and religion September is also the month of the New Year - when traditionally all mankind is judged and their fortunes for the following year are put on the balance and weighed, based on their good and bad deeds from the preceding year. It is a time when religious Jews pray for forgiveness and apologize for any misdeeds they have done to their fellow human beings as well as to God. As an atonement they give charity - as prayer, repentance and charity can avert adverse Divine decrees and judgements.

Coincidentally, September this year is also the start of Ramadan - the Moslem holy month - where religious Moslems also pray, fast, and give charity.

I'd like to wish all school / college starters success in their studies, Moslems a Ramadan Kareem waMubarak, and Jews a Chatima Tova uMetukah.

May we all be inscribed in the book of
life, health, happiness and prosperity.

Communication

2007-09-17T04:41:00.000-07:00

Most CI professionals are familiar with the standard competitive intelligence cycle (although you will often see variations). Typically the steps are given as:

planning & direction i.e. the boss - also known as the end-user :-) tells you what is needed and you or they work out how to get it;
collection - you follow your plan;
processing & analysis - you integrate the gathered information with other information to convert the information into something usable i.e. intelligence;
dissemination - you pass back the intelligence to the end-user and hope that they act on it.

Those who know me will know that I disagree with this cycle. There are a number of things wrong with the model - for example:

the model lacks feedback steps;
it doesn't integrate with other business processes adequately, such as the strategic/business planning cycles;
it doesn't allow for serendipitous intelligence gathering crucial for effective early warning systems.

There are others, and when I teach CI I always highlight the problems, and also present alternatives. (For example the 4Cs model described in AWARE's brief guide to competitive intelligence)

My focus in this item however is the use of the word dissemination. The Encarta® World English Dictionary defines disseminate as "to distribute or spread something, especially information...". Most other dictionaries give similar definitions. The problem with this word is that it implies that information flows one way - from the collector to the end-user. There is no mention of information - feedback - flowing the other way or laterally throughout the organisation. Effective competitive intelligence needs an information sharing culture where information flows between those who have the intelligence and those who need it - each informing the other. The English word to describe this process is not dissemination, but communication.

The Encarta dictionary has a number of definitions for communication and the verb communicate. Communication is defined as "the exchange of information between individuals, for example, by means of speaking, writing, or using a common system of signs or behavior" while the second definition for communicate is "to transmit or reveal a feeling or thought by speech, writing, or gesture so that it is clearly understood".

Isn't this what we aim to do in competitive intelligence: not to disseminate intelligence without any feedback or even knowing if the intelligence is usable, useful or understood but to communicate it so that both parties clearly understand its impact and importance?

The problem is how to communicate intelligence so that it is understood, and used. That, however, will have to be a topic for a future blog entry.

Management Partrnerships

2007-08-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

Last year I wrote a blog entry on leadership. That entry was based on an idea expressed by Rabbi Mendel Lew, and given in one of his weekly synagogue sermons. Today Rabbi Lew gave another sermon which I think has implications for management.

The topic was a strange verse in the Book of Genesis just prior to the creation of Adam's wife, Eve. Genesis chapter 2 verse 18 is generally translated from the original Hebrew as follows: God said, 'It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a compatible helper for him'. Two verses later (verse 20) the same idea comes up. The man named every livestock animal and bird of the sky, as well as all the wild beasts. But the man did not find a helper who was compatible for him. The Hebrew words "ezer kenegdo" are translated as compatible helper or similar variations (e.g. a suitable helper) but a more literal translation would actually be a helper against him or a helper who contradicts him / argues with him. (For linguists - ezer means "helper", while kenegdo means "against him")

So what does this have to do with management. The second verse quoted gives the clue - in that Adam was not actually on his own, as implied in the first verse. Adam had companions - dogs, cats, livestock, etc. However none could advise him or work with him. They were all subordinate to, and dominated by, him.

There are two types of managers

those who seek to dominate those around them
those who listen to, work with, and respect the opinions of those around them.

The first sort generates "yes men" and "yes women" who dare not question the wisdom and leadership of the manager. The problem with this sort of manager is that if they are wrong they will have nobody to tell them so. They will have helpers - but nobody to tell them when they are wrong, or even to discuss issues objectively. Nobody will risk contradicting such managers - and if such a manager did ask for the opinions of those around them, the answers received would be crafted to correspond to what people thought he/she wanted to hear. Essentially the helpers are a bit like a sheepdog rounding up sheep for the shepherd - very useful, but only so long as everything is straightforward and there are no problems. The moment problems occur, the manager - like the shepherd - will be alone. Essentially this type of manager has nobody to share ideas with: he/she has no peers to listen to, to respect and to view as equals.

For true management and leadership success this is not enough. You also need to hear contradictory opinions and take into account the views of those who disagree with you - who are against you. From the differing opinions you can then develop a balanced viewpoint - and end up making better, more profitable decisions.

In a recent blog entry (Thinking Hats) I suggested that prior to making a decision you look at the problem from six different perspectives, with the sixth being a synthesis of the other five. The same applies to management: to manage successfully you need to consider the opinions and attitudes of those around you. You need an ezer kenegdo whose opinions are seen as equal to your own, so that you can balance your and your peers' views when making decisions.

However this only goes as far as the planning stage. When it comes to action, you need to think as one - and act as one. There should be no scope for different people to pull in contradictory directions. Successful managers should take on board diverse viewpoints, and then come up with rational strategic or tactical decisions that bring people together; that unify the various perspectives; and that lead to coherent actions that fulfill agreed business aims and objectives.

Competitive Intelligence and the small business

2007-08-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

I wasn't planning to do another entry so soon after the last one, but felt I had to highlight an excellent article on competitive intelligence in the latest issue of FreePint. The article, entitled DIY Detection: Competitive Intelligence for SMEs is by the Australian based consultant, Vernon Prior, and gives a very comprehensive description of how to do CI on a low budget. (I wrote an article several years ago for the sadly defunct Competia newsletter on a similar topic - you can still read the article Competitive Intelligence on a Small Budget but unfortunately many of the suggested links for Internet research are now dead or no longer offer the same material).

Vernon's article covers all aspects of CI - from what to look for, how to look for it, and what to do with the intelligence when you've found it. He discusses both secondary and primary sources and concludes with brief guidelines on actually setting up a CI operation. A well written article, that beats mine in its depth and comprehensiveness - taking account of the limited word count available for such articles.

Another site of interest to Competitive Intelligence specialists is Jens Thieme's Competitive Intelligence & Marketing Intelligence Resources & Tools web-site at www.markintell.com. This - still growing - resource for all aspects of CI, includes some excellent articles on CI and related disciplines and Vernon is a contibutor/member of the site.

Thinking Hats

2007-08-07T02:20:00.001-07:00

This entry has been prompted by a comment (critique) on Jon Lowder's CI blog that I don't publish very often. I could try and make excuses (work, laze, inability - delete whichever is not applicable). However I won't - as I think the complaint is totally justified. In fact I tend to have spurts - and publish when I get ideas. I'd prefer to blog something that fulfilled the aims I have for this blog then just use it for a stream of consciousness - much of which would be just a way of me asserting my ego. So thank you Jon for the prompt to think!

First - a couple of comments on Jon's blog - if you've not ever read it. He has some great tips which I firmly second. For example, recent blogs mention the uses of LinkedIn in CI. I've been a LinkedIn user for some time - and have found it invaluable as a source for potential contacts. I've also signed up with other networking groups although my network is smaller on these - Xing, Ecademy, etc. Also - don't ignore Facebook and MySpace. A lot of companies have signed up for pages on these networking sites, and you never know who or what you might find that could help with a project.

Jon mentions a new LinkedIn feature - the ability to ask questions, and get answers from other users as a strength of the service. Potentially it could be - although I felt the answers given were poor. I think a better service for answering questions is the FreePint bar which has a circulation list of approaching 100,000 expert searchers who answer questions on a massive range of topics - many of which are relevant for competitive intelligence professionals. (As an example, recent posts have looked at international tax comparisons, media monitoring, Swiss, Austrian & German company shareholders and Russian export regulations).

In the example Jon highlighted, half the answers suggested HitWise. This is a great service, but I'm not sure that it is the right solution for the questioner, from the bank JP Morgan-Chase, who was looking for competitive intelligence vendors for paid search - asking Is CI effective in Search? None of the answers given took into account the questioner's origins in financial services - or asked what he meant by his question about whether CI was effective in search.

What Hitwise offers is a service giving customers knowledge on how Internet users interact with web-sites - your own and your competitors. You can use it to compare how your site is performing against competitor sites - and if this is what was wanted, then Hitwise would be a good solution. However Hitwise's strength is not really for B2B web-sites, as these will generally receive much less traffic than the consumer web-sites for which the Hitwise service is best aimed. If what was wanted were vendors who were experts at secondary Internet search then Hitwise would not be the correct solution - members of the Association of Independent Information professionals (www.aiip.org) would have been a better bet - as most are experts at searching the Internet and other databases, and many, including us at AWARE, specialise in competitive intelligence.

In fact, another interpretation of this question is completely different and takes into account both the nature of the questioner and medium where the question was posed. LinkedIn attracts a lot of recruiters and recruitment agencies, and is used by these for looking for candidates. Search is sometimes used in this context so the question could have related to this i.e. Is CI effective in Recruitment Searching? If this was what the questioner really wanted then none of the 8 responses was satisfactory.

This highlights a lesson for all competitive intelligence professionals - you need to know, for each research request:

who is actually asking the question (i.e. you are asked a question by your boss, but this is because his or her boss has asked them a question - are the two questions the same or has something been lost in the transmission?),
why are they asking it,
what are they really looking to achieve with the answer.

Only then can you really answer the question. It's a question of putting on your thinking hat to get behind the, often, easy looking question.

In fact, if you really want to study a problem it's not one thinking hat that should be used but six! This idea comes from the work of Edward de Bono - and should be a key element of all competitive intelligence analytical approaches. Essentially every problem for which a decision is required should be looked at in six ways:

Neutral: focusing on the data available, knowledge gaps, past trends and extrapolations from historical data. Unfortunately this is where a lot of CI people stop in their analyses - and just present the neutral view. This is rarely the full answer that the decision maker needs.
Self-opinionated / emotionally: how will your customer react to the response you are giving him or her? Does your work answer the question they've posed - not the surface question, but the underlying driver that led to the question? You need to use intuition and your emotional instincts to look at the problem with this approach. What are the emotions involved? How will people respond to your research when they've not been through the process or followed the reasoning you took to reach the answer?
Judgmentally: what are the bad points or weaknesses in your work or the decision suggested? What could go wrong? Be cautious and risk-adverse. This approach lets you prepare for the worst and makes you think of alternative options and create contingency plans if things don't work as expected.
Positively: now look at the good points and the benefits that will result from any decision. Even if everything looks like a disaster, trying to see the positive can help find a way out of the mess. It can also help show the value in the decision - in a way that may not be immediately obvious.
Creatively: brainstorm a bit. Try and think beyond the problem for alternative solutions or approaches. Don't criticise any ideas - just go with the flow. This approach allows you to come up with further suggestions and ideas that could add increased value to what you are suggesting. More importantly they show that you've really considered all aspects of the problem.
Take an overview of the other 5 approaches: this final approach looks at all the other five and evaluates the responses, synthesizing the responses into a single coherent, balanced position. If there are too few alternatives then it may be time to go back to the creative approach. If everything looks perfect, then be really judgmental and see if you can come up with anything wrong at all - just in case there is some gremlin that was missed. If everything looks bad, go back to the positive approach and look to see if there is anything salvageable.

Answering problems and coming to decisions using de Bono's 6 Thinking Hats technique will result in better solutions and safer, more resilient and robust decisions - avoiding potential disasters, while being able to feel more confident about the actions you commit to.

Abolish Negative Thinking

2007-07-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

When trying to obtain information it's easy be negative about finding it - and to come up with reasons why it can't be found. The problem is that human beings naturally tend to think negatively. This is destructive to creativity and the ability to get round problems, and find solutions that are achievable and effective.

As an exercise try and think up reasons why a piece of intelligence won't be found. I'll bet your list looks something like this:

We tried looking for this once before and got nowhere.
It'll take to long to obtain.
We don't have enough people.
It'll cost too much.
We don't have the software systems.
It's not ethical to obtain this sort of information.
It'll be protected.
We won't be able to find out the relevant people to interview.
Nothing will be online.
Anything useful we will already know so it's not worth looking.
We won't be able to verify it.

How many of the above did you come up with? What other reasons did you consider?

Now try repeating the exercise - but this time think of reasons why the same information could be found. Most people find this much more difficult, and the list will be much shorter.

Good competitive intelligence - in fact good research in any field - requires an ability to overcome these negative thoughts and to discover reasons why something is possible. Sometimes the solution can be obtained by an indirect approach - lateral thinking. Often however the perceived blocks don't actually exist and the information is in fact freely available. It's a case of the old adage "if you don't try you won't succeed".

So, if there is one thing to do today that will improve your ability to obtain the competitive intelligence you need tomorrow it's to abolish negative thinking and to always look for the positive. In fact looking for the positive will have other benefits - as instead of seeing things as obstacles all of a sudden they'll become opportunities.

It's April - so it must be Spring, SCIP and AIIP

2007-04-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

April is a peak time for information professionals. There are two major industry events - and AWARE managing partner - Arthur Weiss - can be seen at both.

The first is the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) annual conference - taking place this year in sunny Minneapolis. The second is the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professional's conference - a week later, in New York.

Both are major events on the calendar - and major networking opportunities. Networking is a crucial skill for info-pros - and it pays off. A few years ago I helped out a colleague and she has now put me in touch with WS Radio who just interviewed me on my role as a CI professional. You can listen to the broadcast now: Radio Interview with WSRadio.

What better proof of the power of networking than being heard on a network :-) I hope that you enjoy listening to the show as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

Dissing the competition through dirty tricks!

2007-04-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

An article in the New Zealand Herald - Cloak & Dagger Tactics Hit the Office gives an interesting perspective on how dirty tricks, espionage and other unethical practices can hurt companies. Unfortunately there is nothing new in the idea that competitors and others can deliberately aim to hurt rival organizations using unethical and illegal approaches.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is primarily about finding information on your competitive environment - competitors, customers, suppliers as well as general business trends that could impact you. (AWARE's brief guide to competitive intelligence tells you more about this).

One common technique is to identify the key intelligence topics (KITs) that you need to focus on to give you that competitive edge. These KITs will are aimed at helping you understand competitor strategies and the reasons competitors are doing what they are doing - as one example.

One topic that all organizations should look at is what others are saying about you.

What do your customers think about your products and services?
What do suppliers think about your negotiating skills - are you a push-over?
How do competitors view your position in the marketplace - and what do they see as your vulnerabilities?

You need to do this globally. Don't just focus on your key local competitors, but consider those from further afield. New threats could be coming from anywhere: Brazil, India, China.... In fact, CI is a truly global discipline, and it is essential to know thy competitors - wherever they are located.

Sometimes what you'll discover may be uncomfortable. In 1993, Virgin Atlantic discovered that BA had gained access to confidential files and was using these to poach customers from the airline. This led to a protracted court case - BA lost.

More recently, the Canadian insurer, Fairfax, was the target of a campaign of malicious disinformation from a group of Wall Street Hedge Fund managers. The company is now suing them for $6 billion - claiming that their aim was to manipulate the market by creating uncertainty about the company and its future. These include a variety of dirty tricks - false emails and letters, espionage attempts and more.

The lesson from these two cases (and there are many more) is that it is important to watch out for what others are doing to you. Don't assume that your competitors always play fair - some don't.

You need to keep a look out for unethical practices:

the phone call from the "student" asking for help with a school project;
the visit from an "industry analyst" claiming to be writing a stock report

and so on.

Always check that they are who they say they are before confiding anything. If suspicious refuse to give any information away.

Even more important, beware of scams that may try and lull you into a false sense of security: the "official" who claims to be a government tax inspector, who then gives a phone number that you can use to check him up. Except that the people answering the phone are in on the scam! (For any official organizations it should be easy to verify that the phone number is real).

Or the organization using a fake, but official sounding name (e.g. in the UK, many companies are conned into paying more than needed by companies calling themselves things like "Data Protection Office Ltd" which sounds sufficiently similar to the real Data Protection Registrar.)

The old adage Buyer Beware (Caveat Emptor) holds. A key intelligence topic that all companies should include in their armory is the one that focuses on what competitors are doing aimed directly at you - what they are saying, what they thinking, and what they are doing, especially if they have a propensity to play dirty!

Looking Forward - but don't ignore what is behind you!

2007-03-09T00:34:00.000-08:00

I left school many years ago, but I still remember some of the lessons taught by Jeremy Rosen, who was, at that time, my headmaster. I'm still in contact with him - and both of us now have gray hair! In a recent newsletter he writes:

There’s a Russian proverb that goes, ‘He who looks to the past is in danger of losing an eye. But he who ignores the past is in danger of losing two eyes.’

Jeremy Rosen states that he doesn’t know if this is really a Russian proverb - he heard it from Lord Bullock, the historian, biographer of Hitler and Stalin, who was speaking at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem many years ago. However the origin is less important in this case than what is being said.

Too often, people make decisions based on insufficient information - they ignore the past, creating excuses saying that the past is a closed book - and base their decisions on the perceived problems of the present, tearing up all that has gone before in an effort to create a desirable future. Others take the opposite view - and dwell in the past, refusing to realize that it is the future that shapes our fortunes, not what has gone before.

In marketing and business the same rules apply. Some are "Risk seekers" - always anticipating a bright future, irrespective of warnings, and ignoring the past. Others are "Risk adverse" scared about what the future may bring - and essentially living in the past. In reality, businesses need to balance both approaches. They need to build for the future, and should grasp emerging opportunities with both hands. However this should be based on knowledge of the risks involved, and this can only come from prior experience and knowledge. Even brand new innovations are built on past knowledge.

There are organizations that seem to focus on past (or should that be passed) glories. They stress how they did this or that - and how they became the market leader through their past actions. However if they fail to see how the present has changed then they will inevitably lose this leadership position. There are numerous companies that have fallen because of this. One of the best examples is J Sainsbury - the UK supermarket giant, currently in the midst of a bidding battle. Sainsburys used to be the largest UK supermarket, but it lost direction, and with it share - it is now no longer the market leader. Sainsbury saw itself as the market leader, but failed to recognize the innovations and different approach of competitors such as Tesco and Asda (owned by Walmart). Essentially, Sainsbury was looking at the past and reveling in it, but in reality was ignoring the past and the lessons it held on success. Sainsbury had grown by being innovative - it was the first UK supermarket, building a major presence by giving customers what they wanted. However by not keeping both eyes open on what was happening in its market, it lost its market position.

A key business skill is being able to anticipate the future (using techniques such as scenario planning). This depends on using drivers and trends from the past to anticipate what could happen in the future. We need to look to the past and learn from it. However our aim should be to build a better future. This cannot come by ignoring what has gone before. Instead we should aim to understand why something happened, so that we can learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes. As George Santayana said in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

There is a widely known Zen story that shows this in another way:

"When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice."

The importance of lateral thinking!

2007-02-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

A story is told about a supermarket that was having problems with gangs meeting in its car park after the supermarket had shut for the night - trading drugs, fighting and generally making a mess and nuisance.

The supermarket tried various conventional solutions to solve the problem: fences, increased security, and the like. Nothing worked long-term and, moreover, they were all expensive. Then somebody thought that perhaps a different approach might work.

The gangs were all trying to look cool, and the supermarket car-park had gained a reputation as a cool place to hang out at night. So what did the supermarket do? They thought about what could make the car park an uncool place to be, and started up a loud-speaker system piping the music of Mantovani over the parking spaces. Quickly the problem disappeared - as what kind of "cool" 16-18 year old wants to be associated with visiting a location that plays the kind of "easy listening" music beloved by their grandparents!

I teach a weekly diploma course at Thames Valley University, as part of the UK's Chartered Institute of Marketing's Marketing Research & Information module. One of the joys of teaching is that you often learn a lot from your students. Last week was no exception, and provides another great example of lateral thinking - combined with a crucial awareness of the importance of ensuring customer satisfaction while still making money!

One of my students had spent some time working as a hospitality manager in a Greek hotel. He was working the night shift, when a package group of 15 tourists arrived at the hotel. They'd just landed, and the time was 3.00am. All were tired, having had a delayed flight, and all were looking forward to the rooms that they'd paid for. Except because they hadn't turned up, they had been treated as no-shows, and their rooms had been sold on.

Overbooking is a not-infrequent problem faced by hotels. Normally the way round is to find another equivalent hotel, and transfer the overbooked guests there. Nobody is particularly happy about the arrangement.

The guests are unhappy as they had been expecting hotel A and got hotel B - and have to move on, when they were looking forward to resting from their journey.
The hotel is unhappy as the replacement hotel needs to be as good, if not better than the original. This means that the hotel has to pay for its mistake - financially, and if the replacement hotel is not better, in good will and reputation as well, which can be even more important.

At 3.00am, with tired and irritable visitors desperate to sleep, the problem is even worse. You have to phone around your competitor hotels in the area - speaking to the night staff - to find a replacement. Often the other neighborhood hotels will also be full, meaning that the group will have to be split up - guaranteed to cause problems. Furthermore, you are likely to have to book people in lower quality hotels. You will also need to arrange several taxis to transfer people to the replacements. All told, you have a PROBLEM!

Christos found another way.

The locality ran regular cruises to the Greek island of Santorini - which necessitated an early morning start, and a couple of nights on the island.

Santorini is one of those magical islands that, once visited, you never forget. It offers all that is best of the Greek islands - white washed villages, great beaches and views, fun restaurants, archaeological sites, monasteries and churches. However this is not all - it also has a volcano in the middle of the archipelago, with regular trips to see its caldera. This volcano has been attributed to the destruction of the Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete, and even the cause of the plagues that the Biblical book of Exodus mentions as having led to the release of the Israelite slaves from their Egyptian servitude (so, for example, the plague of darkness resulted from a cloud of ash that fell from the volcano). This eruption, 3500 years ago, was undoubtedly one of the largest ever volcanic eruptions during human history - much bigger than the infamous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The island has even been linked to the legend of Atlantis.

Christos knew that there were always places on this trip. He also knew that the costs of the trip, including the island hotel costs, would be considerably less than what would need to be paid to competitors to find beds for the group so early in the morning, as well as the less tangible costs in lost goodwill and so on. Accommodation on Santorini was much more basic and low cost - but the surroundings compensated for this.

Rather than apologizing to the group, and then getting on the phone to search for replacement hotels at 3.00am - a depressing and tedious task - he welcomed the group and said that they were really lucky. They were the hotel's 1000th tour group and as such had qualified for a superb prize - a free trip to Santorini to start their holiday with a bang. The tour bus that would be taking them to the boat would be arriving shortly so there was no point in checking them in. They'd check back into the hotel in 2 days time, after their mini-cruise.

The tourist group may have been tired. But tiredness evaporates in such circumstances, and instead of an unhappy and probably angry crowd, you now had customer satisfaction par excellence. Instead of a short-night's sleep and then a day recuperating by the pool, this group had been chosen to visit one of the highlights of any trip to Greece - for free. The tour group were overjoyed at their lucky break.

Next morning, the day-shift manager queried why the hotel was paying for 15 tourists to go on the Santorini trip. This was normally seen as a profit center by the hotel - as the margins were considerable. Christos explained the situation: how, instead of paying out to competitor hotels to accommodate the overbooked tourists, the hotel had covered its costs by just diverting the payments already made to the tour. Quickly the wisdom of the decision was realized, and it is now part of the hotel operating manual.

More importantly - this second story shows some of the skills all great marketers need:

Ability to be able to think quickly, laterally and if needed, sidestep conventions and rules;
Awareness of the importance of customer satisfaction: a happy customer leads to a strong reputation, and repeat purchase;
Awareness of the importance of profit and that customer satisfaction needs to be balanced by an ability to make money.

Successful marketing is not all about reading the text books. Generally it is about solving everyday problems using innovative approaches. Many of these require skills in lateral thinking. Such solutions often are low-cost or save money, and build reputation at the same time. There are many examples of how lateral thought has been used to create opportunities or limit threats to the business. These two stories illustrate two different ways problems were solved through lateral thinking.

Thoughts for 2008

2007-02-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

It may seem like we've only just started 2007 - after all it is still only February. However marketers should be thinking ahead, and it's never too early to start. After all January 1st 2008 is less than 330 days away and the US presidential elections, taking place on November 4th, 2008 are under 650 days away.

So what can we expect for 2008 - which we should be planning for today!

1) There will be a US presidential election - and the winner will not be George Bush. It may be a Republican colleague - I'm not going to forecast who I think will win. Or it may be a Democrat. Whoever wins will want to show change - and will want to be seen as their own man or woman. (Yes - woman. As this election promises to be significant in that Hillary Clinton may become the Democrat nominee - meaning that for the first time, there will be no First Lady, just a First Man, to accompany the First Female President of the USA.)

So political change in the US is inevitable. This will have an impact on all aspects of life both in the US and the world.

2) In the UK, Tony Blair will be just a memory and history. He's announced that he will be standing down this year. 2008 will be the year his successor will start making the changes that will gear up to the next UK general elections which must take place before June 2010. If Tony Blair's successor fails to win hearts and minds, then they will not survive and it takes at least a year for this to happen. So 2008 will be the make or break year.

3) Globally, the Iraq war will still not be sorted out - and deaths from bombings and terrorism will continue. Whether the USA and UK will still be involved is less clear - although my bets are that both countries will still have forces in the country.

In fact, I suspect that the situation today in the Middle East will still be broadly the same. The Israel-Palestine conflict will still be a dominant factor - although I think that the leaders in both Israel and the Palestinian authority may be different. I'd like to say the same for Iran - but even though President Ahmadinijad (don't you think this sounds a bit like "I'm a Dinner Jacket") may be highly unpopular globally and even among many of the intellectuals in Teheran, he won't be ousted unless the Mullahs and the masses turn against him.

I'd also like to see President Mugabe of Zimbabwe go. Again, this is unlikely - unless he dies of old age. I don't see him stepping aside, despite the dire straights his country is now in. And Mugabe will continue to blame Britain and the West rather than accept that he has destroyed what was once a flourishing and successful economy.

4) In the information / computer world - Vista will become the dominant operating system, not due to its quality but purely due to inertia. People will be dithering in 2007, but by 2008 will feel that they need to upgrade their PCs - which will all come pre-installed with Vista. However there may be small changes.

It is possible that in the home market, people may start thinking about Macs - especially if Apple's marketing succeeds in emphasizing the Mac as a better computer for the home in contrast to the PC for the office. The iPod effect may help drive this, as well as the aspirational aspects of the new iPhone which will start being seen in people's pockets. Meanwhile in the world of the web, many of the Web 2.0 applications will be seen as mainstream - possibly with a new killer application taking pole position. Google will, however, still be the dominant search engine although I believe that it will have lost share to others - both newcomers and perhaps Windows Live and Ask.

I've not mentioned other areas that I think will be important - the threat of climate change for example will lead to increased demands to control carbon emissions, and flying may start to be seen as a luxury if taxes increase to make airlines responsible for their carbon footprints (although I somewhat doubt this will come in by 2010). I think that predictions that 2007 will be the hottest year ever will, if they come true, lead to an international effort to prevent global warming. However unless China and India come on board not much will be done, so I feel that any major changes won't occur in 2008. If they do, then the impact on economies will be "interesting"!

Finally terrorism will still terrify - increasingly, as the prospect of mega-terrorism comes to the fore, with terrorists gaining (or being prevented from gaining) nuclear or biological material. The war on terror will not be won until all countries perceive the threat equally and stamp down hard on this scourge. Currently many just play lip-service to the concept in the hope that by keeping their heads down they won't get targetted. However that is not how the terrorists see them. They see them as soft and ripe for take-over, as that is the ultimate objective: to make the world follow their particular concept of God!

A new dawn - we hope you like it!

2007-02-01T00:52:00.000-08:00

At last - the update on the AWARE site has been completed. After a marathon late night session all pages, both new and replacement, have been uploaded.

We've included more FAQs, more humour, more white papers, copies of presentations given at conferences and many resources to help competitive & marketing intelligence professionals stay at the top of their field.

There are a few bits we are still working on, but over the next few weeks these should be finished too. So bear with us. Our Business Sites for CI Professionals pages still require work - so that we can create the definitive resource of top sites to aid secondary research. We also plan to change a lot of the images and pictures - with new sharper, snazzier versions. And that's just for starters. Other changes will happen over time - with new content and support for competitive intelligence professionals worldwide.

This site update involved almost a complete rewrite of the way the site was built - and EVERY page had to be modified. Most of the changes are behind-the-scenes and apart from the new menu bar, you may not even notice differences on some pages. Believe us though - there were. The site now allows text size to be increased or reduced - complying with disability legislation and allowing visually impaired readers to read the site with ease. We've also labeled most (not yet all) images so that visitors using Braille readers can identify the graphic elements.

As with any undertaking this size, there may be mistakes, typos, errors, or pages that just don't work. There may also be some pages that look inconsistent, or where fonts change half-way through or between pages. Some pages may look odd on your browser and although we've tried to check for this, we may have missed something. (The look of a page can vary depending on the computer used, the screen resolution and the browser. Our favourite browser is Firefox, and all pages looked OK using Firefox. We also tested the site on an older version of Internet Explorer - but may have missed some things).

So, if you do spot errors, or things you don't like, please let us know.

Back to the Future - January 2007

2007-01-14T04:25:00.000-08:00

This may look like the first entry in AWARE's blog but it's not. We've been blogging for a while, albeit not frequently. Unfortunately our previous host fell by the wayside, as often seems to happen with web-sites and cyberspace. So this is more of a recap post, as I don't want to lose the great stuff already posted.

So this is what now follows: the preceding posts.... awwww. "Couldn't you start something new" I hear. Well, that will come, but not today.

Instead, I'm posting the previous entries as new entries. They may look new - but in reality they are just repeats from our previous site (ResearchZilla - at ResearchZilla.com)

Honey Traps!

2006-12-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about a topic for this entry. I was considering something along the lines of the uses and dangers of honey-traps in competitive intelligence and counter-intelligence. This was prompted by the story of Judith told in the Apocrypha, and featured in some of the world's greatest art work. (If you see a woman holding somebody's decapitated head then it is either Judith with the head of Holofernes, or more commonly, Salome with John the Baptist's head. Judith's story is remembered on the Jewish festival of Chanukah that ended just after Christmas, and led to a custom to eat cheese on this holiday. The key point is that Holofernes, a Greek general, was tempted by the beautiful Judith, who plied him with salty cheese, and then wine to quench his thirst. Holofernes had lost his head to Judith's beauty before he fell into a drunken stupor. He then lost his head to Judith's sword! It is essentially the old-new story of beware Greeks bearing gifts - in reverse, as instead of it being the Greeks tricking the Trojans, it was the Greeks getting tricked. For competitive intelligence professionals, it shows three things:

How easy it is to get information or what ever is needed when tempted by an unexpected gift. Rather than ask for information and give nothing in return, try and make it a quid-pro-quo by offering a piece of harmless (but unknown to the interviewee) information. This exchange can stimulate conversation and encourage the passing of information. As an example, many years ago, I was working on a project. I promised interviewees a copy of the report I was writing in return for their co-operation. This was a sanitised version of what I was giving to my client. In fact, it was pretty much a rehash of what my interviewees had just told me, with the useful bits wanted by my client removed. I sent this to one interviewee - who promptly called me back to thank me. He had been my main source and much of the report was based on his input. He then proceeded to give me much more information than he had before - invaluable to my client.
How an unexpected gift can encourage people to talk. The above example shows how it can be done. The danger is that people in your company may be giving away valuable information - so it is important to ensure that there is a policy on who can talk to outsiders, and what can be said.
How women can tempt men. Yes - I know that this is politically incorrect, but it is done. I know of a CI consultancy that had a reputation for employing extremely attractive, and very bright 20-year old graduates. These girls would then call up senior executives, play naive, and get the executives to talk. They would then invite them to a lunch meeting to talk further - and the executives would melt, giving away information that they should have known not to give. Unfortunately it is a failing of some middle-aged men to give away the store when flattered by a much younger woman. This is the classic honey-trap, and although it may not be ethical, it does go on.

Think why information is available

2006-09-25T07:52:00.001-07:00

When I teach people about competitive intelligence, I always emphasise the importance of understanding why information is available.

Competitor information becomes public for a number of reasons, but these can be summarised into three categories:

Intentional dissemination of information about the company by the company - for example, an annual report or a press release
Accidental dissemination of information about the company by the company - for example, a leak or rumour
Information that comes from a third party. This itself can take a number of forms. One is like a footprint in the sand - so competitor actions can provide clues to their plans or strategies. A typical example is when a competitor signs a contract with another company. This company may mention the contract - giving out information about the competitor. A second example is where a third party has managed to collect information on a competitor from a variety of sources including interviews and non-published sources. In this case, the third party may decide to publish their information as a market research report. Sometimes the third party may include a synthesis of information that combined gives further insights.

Of course, all three are important for competitive intelligence - although perhaps the third is the most important. One of the aims of a competitor analyst is to gather intelligence from both published and non-published (but legal and ethical) sources - and synthesise these so as to give something that conveys an advantage not available to competitors.

Sometimes though, information can come too easily. Part of the skillset of a competent competitor analyst should be an ability to evaluate why information became available. Which of the above was the reason and how reliable is the information? There is a risk that the gathered intelligence is wrong, and a validity check can help assess the chances of this. (One common approach is to grade both the intelligence and source, giving a likelihood of accuracy). Whatever method is used, however, there is always the risk that sometimes things will be wrong.

A simple approach is to consider how easy the information was to obtain. This works on the assumption that competitors will try and protect information that they would prefer not to be in the public domain. So if information is easily available it has a lower value and may be more suspect than information that took a lot of thought and work to obtain.

This is illustrated by the following story - in this case there was an ulterior motive in providing information that on the surface, looked like a real money-saver. The true reason came out as an accidental disclosure following a pointed interview type question!

A man was having problems with the quality of the print from his printer so he called a local repair shop where a friendly man informed him that the printer probably needed only to be cleaned. Because the store charged $50 for such cleanings, he told him he might be better off reading the printer's manual and trying the job himself.

Pleasantly surprised by his candor, the man asked, "Does your boss know that you discourage business?

"Actually, it's my boss's idea," the employee replied sheepishly. "We usually make more money on repairs if we let people try to fix things themselves"

The question of leadership

2006-07-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

I last wrote about leadership almost a year ago. Yesterday I heard a talk that made me think again about this topic.

Understanding leadership is a crucial competitor analysis skill. Poor leadership is a weakness which is reflected in the strategies taken by the company. And companies with poor leaders are less likely to survive when competition intensifies. The opposite is the case for good leaders.

But what makes a good or bad leader. Is it just an ability to come up with winning strategies, or is there more to it.

I've written before about how the Bible can teach us lessons that are applicable for today's business. The biblical story of Korach - told in the book of Numbers is one story that illustrates the issues of leadership. Korach was a cousin of Moses, the Israelite leader. According to Jewish legends, he was fabulously wealthy, and he was also sufficiently charismatic to attract several followers. He approached Moses and asked why he was being passed over - questioning the right of Moses and his brother Aaron to be top dogs. God was not amused, and eventually Korach and his followers were destoyed.

But was it so wrong to aspire to leadership. What was so special about Moses and Aaron that made God accept their leadership style and not that of Korach. Afterall, Korach had proved that he could be successful - his wealth and followers showed this.

The answer lies in how you lead. There are two sorts of leader. The first, leads for reasons of ego. They want to lead. They want to be the boss. Essentially, their ambition is to make things better for themselves, and if those beneath them benefit, then all the better. They thrive on the feeling of power and control that leadership can convey. This type of leader can be viewed as a taker. They take what is given from their followers and those underneath them. If they are good at strategy, then all benefit - although they will often benefit more. If they fail, however, then through not cultivating successors and partners, they are likely to drag all down with them.

The second sort of leader is the opposite of the first, in that rather than choosing to lead, leadership is thrust upon them. They may be the boss, but their ambition is not to benefit themselves but to make things better for those who entrusted them with the leader role. They are givers and will encourage others to follow them, through taking up leadership roles and sharing power. As a result, such leaders are more likely to leave a long-lasting legacy, and will also be better suited to withstand problems. They can call on others for help - and as their motivation is altruistic, they are more likely to receive help.

So how do you spot givers and takers in companies. The first thing to do is look at the company culture. Is it collaborative or mercenary? Do the leaders lead by example, or do they just expect to be obeyed? Do they consult with others and take account of the needs and interests of all the organisation or just a select few who they see as their near-equals?

People like to knock Microsoft, and Bill Gates. Gates is a ruthlessly successful businessman. It is not for nothing that there used to be a Googlebomb that claimed that Microsoft was more evil than the devil. Afterall, Windows and Office are the dominant computer operating systems and software (although not 100% - this is being written on an Apple iBook using Firefox - if you are not using either, consider switching for a better computing experience!). But let's look at Gates himself, over the last few years. He stepped back from being the Microsoft CEO, and now has virtually stepped out of the picture. The world's richest man stated that his aim is to use his wealth to benefit others - via his charitable foundation. This is not the profile of a taker but of a giver. Is this why Microsoft is so successful - it listened to its staff, its customers, its suppliers and the inner voice that says make the world a better place.

Or what about Google. Their company motto may be a trite Don't be evil but this at least recognises that corporates can be evil - Enron and Worldcom were just the tip of the iceberg. OK - so Google's practices in China are suspect. And the way they don't filter out pornographic sites is defintely wrong. However I personally think that both these examples are reflections of how difficult it is to resolve mutually incompatible conflicts of interest. How do you supply search listings when a government gives you a choice of censorship or nothing. Refusal to comply, and so getting blocked totally, doesn't help the population of China. And machines don't find it easy to tell good from bad - Google set rules on what could be found and how, and although these could be altered for exceptions, it sets precedents that could destroy the very accuracy people want. Essentially, Google's leadership style is that of a giver - but giving is never easy. It is taking that is easy as you then consider what is best for a small elite and don't have to balance multiple conflicts of interest.

Both these examples link to computers and the Internet. But givers don't just come from these areas. Ben & Jerry's ice-cream company is another example - that as part of its corporate objectives supports small-scale family owned farms that would otherwise have gone under - squeezed out by their larger competitors. Ben & Jerry's new owners - Unilever also take corporate social responsibility seriously. And if you look at how Unilever is managed, you will see a truely diverse company with many races and creeds at senior positions. Or take the Indian ICICI bank. India is seen as a patriarchal society by many. Yet ICICI has more women at senior / board positions than many US corporations. It is also India's fastest growing private bank - success and the giving mentality seem to go together.

There are many more examples. Just recently Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hatherway, announced that he plans to leave 85% of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation - which made charitable payments in 2005 alone, of more than twice that donated by UNESCO. The name Buffet won't even become incorporated in the charity's name.

So, when you look at the leaders of your competitors (and your own companies) think about whether they are givers or takers. If they are givers and your company is a taker than be worried, as long-term it seems that being a giver is a more reliable indicator of success.

(With thanks for the idea of givers and takers to Rabbi Mendel Lew and his sermon given following the annual reading in synagogue of the story of Korach).

Know your information sources

2005-12-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what the weather is like outside London. Summer here could have been better - but also a lot worse. I know that there are heatwaves in Southern Europe, and I'm sure that even though hurricanes hardly hever happen in Spain (where there currently is not much rain on the plain), this is not the case everywhere. And as Discovery found out, you can't predict when bad weather can cause you to change your landing slot!

It is important to know information sources. When I do competitive intelligence training, one workshop exercise I take people through is to show how many different information sources there actually are. I do this by compiling an A to Z of information sources - with one rule, that they must all be different types. (So you can't have Search Engine and then Yahoo! as options for S and Y as Yahoo! is a Search Engine and so is included in this category). Try it - it is not that difficult. I have 4 items for K and 2 for Q, X and Z. Most other letters get spoilt for choice.

However it is not just good enough to know your information sources. You should also know how accurate they are - and ideally how the source gathers the information. Only then can you guard against disinformation - or perhaps from using secondary information that you think is actually a primary source.

There is a story:

A film crew was on location deep in the desert. One day an
elderly native American went up to the director and said, "Tomorrow rain."
The next day it rained. A week later, the native American went up to
the director and said, "Tomorrow storm."

The next day there was a hailstorm. "This Indian is
incredible," said the director. He told his secretary to
hire the man to predict the weather for the remaining of
the shoot. However, after several successful predictions,
the old native American didn't show up for two weeks.

Finally the director sent for him. "I have to shoot a big
scene tomorrow," said the director, "and I'm depending on
you. What will the weather be like?"

The native American shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know," he said.
"My radio is broken."

So before using a source, make sure you fully understand it - and any drawbacks or weaknesses associated with it.

The above story illustrates the need to know your source's source. There is a variation on the story illustrating the same lesson, but also showing how important it is to be objective. Some sources are not totally objective, and so the information provided can actually be false or disinformation.

The Native Americans asked their Chief in autumn, if the winter was going to be cold or not. Not really knowing an answer, the chief replies that the winter was going to be cold and that the members of the village were to collect wood to be prepared.

Being a good leader, he then went to the next phone booth and called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is this winter to be cold?"

The man on the phone responded, "This winter was going to be quite cold indeed."

So the Chief went back to speed up his people to collect even more wood to be prepared. A week later he called the National Weather Service again, "Is it going to be a very cold winter?"

"Yes," the man replied, "it's going to be a very cold winter."

So the Chief goes back to his people and orders them to go and find every scrap of wood they can find. Two weeks later he calls the National Weather Service again: "Are you absolutely sure, that the winter is going to be very cold?"

"Absolutely," the man replies, "the Native Americans are collecting wood like crazy!"

As real examples of disinformation, there is the well known Di-hydrogen Monoxide Research Division web-site.

Another interesting example is the satellite maps shown for 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014 on Google Maps compared to that on Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

Of course it could be that Microsoft is using a satellite image from around 30 or so years ago (despite the 2004 copyright notice from NAVTEQ at the bottom). More likely is that Microsoft just wants to air-brush a major competitor - Apple Computers - out of history.

As somebody who has just received delivery of my brand new Apple iBook, I can fully understand why Microsoft would like to do this. However just renaming your future operating system from a breed of cow (Longhorn) to a long-term view (Vista) does not make it a Tiger! :-).

From a competitive intelligence information source point of view the above two maps show how easy it is to

a) misinform
b) blind yourself to the real picture
c) use a respected information source such as Microsoft's mapping software that may not be totally accurate.

Online Again!

2005-12-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first day of the International Online Information Conference and Exhibition - the premier (well I think so anyway) trade show for those interested in anything to do with online information.

Whether you are interested in competitive intelligence, or scientific information or history or knowledge management - or even just chilling out with some really great people, you'd find something to keep you interested, amused or just full up with chocolate. (Yes - lots of stands were giving out free chocolates - which means that this is one show that you should skip if you subscribe to Chocoholics Anonymous).

My day started with the annual AIIP breakfast - sponsored by the Thomson Organisation (Yes - even corporates can be altruistic sometimes!) - and speaking to old (and new) friends within the AIIP community. (You don't know what AIIP is - and you call yourself an information professional? Go this minute to their web-site and sign up - or if you are not independent, find out how you can improve your research efforts by using some of the world's best searchers (www.aiip.org).

And then to the day's key-note speaker: David Weinberger (for more on David – visit his site at www.evident.com or his blog at www.johotheblog.com). Unfortunately I spent too much time chatting at the breakfast and so missed the start of David's talk. However what I heard was enough to make me realise how much further things will go in the information-using industries (and isn't that all industries?). He highlighted how blogs and wikis are changing the way people perceive information. He contrasted corporate web-sites with the newer collaborative models such as wikis and blogs. He suggested that corporate sites tend to be narcissistic in that they are self-referencing with links that only refer to other parts of their web-site, or sometimes to paid advertisements. Compare this to blogs which invite the reader to explore outside and visit other sites. Rather than focus on sticky eyeballs and making sites sticky (whatever that means - I've yet to see anybody attach their eyes to a sticky screen showing some cool web-site!) they have enough confidence in their content to know that readers will return for more - after they've visited the links of interest.

The impact of such collaborative approaches is sure to grow - just consider the number of entries on Wikipedia compared to something more traditional - the Encyclopedia Britannica for example. Wikipedia has more entries - many of which are highly eclectic showing the range of information that people view interesting or important. The Britannica is, more staid, serious, and tied to older ways of sharing knowledge. As a result it can't keep up with the dynamism of Wikipedia. (Could you imagine an entry such as the Wikipedia one for Deep Fried Mars Bars in the Britannica. This was one example of several given by Weinberger).

Apparently Weinberger has given a similar talk before - which was turned into a Podcast. So if you missed the talk at online, it is available for downloading at the Everything is Miscellaneous link on Paidcontent.org. (Thanks to Marydee Odjala for this - Marydee, apart from producing a great blog at InfotodayBlog, is the editor of Online Magazine).

And then to my session. I spoke for 30 minutes on using Online tools for finding competitive intelligence that can help identify opportunities and threats. Obviously you can't do more than an overview of such a vast topic in 30 minutes - but I tried, by giving a brief overview on competitor, customer and similar monitoring using selected online tools before moving on to mention RSS feeds as a way of keeping up to date and then selected futurist sites for anticipating the future (e.g. the Global Business Network (led by Peter Schwartz, author of the excellent The Art of the Long View) or Shaping Tomorrow as two examples. (The Art of the Long View is my favourite scenario planning/futures studies books - I list several more on my web pages at www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk/resources/books.htm. OK - I know that is a plug for my site, but this is my blog, so tough - live with it! )

In the afternoon, I found time for two sessions on searching, featuring luminaries from both the UK and across the pond in the US including Chris Sherman (of Search Engine Watch; Karen Blakeman of RBA Information services - one of the top UK based information search services; Amelia Kassel of MarketingBase who had joined me a short-while earlier as a co-leader for a round-table session on competitive intelligence where we were joined by an international audience with people from the UK, US, Europe, Egypt...; Mary-Ellen Bates of Bates Information Services; the UK's own Phil Bradley and the aforementioned Marydee Odjala. Could you ask for more?

If all that wasn't enough for one day - I finished off joining Will Hann of Freepint (the information professional community site - if you don't know Freepint then this is another one to visit and bookmark now) and friends for after show drinks and snacks. A great day - to start a great show. Today - Wednesday - will finish with the International Online Awards dinner, but before then will be some more great sessions.

And the show goes on (until Thursday - 1st December 2005, that is!)

Sometimes things are not what they seem: Debunking Mythologies!

2005-11-12T04:49:00.000-08:00

I just read an e-mail newsletter from the headmaster of my old school - Rabbi Jeremy Rosen. Rabbi Rosen is not your typical Rabbi, and likes to challenge and get people to think. He encourages questioning at a deep level.

The Old Testament is often seen as a book of vendettas and vengeance - and compared unfavourably to the New Testament. Many of the most interesting stories are not even taught in Sunday schools, so most people - unless they read the bible - are unaware of some of the stories that appear in the bible. For example, Rabbi Rosen mentions how the book of Genesis contains the following:

A story about a major character who puts his wife and marriage in danger - with blatant lies about her - in order to save his own skin. This happens not just once but three times;
A story about how a lively teenager and his mother are kicked out of the biblical hero's home into the world with no more than a day’s supplies;
A story where the above biblical hero tells his son that they are going on a hiking holiday, when in fact the intention is to kill him;
A story about another biblical hero who cheats his father and tells lies - in order to get his hands on the inheritance promised to his older brother;
Stories where one child is favoured over another and stories where the hero takes advantage of their siblings;
A story where the hero moonlights and takes advantage of his father-in-law's capital assets;
A story where two of the hero's children go out of control and top the local gang (in revenge for the gang leader molesting their sister);
A story where a major character spends the night with a call-girl who he's picked up off the street and who turns out to be his daughter-in-law.

And this is just Genesis. There are many more stories as graphic as these and more later on in the bible. Yet - this is a source book and holy writ for Christianity and Judaism, and many of the characters and stories are also sacred to Islam and Bahaism. The characters have influenced the way we think about life, society and ethical behaviour.

So what does this all have to do with competitive intelligence. Well - one mistake that people make is to make myths out of information. They get blinded and make assumptions. They read the company histories and believe that what was written about the company history is correct - or mostly correct. But real life is not like this. People make mistakes. Things go wrong. The company founders were never the paragons that are portrayed in later company literature. Part of the role of competitor analysts is to uncover the truth, and to disperse the fog that companies like to put around their origins and history. Because the history is important in that it sets the scene for the present. The culture, strategies and vision are all products of what went before - even if the company refuses to accept this and tries to airbrush the unpleasant bits out of their collective story.

That is part of the genius that is the bible - as the bible does not run away from stories that put its heroes in a bad light. The idea is to show that even biblical heroes got it wrong and that nobody is perfect - and that we should learn from the mistakes made. If only companies did the same, and were as honest: the job of a competitor analyst would be much easier.

PS: I've deliberately not identified the above stories. As good information searchers it should not be too difficult to identify each. However as a seasonal competition (no prize - just the honour of getting praise) - see how many you can work out. Post the answers in the comments - or wait, and I'll respond in a couple of weeks if people ask!

Biblical Animals

2005-11-01T04:49:00.000-08:00

You can get tips to better practice from many sources - and one of my favourites is the Bible. There are several bible stories that convey lessons for today's competitive intelligence professionals. One example is in the story of Noah. After the biblical flood, Noah sent out a raven and a dove to search the earth for clues that the flood had truely ended.

The story seems simple, but in fact it is not. Why couldn't Noah just look outside and make a decision? The reason is that when he did this, all he could see was water. It wasn't even as if he was on low ground. The bible says that the Ark came to rest on Mt Ararat which is in today's Turkey. However Noah realised that what you see close up is not necessarily the real situation. Sometimes you need to look further afield. A colleague of mine pointed this out to me - stating that what Noah needed was an unmanned air-reconnaissance vehicle (UAV) (this colleague works for an aircraft / defence manufacturer). So Noah used birds who spied out the land. The first came back with nothing whereas the second, the dove, brought back an olive branch. So what!

It is not the evidence that counted, but the analysis. Noah had gathered information - that with the raven there was nothing to be found, whereas with the dove, there was an olive twig. The analysis showed that with the raven, the waters had not receded whereas with the dove they had.

The same lesson still applies. It is not the information that is important, but the analysis that you make based on this, turning information into intelligence and leading to operational or strategic decisions..

(At this point I can't resist a "business" type joke: Who was the first entrepreneur in the Bible?. Answer: Noah. He floated a company when the rest of the world was under liquidation!)

In fact, it was not Noah that made me think of this theme, but an article I recently read about Bilaam and his donkey. In synagogues throughout the world, the story of Bilaam (told in the Biblical book of Numbers) will be read this Saturday. Essentially, the heathen soothsayer/prophet Bilaam was paid by King Balak to go and curse the Children of Israel (plus ça change...). On his way, an angel appeared blocking the way forward. The donkey on which Bilaam is riding sees that the way is blocked and turns aside. In response, Bilaam hits the donkey - and this happens twice. (Hence the joke that Bilaam had a stubbon ass).

At this point, the donkey spoke to Bilaam and asked Why are you hitting me? Bilaam then enters into an argument with the donkey about why it turned aside which only ends when Bilaam looks up and spots the angel.

The question is what is going on here? Bilaam is not a fool so why is he talking to animals? And why are animals talking in the first place? (The Bible is not Dr Dolittle or Babe).

The question on why the donkey was talking is relatively easy - God made the donkey talk. (God can do things like that!)

Explaining Bilaam's response is not so easy. Here is a man who is seen as sufficiently wise that Kings are willing to pay a lot of money for his words of wisdom. Yet in the story he talks to animals and does not see anything odd or unusual in this. The answer to this problem has many lessons for contemporary competitive intelligence practice.

Every now and then, there is some intelligence that does not fit in to the general pattern of things. It is anomalous. The easiest way to treat something anomalous is to ignore it, or pretend that it does not exist. If the anomaly continues to crop up, then denial can occur in which you just accept the anomaly as a fact of life and try and live with it. In fact, rather than face up to the new situation and change direction it is often easier to keep on trying to move forward on the same path - perhaps using brute force to try and continue by increasing advertising spend, reducing prices, or other marketing equivalents. In other words, to behave like Bilaam and to keep hitting your donkey.

It is only when all these attempts fail that the company / organisation / person in denial is forced to face up to a new situation - and look up, as Bilaam did, and see the angel blocking the path.

Part of effective competitive intelligence is to keep an eye out for anomalies and new situations. They may not be part of a current key intelligence topic (or KIT), but just because they aren't does not mean that they are not relevant or that they can be ignored. On the contrary, they should be incorporated into the current knowledge, and decisions on future actions should take them into account.

This is the lesson of Bilaam. He was in denial and refused to accept that something was wrong or odd. Rather, he incorporated the anomaly into his own world view, until it was almost too late. Only then did he look up and see that his path was blocked.

The story ends with the angel telling Bilaam that he cannot curse the Israelites - but instead should bless them. Sometimes organisations need to change direction and only then will they be able to move forward. It is often the anomalies that give the clues to such situations - rather than the routine intelligence that is collected to a schedule.

© Arthur Weiss, AWARE, 2005

Leadership and the Terrorist Plague

2005-07-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

The last couple of weeks have set me thinking about what leadership is or should be. This entry will be fairly rambling - as I want to throw up ideas. I'm still unsure myself what the ideal leader should be like.

Maureen Sharib's blog entry (Psychopaths in the Hallowed Halls touched on this. Maureen mentioned an excellent article - a must read at www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html. This great item looked at the psychology of business leaders. However it did not go far enough in my opinion, by looking at national leaders. If your boss is a psychopath at least you have the option to change jobs. If you live in a democracy, then if the President/Prime Minister is psychopathic then he/she may not get re-elected. But what if you are not in a democracy - what then! Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under Assad, Myamar (Burma), Zimbabwe....

A couple of years ago there was a session at the SCIP London conference (SCIP Europe 2003) entitled "Advanced Analysis: Pychological Profiling" by Jens Hoffman and Everhard von Groote. The aim was to teach methods of leader profiling, and several of the examples were national leaders. Four leadership styles were discussed:

Narcissistic (feelings of grandiosity, lack of empathy, need for admiration, power fantasies);
Paranoid (General distrust, jealousy, provokes interactions, aggressive, feeling of superiority);
Compuslive (High structure, perfectionism, rigid, highly adapted socially);
Pyschopathic (Superficial charm, grandiose sense of self worth, a liar, manipulative, no guilt, lack of empathy. Often impulsive and reckless - and lifestyle may be parasitic, feeding off others).

Several national leaders were discussed - Clinton, Margaret Thatcher. There is a wealth of literature on the topic. (For example: Profiling Political Leaders: Cross-Cultural Studies of Personality and Behavior edited by Ofer Feldman - containing essays on several political leaders e.g. on Mao Zedong's Narcissism).

What worries me about all this is that it gives the impression that those who reach the most senior positions in countries or companies are all suffering from some kind of personality disorder - paranoia, narcissism, pyschopathy and so on.

At the same time, there is a second element to leadership - trust. Without trust, you won't get people to follow you. Instead you need to rely on control and your status.

In the bible there is an odd story - of Phinehas, who was the great nephew of Moses (and grandson of Aaron). The book of Numbers discribes a plague that came about following an episode of immoral behaviour. (See Numbers ch 25). It appears that none of the leaders of the Israelites did anything to stop this - other than talk. That is until, Phinehas (who was not in the chain of command) caught one couple in flagrante delicto. In a gesture of righteous indignation, Phinehas killed the couple. The strange thing is that instead of being condemned for murder, or taking the law into his own hands, Phinehas is praised, the plague stops - and Phinehas is granted a covenant of peace.

The Jewish Rabbis spent a lot of time on this story - discussing what was meant by it and what was meant by the covenant of peace. They also raised questions on leadership and what it involved.

Re-reading this story (the weekly reading in synagogues this week) set me thinking about all the above issues - what is leadership?

Is leadership managing others and controling them?
Is it the ability to be decisive - like Phinehas - and take actions which might be unpopular, damning the consequences?
Or is it something else?

A lot of this thought has also been tied in with recent events in London. How do you fight terrorism? What do you do with a suspect who runs? (As happened last Thursday, when an innocent man was shot dead - in a Phinehas like act by the police. He'd been linked to one of the bombers, although the link appears coincidental, and when ordered to stop, he ran. He was also wearing a quilted jacket on a hot day. The police thought that this hid a suicide bomb belt, and rather than risk shooting his torso and setting off a possible bomb belt, or allowing him to set it off, they shot to kill).

Mistakes may be made - but in fighting terrorism the leader needs to be prepared to take positive action, even if this is unpopular. Appeasement and other approaches to avoiding an unpleasant decision are not really options as they only sort things out in the short-term - deferring the problem until later. (Think of Chamberlain, the pre-WW2 British Prime Minister who followed a policy of appeasement with Adolf Hitler - letting Hitler carve up a bit more of Europe, and proclaiming peace in our time, while giving Hitler a chance to arm up).

Terrorism is a plague! (Blaming it on the Iraq war, the situation in Palestine/Israel, and so on is just such appeasement in my view. Otherwise how do you explain the weekend bombing in Egypt, or last week's bombs in Turkey - both unrelated to the Iraq and Palestine issues.) I believe that the only approach is to hit hard at the terrorists and not give them a chance to group up. Obviously you also use other approaches to try and stop people joining the terrorist movements - and without clarity and a willingness to emphasise this is wrong some people will continue to be brainwashed into believing that setting off bombs on buses, trains or in shopping malls is an acceptable way of reaching heaven or achieving political aims. Perhaps this is what the Bible is trying to say when it talks about the covenant of peace. That it is only through strong and decisive actions that will we be able to defeat such plagues and gain peace?

There is leadership story told about Presidents Bush and Clinton.

When President Clinton turned over the reins of government to George W Bush the public and political pundits were all quite surprised how short the two of them met to discuss transition issues. In a recent exclusive, it was revealed what Clinton discussed with Bush.

It appears that Clinton handed Bush three envelopes, each consecutively numbered from 1 to 3. Clinton told Bush that his father, George Bush Senior, had provided him with the same briefing and the same three envelopes, as had all Presidents done from the time of George Washington.

"When things get tough," said Clinton, "open the envelope marked Number 1 and follow the instructions. If things get worse, open the second envelope. And, when things get really impossible, open the third. Do not," emphasized Clinton, "open these envelopes under any other circumstances" The envelopes were passed on to a new era of leadership and the two shook hands and took their leaves.

Bush, being an intensely curious and impatient man and one who is frequently up at all hours of the night, became rather curious as to the contents of the envelopes opened the first. He read "Blame your predecessor." His curiosity piqued, he opened the second. "Blame the Senate." He then tore open the third. It read "Prepare three envelopes."

Competitive Strategies - the dog fight!

2005-07-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes selecting the right strategy is not straightforward. You have to think laterally.

People talk about competitive strategy - and how important it is for the business to have an effective competitive strategy. In fact, this is a redundant use of words. If a strategy is not effective, then it is not competitive, and vice versa (i.e. if it is competitive, then it will be effective). So why not just say that businesses need effective strategies.

The following story comes to mind in the context of designing an effective strategy that will beat the competition. (It is also timely, considering the recent London atrocity - still in the news of course). There are five lessons from the story:

You need to know what you are up against (so do a full SWOT analysis)
You need to ensure that you have all the facts
You need to be wary of assumptions - just because you think you know what something is, does not always mean that that is what it is!
Never underestimate your opponent - they could have a more effective strategy than you have
Sometimes, to win requires lateral thought. The obvious or standard approach will not win out.

It is now the year 2010. Around 2007, the US and the Al-Quaida network realised that if they continued their fight they would someday end up destroying the world. So they sat down and decided to settle the whole dispute with a dogfight. The negotiators agreed that each would take five years to develop the best fighting dog they could. The dog that won the fight would earn its owner the right to rule the world. The losing side would have to lay down its arms.

Al Quaida found the biggest, meanest Dobermans and Rottweilers in the world. They bred them together and then crossed their offspring with the meanest Siberian wolves. They selected only the biggest, strongest puppy from each litter, killed all the other puppies and fed the lone dog all of the milk. They used steroids and trainers in their quest for the perfect killing machine, until, after the five years were up, they had a dog that needed iron prison bars on his cage. Only the trainers could handle this beast.

When the day of the big fight arrived, the US showed up with a strange animal: It was a nine-foot-long Dachshund. Everyone felt sorry for the US. No one else thought this weird animal stood a chance against the growling beast in the Al Quaida camp. The bookmakers predicted Al Quaida would win in less than a minute. The cages were opened. The Dachshund waddled toward the center of the ring. The Al Quaida dog leapt from his cage and charged the giant wiener-dog. As he got to within an inch of the US dog, the Dachshund opened its jaws and swallowed the Al Quaida beast in one bite. There was nothing left but a small bit of fur from the killer dog's tail. Al Quaida approached the US, shaking their heads in disbelief. "We do not understand. Our top scientists and breeders worked for five years with the meanest, biggest Dobermans and Rottweilers. They developed a killing machine." "Really?" the US replied. "We had our top plastic surgeons working for five years to make a Florida alligator look like a Dachshund!"

Moonwatching - Google goes out of this world!

2005-07-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

Just visited Google, and saw that today (20 July, 2005) is the 36th anniversary of man landing on the moon - the first extra-terrestial tourist walkabout.

Take a look at the moon map - and for another example of Google's humour zoom in on the map (I can't bring myself to call it ElGoog!). The result is really cheesy! (http://moon.google.com). (And of course this is another reason why Google is pre-eminent in the search engine world. Google is a great example of a company that encourages lateral thought - so that all staff think differently and rather than fall into a rut of mediocrity, continually try and come up with new ideas. Some may be oddball, some objectionable, but many will help enhance our web experiences. That is what marks a great company: a company that is satisfied with itself - while at the same time willing to push the frontiers of what is possible, without fear that eccentricities and failures will be penalised).

It seems strange to think that man first landed on the moon so long ago. I was still at school but remember the occasion vividly. It was an example of all that is best in mankind. Adventure, bravery, challenge, daring, excitement, fearlessness.... yes I could cover the whole A-Z! Yet by 1972 the dream was fading - and moon trips stopped.

The world today is completely different to that of 1969 with its hopes of peace, as symbolised by the One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind speech as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin disembarked from the lunar module. Just think about how different the world is today: no more cold war, the fall of the Soviet Union, medical advances that were dreams back in 1969, instant communication (mobile, Internet) - the average computer in 1969 was probably less powerful than the credit card sized calculator given away as a freebie at many of today's trade shows. Yet - the promise of peace is still as elusive; the world may seem smaller, but the cold war was replaced with other ideologies that still separate us from recognising that we are all part of a global community living on the only planet we know that can support human life.

London Calling

2005-07-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

The London bombings shocked the world - perhaps more than they shocked most Londoners. It is not as if Londoners are not worried about terrorism on their front door - they are. Rather, it is that we've seen it before. The IRA frequently bombed London and security alerts, when everybody was asked to vacate a train or a bus were not uncommon.

What is difference is the nature of the enemy. The IRA might have hated the British government, but they didn't hate the British people. Generally there was a warning - allowing for people to be evacuated. The current enemy doesn't care if people die - in fact, the higher the body count the better. After all, most will be infidels - perhaps a few Zionists (aka Jews) will die which makes it even better. And any followers of Allah will have achieved martyrdom, whether they liked it or not - whether they leave grieving spouses and orphans. And if they did not want to die a martyr's death then they were not true followers of Islam and so deserved to die as heretics.

It is easy to dehumanise the perpetrators of such terrorism - to say that they are inhuman, animals, beasts and so on. However this makes us like the enemy - as it is only be defining another human being as "non-human" or sub-human that such atrocities can occur. And yes - the enemy does view everybody else as not equivalent to their elevated "holy" status. We are infidels, monkeys, doomed - so it is valid to help us on our way.

So, defeating such an enemy has to be two-fold: intelligence to catch and lock away the terrorists accompanied by actions to ensure that their communities are educated in human values. And their communities also include those in the Middle-East that allow crimes like Darfur to continue, or the dehumanisation of women (as in Saudia where women are banned from many things men expect - driving cars for instance), and the lack of choice of all the peoples. Democracy will help - but education is also needed. So that all see our shared humanity and stop defining people as "the other".

As for Intelligence - which will be one focus of this blog in future. The IRA once said that the UK government needed to be lucky 100% of the time, while they only needed luck once! The same applies today. The London bombings were an intelligence failure in that the terrorists were not stopped. But in reality, to be 100% successful would have had other consequences - as to ensure 100% intelligence would have meant that we would be living in a police state without any of the freedoms we value, and which were attacked so wickedly on Thursday, 7th July.

The same applies for competitive intelligence - you cannot get 100% intelligence without an unreasonably high cost. Which is why companies and organisations need to have contingencies for when the unthinkable does occur. Contingency planning should be part of CI - as you cannot predict when something will happen with total confidence. Frederick the Great once said: It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised. The aim of intelligence should be to anticipate and not be surprised when something happens - even if it was not possible to prevent.

This was London on July 7th, 2005. Londoners were not surprised - what happened was expected. We did not know when, how or where. But we did know what we would do straight afterwards - and that is what we did. Which is why the stock market recovered so quickly, and everybody was back at work on Monday.