Is there a difference between how CI is practiced and studied in the US, in Europe and in China?

[klaus Söilen]

At the SIIE2011 there will be a panel on "European CI" where we present recent academic contributions within CI in Europe. The panel will consist of a number of the most published CI academics in Europe over the past 3 years. If you have any suggestions as to who you think should qualify (with scientific articles and books published), let me know.

For the first time the SIIE Conference (Competitive Intelligence + Information Systems) will be held exclusively in English (earlier papers were  also accepted in French). This is a great opportunity for all American CI professionals and academics to see how CI is practiced in the region around the Mediterranean Ocean.

Klaus

http://siie2011.loria.fr/

SIIE2011 Conference February 17, 18 and 19th., 2011 at Marrakech (Marocco)

[Melanie Wing]

Is this a purely academic conferene or are you looking for multinational practice?

[Dimitrios Philippelis]

CI cannot be only academic conference.

If markets are multinational then the CI and the CA(Competitive Advantage) should have the qualities and the characteristics of the markets

[Dimitrios Philippelis]

Yes, a great difference. In Germany for example, in SIEMENS CI is achieved by bribing  other European countries Ministers and these countries buy SIEMENS products in very competitive prices. They prepare the required paperwork as per directions of SIEMENS and get money as a gift, politicians here in Greece call it benefaction. There is a case in Greece where a minister had got money from SIEMENS to finance his pre-elections needs. More specifically, company's (SIEMENS) CI methods were the funding of minister's son to get education in a USA university. The company completed an Annual Report but no where were reporting the expenses of paying bribes to the minister and the cost of his son getting education in USA. They are not costs that investors should get knowledge? Some of the company's employees left the country as common in criminal and have to apologize to the Greek Justice and to the Greek  authorities. It said that a Greek-german employee in the SIEMENS has become client of it because his father during Nazi period was a client of Nazi's secret service.

[klaus Söilen]

As previous auditor for SIEMENS in Norway for several years (KPMG), my impression is that the company is not particularly corrupt. To my knoweldge it was not involved in activities that were not common for the industry, thus shared by other multinationals. SIEMENS did not play a unic role either as a particularly evil company in Nazi-Germany. On the contrary I would say it is one of the most interesting and attractive companies to work with.

 

That being said I too see differences in general business practices in different countries, but these practices are to my mind not particular for CI. As an example Russia is one of the world's most corrupt countries. As a consequence CI practices in Russia often goes against the law. If you want to do business in Russia it often comes at a certain extra price. It is much a questions of indentifying certain risks in advance. For a classroom failure see ex. IKEA in Russia, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_28/b4139033326721.htm

http://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/ikea-to-russia-drop-dead/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-01/russia-repels-retailers-as...

 

Klaus

[Dimitrios Philippelis]

Could you be so kind to provide me your email address to send you an attachment about 20 pages received from them and read what they are saying?

Do not be so sure they have secretely paid ministers to obtain a Competitive Advantage and Competitive Intelligence. The case of having a minister in Greece punished means that your impression is not correct.

You should know too that utopia is a place of complete perfectness but not in SIEMENS. A tango needs two persons to be danced and SIEMENS has been involved in ethics cases and has to be punished by the market.

As per Nazis be advised the number two person of SIEMENS in Greece who now has fled in Germany and who helped by the Greeks to escape, his father was working as an informer to the Nazis.

Ref. Russians and IKEA I have no for the time being any information, if you want to have please, tell what about, I have some connections there and in Serbia and can get some.

 

[Sheila Wright]

Dimitrous.

I suggest you call your lawyer.  These comments sound slanderous to me.  You will need deep pockets if SIEMENS decide to take you to Court over these allegations.

[Dimitrios Philippelis]

Shella,

To help your lawyers to have a complete understanding of the situation tell them the following, myself I have no need of lawyers. The lady who is describing the deeds is an American and talks frankly and honestly.

Anna,

This website

http://thesprotia-news.blogspot.com/

about two three months or so ago, published a series of photographs showing the  mass execution of a village in Crete.

I cannot remember the name, it may not have been Kantanos. What I do remember is that the text claimed that it was the first mass killing of civilians by Germans in Europe.

Something else I remember is that they herded people in an olive grove, I believe, and shot them all. Men, women, old people...I don't remember any children in the photos, which were taken by a German officer.

So it may not have been Kantanos.

If you get in touch with the site, they may tell you more.

chris

On 2011-04-23, at 2:16 AM, Anna wrote:

There is a large village in Western Crete, in the mountains, called Kantanos.

This village appears to me to be one of the worst victims of Nazi reprisals during WWII. I visited this village one year and the first thing that seemed unusual to me was that it had the biggest war memorial I have ever seen in Greece. There is a very large plateia and marble memorial stones cover every inch at the back of it. The plateia is so large to make space for the memorials. Just inside the village there was a plaque, written only in Greek, saying that because the villagers fought the Nazis, they first killed everyone there, even babies. The women and children were locked inside and the houses were set on fire, burning them alive. After the people had been killed the Nazis razed the village to the ground. They left a notice saying that because the village dared to fight them, they had ensured that nobody would ever olive there again, that the village had been razed from the earth and the map.

Later I was told that this village was one of the wealthiest when the Nazis invaded, and the villagers took up arms to help the allies. But when the allies fled from Crete, nobody told the villagers, so they carried on fighting on a road that had been used by the allied evacuation, and this was the reason for killing every man, woman and child. There were very few men of fighting age then, because most were in Albania with the Greek army. I don’t know if this is still true, but when I visited two old men were in charge of an ossiary that contained the bones of the babies and children killed by the Nazis and it was permitted to view the tiny bones.

 

Does anyone have information on this Cretan village, especially what happened during WWII?

This would be useful for a historical web site for HEC, but is also of personal interest to me. My ancestors hid as much as possible about themselves when they came to the UK and I cannot find out what part of Greece they were from, but the people who live in this village had some genetic likeness to me that is uncommon. Never before have I seen so many people with hair the same as mine, so I wonder if they were from that area, but emigrated during the very long period between mainland Greece being free of the Ottoman and Crete being freed.

 

Anna

 

 

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There is some post war history about German atrocities in Greece. The one I know, just slightly, is the case of Max Mertens, who was arrested in Greece, jailed, sentenced, but the C. Karamanlis govt. passed a special law to extradite him to germany, whereupon he was set free. 

There's some rumours around this event, but it does seem that either he or the Adenauer govt. was blackmailing Greece because at least two in the K. cabinet (and some say K. himself) were ww2 collaborators. Anyway, my knowledge is slight, and you may know more about it. Mertens operated in Thessaloniki, and you're not going to hear too much about the role of prominent greeks in ww2 occupied greece for obvious reasons. My knowledge of this is hazy, to say the least, so I may be wrong. Bears more research, and could explain why you don't hear too much about german atrocities. There's other reasons, of course, but we'll let sleeping dogs sleep.

Here's an excerpt from a pdf in Ta NEA

http://tinyurl.com/3okjccg

In March of 1944, he hurriedly left Greece along with his ‘treasure’ [supposedly sunk at the bottom of the Gulf of Messiniakos [off the coast of Kalamata: my note], a rumor that has never been proven even after extensive searches. In 1957, he was in Greece to testify before the War Crime Tribunal in Athens at the trial of Arthur Meissner. He was subsequently arrested by the prosecutor, Toussis, and imprisoned at Averof Prison. He was tried and sentenced to 25 years [he was kept imprisoned during the pre-trial period to assure that he would not flee the country]. In the summer of 1959, something unique in the chronicles of world history happened. The Greek parliament passed a law that decreed the removal [note: a term is used her by the writer of the article which gives the connotation that this law was ‘illegal’] of all prison penalties and, in all essence, granted amnesty to all of those Germans convicted of war crimes. The main person who benefited from this law was Merten, who was released and fled Greece.

On 2011-04-23, at 11:06 AM, Anna wrote:

Thanks Chris. There are so many villages that were decimated or destroyed
during WWII.
I read about the village on the Thesprotia web site, and the story is
terrible, but about a different village.
Kantanos is in the Lefka Ori, Chania province, and the women and children,
even babes still suckling, were burnt alive.

So many people killed in so many places, but somehow the West never hears of
the atrocities that happened in Greece. In the UK we know about this
happening in France, but never in Greece.

This is true from very recent history all the way back to the days of the
Ottoman Empire. I ask myself why the world forgets Greece but remembers
other countries that have suffered for a shorter time.

I

Anna

I I dont know what CI they were using for  the masacre of villages but for your information the "treasure"  of CI will be a very productive tool if you find him.

Dimitrios

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[Arthur Weiss]

I see below that Arik has deleted one of your posts. However I still feel it worthwhile commenting on what you say above. 

 

1) As with Klaus Solberg Söllen, below, I too have had experience with Siemens (in both the UK and Germany). I can vouch that they take an extremely ethical view on CI. As one example, SIEMENS CI produced material using 100% ethical (mostly open-source) approaches on a competitor to be used as part of a war game. When we presented this to senior management there was some concern about how we'd obtained the material - as our analysis gave a very full view of the competitor. We had to show that it had been obtained legitimately and ethically before anybody was willing to even consider using it (apart from the need to restore trust in the CI function). 

 

2) Most large, multi-national companies have some skeletons in their closet. Generally these are limited to one small area (geographical, product or service niche) and may not even be known by the corporate HQ. If/when found out, heads generally roll - and those involved get summarily dismissed. This happened a few years ago, when P&G found that their CI people had obtained intelligence on Unilever using unethical approaches (dumpster diving). The CI people responsible were fired, as were the external consultants involved. P&G also paid Unilever compensation. This is normal for MNEs - and there are other examples. I know of one MNE where the policy is not even to work in countries where there is a culture of paying bribes or unethical behaviour - and that if any members of that company are caught it is cause for instant dismissal.  

If you have full evidence against Siemens in Greece, then I strongly suggest doing some CI to identify the Siemens Advisory Board members (http://www.siemens.com/investor/en/corporate_governance/supervisory...) and send copies to them. If you are worried about you being identified as the source, try and send it anonymously. This is important for you to do - for your own peace of mind, and also for Siemens to protect their global reputation. (If what you say is true, then rumours will start and cause general damage to their reputation which the company WILL want to protect). 

[Arik Johnson]

Dear colleagues,

My apologies for Mr. Philippelis and his rant that (formerly) appeared below (I have removed it). I have also warned Dimitrios that any further less-than-civil discourse appearing on this website will result in my permanent deletion of his account and all prior posts and suggested he apologize to anyone he might have offended.

Carry on,

- Arik

[klaus Söilen]

Thanks Arik, I guess it comes with the profession :-)

Klaus

[Craig S. Fleisher]

Hi Klaus: Sheila Wright and myself wrote a paper a few years ago on CI practiced in different places like Japan, China and the West in Thunderbird Intl Busines Review (2009), Sheila wrote another multi-country comparison piece in EJM (2006). I had dedicated the better part of one volume of JCIM to country-specific studies (JCIM volume 2, 2004), and my Canadian colleague Prof. David Blenkhorn and I wrote a book with multiple chapters on this topic entitled CI and Global Business (Praeger, 2005), among many other country-comparative CI study efforts.

 

A good number of these can be easily found by reviewing the extensive CI bibliographies we published in JCIM, which have been updated and continued by Sheila Wright at her CIMITRI site hosted at the Leicester Business School of De Montfort University, UK.

 

This conference sounded as though it w/b terrific and I hope it builds in the next few years upon the work and foundations that others have previously laid.