Article on "How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating"

[Suki Fuller]

I would be most interested to hear the opinions of all regarding this blog post by Leonard Fuld regarding CI rules http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/12/how_competitive_intelligence_r.html

[Trip Krant]

I think he makes a sensible enough argument: management and lawyers should have some awareness to the realities of the issues on which they write rules for.  However, he attributes overbearing CI policies to attorneys who are “overprotecting their organizations by trying to protect people from themselves”, and I wonder if he is overlooking the contribution of senior management to this. 

 

What do you think, Suki? 

[Vivek Raghuvanshi]

Most of the companies believe that they own the employees.

If a CEO moves from one organization to another, it is because of the incompetence of the former organization to retain that employee, and it is the competence of the latter organization to acquire that employee.

The problem is that most organizations have become arrogant and they believe that their employees are bonded labourers.

The issue here is about incompetent HR retention policies of one organization in not being able to retain a top performing employee.

Why is one an employee in the first place?

It is to become a master and a subject matter expert.

The other issue as to how information should be gathered depends upon the competency of the training and development conducted by HRD section.

If the employee is taking a short cut, it is because they have not been trained to properly collect information.

Most organizations believe that the information they collect is intelligence.

Sometimes even while using management tools, most employees are not competent to analyze information in the right perspective.

Competitive Intelligence is not a mass market product where every Tom Dick and Harry collecting information using PUBLIC sources and analyzing information using management tools can claim to be an expert analyst.

Competitive Intelligence information collection and analysis should be entrusted to the very best and the brightest and not the commoners.

 

 

 

 

 

[monica nixon]

Hi Suki,

As a long time CI practitioner in big corporate America, my experience has been that the lawyers only impose "draconian rules" at such point as somebody in the CI unit does something remarkably stupid and they end up getting called in to do damage control. It's normatively a reactive stance.

That said, I think there is something critical this piece fails to address that is underpinning this"NEW RULES" movement at many companies today. Simply put---given the nature of the economy, the fact that the event horizon has shortened, and that the emphasis is strictly on immediate profit- the traditional CI unit has been abolished/obliterated. Whats happened as a result is a shift to day to day business intel (tactical) for the most part, a just go get it now mentality not a do the work and analysis and figure it out like the old days workflow, a lot of outsourcing, and junior members being whats left on a lot of CI teams with the more senior and experienced strategic folks being put out to pasture, etc. Ok, follow me here- this has then led to the more junior folks who don't appreciate or aren't skilled at the real art of CI (ie; figuring things out/really doing the analysis, following things over time, building tools to discern the patterns, building a deep HUMINT network over time) trying to call up competitors directly with no HUMINT training, trying to get the quick hit without doing any meaningful analysis or having any in-depth perspective- and yep, you've got the precise recipe for these types of legal problems.

Sigh welcome to the NEW SKOOL...those of us that are old school, well we wouldnt be calling up comeptitors directly, we'd only minimally outsource, we'd have depth and perspective built up over time instead of trying to do a hit and run, and I think accordingly there were a lot less of these issues in the OLD SCHOOL.

Regards, just one perspective.
Monica