Fuld & Company's Competitive Intelligence Blog

Just a few days ago, Google announced it is offering everyone a customized search engine. The user can now select the type of pages he or she wishes to see. Wow! – You can now go from 100,000 hits to a mere 1,000.

Embrace Google! Yes, I am telling you – all of you intelligence analysts – not because this is a very successful concept that is going to put you out of business. Rather, it will enhance your job.

Google and similar search engines have definitely made the world a more porous place; at the same time, it has confused and indirectly contributed to the misconception that better search equals better intelligence. Heck, who wants to live in the university business library (as I did years ago until they shut the doors on me at midnight)? Google is far faster and farther reaching than any library catalog (sorry if I’ve offended the librarati). I still adore libraries. They are wonderful places to explore and think.

Think is the key word here. Google does not think for you, nor is it a “place” that seems to embrace long, meandering musings. Nope. Google is a piercing information barb, an arrow that sometimes hits and sometimes misses. You want financial data on a company, well that may mean you find the balance sheet or it may mean you find a sample of the company cafeteria menu. Take your pick if you can.

Know this: Google does not provide competitive advantage to anyone because it supplies the same information to everyone. It does nothing to lessen competitive risk; only analysis can do that. Even analysis can’t eliminate risk altogether; all analysis can do is provide you with tactical or strategic options.

So, hurray for Google. I will continue to play with it and admire the company behind the engine. You and I, though, we have to play the same game. We have to distill insight from the information around us. Google may increase our supply of information, but in any event we must supply analysis. This is our responsibility, not Google’s.

I have had the opportunity to speak before groups in Boston, Washington, and Brazil about competitive intelligence issues in the last few weeks, and I’ve discovered that the HP story is a big concern everywhere. My take is that the HP story is mostly a soap opera. While it is not about competitive intelligence, the “pretexting,” or impersonating of journalists or other individual in order to obtain confidential records, creates confusion. The press tends to talk about competitive intelligence, theft of information, private investigation, all in the same breath.

In fact, the HP story is not about competitive intelligence at all. It’s about corporate dysfunction, egos and the mismanagement that may result – often at shareholder’s expense. If you want to see my view of HP, I invite you to click on the white paper I wrote, “CI Limits: Lessons from HP” .

This was a board that followed the ready-shoot-and-aim-later approach. Gathering information in anger or under great pressure can be vindictive or misdirected, and will possibly have you crossing the line of what is appropriate – and legal. Ask yourself if you need it at all, or is there a better way?

I think the lesson for people in competitive intelligence is not more sophisticated than doing what your mother told you to do when you were angry as a child. Sit down, cool off, take a few minutes, then respond.

I was recently talking with a quant, a guy who lives by the numbers, literally. He helps companies take the customer data they already have, pour and sift it through a Customer Relationship Management (hence, CRM) system to better understand customer behavior.

Can you imagine all that good customer data going to waste? CI people often don’t look at it. It’s rival v. rival, competitor profiles that are missing the important dimension of the customer. After all, Wal-Mart has made it very clear to lots of manufacturers that customers matter: in particular, one customer, Wal-Mart. Throw Wal-Mart out of the competitive equation and you really don’t see the entire picture. On the opposite end of the customer spectrum, imagine you had millions of customers to watch. Examining the buying patterns of millions of consumers can also inform you. Analyzing these patterns can tell you why one rival whom you have rationalized away as unimportant could be eating your lunch – and exactly how it is doing so.

At the end of our discussion, this quant said he believed that the often qualitative world of CI (which mostly speaks about the competitor) could blend nicely with the bits and bytes world of CRM. I agreed. The reality is that it often does not happen. What a shame. Partly, this is because the CRM world is owned by a combination of IT and the sales organization. The competitive intelligence folks are usually living with Marketing or with Strategy.

Hey, it’s time for a shotgun wedding folks! What do you think?

I recently returned from presenting a two-day lecture and seminar to 150 senior managers and senior executives in Sao Paulo Brazil. They claimed to know little or nothing about competitive intelligence (CI). No one has ever used the phrase with many of them. They came to hear me talk. Well, humbled I was.Yes, there are certainly ideas I can teach them, tools and techniques they can learn, but I probably learned as much from this audience as they did from me. There was a small company involved in producing alternative fuels from sugarcane. The three executives I met from this firm very much understood CI, but to them, it’s about doing business. They are constantly looking over their shoulders, visiting conferences, or being visited by scientists and business analysts from around the world.

Sugarcane. It’s not Google. It doesn’t sound sexy, but boy do these folks know about competition.

The lesson for me was to always be looking around and never get too caught up in your own comfort zone. The fact that I work mostly with large corporations does not mean that other small entities don’t get it right and do it right even though they may call it by another name, or no name at all.