Pop Intelligence Quiz for 2007
Rather than reflect on good and bad personal habits we seem to acquire each year, I instead want to focus on the intelligence lessons I learned these past twelve months. I won’t spoon feed you the lessons; I prefer you guess which ones caught my attention. Read the five challenging questions below. See if you can beat me to the answers before year’s end. Next week, the beginning of 2008, I will offer my answers (If you can guess them in advance, please file your comments below):
1. How has Google upset the phone business – without even having entered that business? Which phone carrier has already reacted? What early warning signal was this carrier watching before making its announcement?
2. Which famous investor concluded a very large and a very public acquisition inside of two weeks? Which company did he buy and which types of intelligence helped him identify the acquisition? How did his action prove that competitive intelligence is a combination of experience and information – where investor experience diminishes the need for heavy doses of information, in turn speeding the decision to buy?
3. Which agri-business company saw an opportunity for genetically modified seed nearly ten years ago – despite all the negative press? Why did it persist? What intelligence did it find promising enough to further invest many hundreds of millions of dollars? What is the key intelligence lesson in this case?
4. Name two 2007 business scandals that underscored the need for ethical guidelines in information collection – both involve sports organizations, one in the US and the other in Europe.
5. Which Internet social phenomenon explosively grew in 2007, first beginning a few years ago as a popular Net-based community activity now finding ‘business legs”? Why is it likely to become a powerful corporate intelligence concept in the years ahead?
I look forward to giving you my answers when we all cross over to 2008.
