Fuld’s Competitive Musings

Last month I intentionally made over 200 people squirm in their seats.   They were participants at a pharmaceutical conference for competitive intelligence professionals.  Rather than just speak for the keynote address, I challenged my audience with a series of information-gathering situations and asked them if they thought the behavior in each case was “normal,” “aggressive,” “unethical,” or “illegal.”  At my firm, we use such cases to align the information-gathering compliance guidelines for many of our clients.  This Scruples-type game approach is a wonderful way to bullet-proof compliance guidelines.  How do you think the audience reacted?

Case A: Interviewing
A manager asks you to interview a number of experts (who recently have worked for or indirectly with a rival) to gather enough details for you to identify a specific  molecular structure for a product  that has recently entered clinical development?

Case B: The Restaurant
You are traveling for work and you go to a restaurant in your temporary host city.In the restaurant, you see two competitors from two different pharmaceutical firms having lunch together.
Your table is within earshot of theirs, and you overhear that they are in negotiations for a new partnership on a new drug.

Case C: The Doctor-Employee
You have a new employee on your team, a doctor who recently left full-time private practice to work at your company, but still sees patients one day a week at a local clinic. 
Your competitor is enrolling patients in a Phase III cardiology drug trial, and will give the entire clinical trial protocol and endpoints to any physician who enrolls eligible patients.  Your new employee enrolls some of his patients and gains access to this clinical trial information.
Case A was relatively simple for most in the audience.  Nearly everyone felt this was a normal situation and something their companies do to remain competitive. Some in the audience did suggest that all this is conditional on how you identify yourself, as well as number of other possible factors. But overall, most felt comfortable with this general description.

Case B was somewhat of a surprise for me – as well as for some audience members. Quite a number of people around the room felt extremely uncomfortable and even went as far as to say they would walk out of the restaurant.  Even after I fine-tuned the hypothetical to say you did not plan to go to restaurant hoping to overhear such conversations (which many companies do not object to) and that this was a total coincidence, still a number of people blanched.   They were not necessarily wrong in my view for taking this highly conservative stand. Perhaps their company was recently slapped with a law suite related to information theft or corporate council warned all who were about to go to the trade show or scientific conference to be extra careful. 

What did I think? I believe you can eat in any restaurant you choose. If someone is talking loudly enough for others to overhear their conversation–be it on an airplane, on the street while talking on a mobile phone, or in a hotel corridor–it is their security breach and responsibility, not yours. 

Case C, the doctor-employee case, presented more substantive challenges for this group. Many stated the doctor may have breeched confidentiality agreements, as well as misrepresented himself. 

Are there variations on each case? Certainly, and each one will likely demand a slightly different approach.  Because each situation is different, this method of stress testing through hypothetical examples works so well—you can consider ‘what-ifs’ or real ethical challenges that your sales people and other market-facing employees must confront every day.  Then, you can continually refine your information guidelines accordingly.

Final note: In our currently running ethics survey (which I recommend you take. Just click here), we have already discovered a disturbing finding for the healthcare industry in particular.  While a larger percentage of respondents from the healthcare industry acknowledge that their company has specific ethical and legal competitive intelligence guidelines (73% v. 65% for other industries overall), only 45% of healthcare respondents stated that someone has reviewed these guidelines (compared to 61% for all other industries).

The implication: Many companies have such guidelines but neglect to truly teach the meaning and implications of right and wrong information-gathering behavior.  As my exercise above demonstrated, since some organizations have different tolerance levels for certain behaviors than others, it is impossible to predict how employee A or employee B will react to a given circumstance.  One of these two employees might do the right thing (even if it is aggressive yet reasonable behavior) while the other steps over the legal limit.  Thus, a clearly articulated (and enforced) set of guidelines will ensure consistent behavior that meets a common standard of ethical conduct for your company and your industry.

If I and my audience learned anything at that keynote presentation, it was to test and educate. Test your guidelines against realistic information-gathering encounters. Educate your employees to know right from the not-so-right.