Management, especially senior management, receives or can access a wide range of industry information. In many companies this information is shared at peer level and, maybe, one level down.

Making it company policy that competitive and market intelligence is widely disseminated throughout the organization is a great way to improve innovation and productivity. Why?

Increasing the number of people with access to the information increases the odds for breakthrough thinking and reduces the risk of wheel-spinning.

An article on a competitor’s product can spark an engineer’s original design idea; gossip about changing industry dynamics can prevent a stumble in marketing; an investment report on a new service offering can suggest an innovative sales approach to a desirable customer.

While highly visible industry developments circulate swiftly and prompt immediate strategy meetings and fast responses, the majority of competitive information needs only to be made available, not necessarily read, at a real time pace.

Everybody picks up viable industry intelligence, along with potentially valuable gossip.

• CEOs receive strategy reports by investment firms, management consulting companies, along with high level information and gossip from the Board.
• Managers receive reports from hired industry experts and publications.
• Marcom and others interact with the media.
• Salespeople gain information from customers.
• Engineers and others observe competitive equipment at trade shows.

People at all levels talk—at tradeshows, networking events, industry conferences and seminars, as well as at social events, bars, restaurants, etc. Most people spend at least part of that time talking about business-related topics.

Smart managers make sure that the information is shared, up, down, and horizontally, by using internal blogs, intranets, wikis, etc., because they know that some managers derive their power through information control. Further, they actively work to encourage everybody to read and discuss it.

Since the goal is to encourage everybody to share everything, no matter the source, all posts should include some form of attribution. Whether they are formal (reports, white papers, news) or informal (conversations, heresay, gossip) the content needs to be accurately assessed and valued. This is especially true with informal intelligence, since, by definition, it needs to be cross checked against other intelligence.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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