Events, News, & Ideas

SAVE THE DATE!

14 -17 June 2009

SLA 2009 Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO
Walter E. Washington Convention Center
Washington, DC USA

“Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”

~ Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

Last week's historic election of Senator Barack Obama as our nation's 44th Chief Executive struck me as a case study in the open source application of asymmetric interpretation that is the cornerstone characteristic of Aurora's Intelligence 2.0 concept.

This idea came up while I was discussing a workshop outline I'm doing in China in March with my good frlend and SCIP colleague Dr. Martha Matteo immediately after the results of the election were in. The Obama example of how his Presidential campaign made use of information everyone else had but interpreted differently made for a perfect opening example of how businesses must do the same to compete in the Intelligence 2.0 world.

When then-Senator Barack Obama was considering running for the highest office in the land and - however arguable it seems sometimes these days - the most powerful seat of authority in the world, he had no idea what would be required of him to succeed. He even asked if he could get weekends off (not if he wanted to win, they told him).

Martha pointed me to an article in the New York Times that described the inflection point when all the pieces fell into place:

It was the third week of September, and Senator John McCain was speaking to a nearly empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla. Lehman Brothers had collapsed that day, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum on which candidate could best address the nation’s economic challenges.

On stage, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, was trying to show concern for the prospect of hardship but also optimism about the country’s resilience.

“The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” he said.

A thousand miles away, at Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago, the aides who monitored Mr. McCain’s every utterance knew immediately that they had just heard a potential turning point in a race that seemed to be tightening. They rushed out to tell Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director, what Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate, had just said, knowing that his words could be used to portray him as out of touch.

“Shut up!” Mr. Pfeiffer said incredulously. “He said what?” Mr. Obama, who had just arrived at a rally in Colorado, hastily inserted the comments into his speech. And by nightfall, the Obama campaign had produced an advertisement that included video of Mr. McCain making the statement that would shadow him for the rest of the campaign.

Derek Johnson, just produced the podcast presentation on State & Local Public Records and its role in the competitive intelligence process. This is the second installment in Aurora's Intelligence Techniques Mini-Series. You're welcome to embed it at your own website or blog to share with colleagues. Let Derek know if you have any questions.

Last week I was reflecting with my good friend, Prof. Craig Fleisher, on the evolution of competitive intelligence having been driven, in its first generation, by the need to create competitive advantage based on asymmetries of information.

Knowledge gaps that could produce an actionable advantage for a firm have traditionally been created when information was proprietary and available only to the one who proved to be the ultimate winner of whatever contest was being played.

This led to the ethics and espionage debate around the very nomenclature "competitive intelligence" that has been raging for far longer than I've been a part of the field. Consequentially, having taken its lead largely from the Cold War era U.S. national security intelligence apparatus, so-called "known knowns" and "known unknowns" have remained the traditional landscape of CI work.

This worked very well when competitors were used to going head-to-head with straightforwardly understood and motivated rivals whose primary goal was maximizing return on their shareholder equity. But it tends to fall apart when companies must decide on their own which direction to turn independent of the emergent direction of ones zero-sum peers.

Echoing the "failure of imagination" rhetoric of the 9/11 Commission, this issue has become a much hotter topic in recent years as the discussion of strategic decision-making has turned away from questions of competition (supposedly "exogenetic" indicators of industry change) and toward questions of innovation (with correspondingly "endogenetic" indicators of change). History has taught us, however, that pendulum often swings too high an arc; and, as we rush headlong into global economic uncertainty ahead, competitive issues (and competitive intelligence with it) is poised for quite a comeback.

The trouble with this is, this shift in perspective will undoubtedly overcorrect and we'll be back here again in a few years wondering why in the world companies are caught so flat-footed by competitive challenges (and CI with it). The problem lies in the "either/or" extremism of looking at the problem as a continuum of perspective when in fact, what is required is a Hagelian notion of "both/and" in dealing with top-down, as well as, bottom-up issues of relevance in anticipating changes in the market environment.

Recent events on Wall Street highlight some of these problems. Inherent the basis of decisions driven by comparative metrics of performance alone, companies are indeed caught unawares when they compare themselves to rivals and only see their relative performance, rather than absolute risk-reward ratio as a way to drive the comany forward.

There has been a rousing discussion on the CI network at Ning about whether the financial meltdown was a failure of intelligence, warning and decision support or whether it was a failure of decision makers to act rationally with the information they were given about their leverage environment, despite the impossibility of being "right" in their intelligence estimates.

I believe the generation of CI dawning now is being driven by these asymmetries of interpretation; that is, in an open source world where knowledge gaps are almost impossible to achieve, looking at the same information and seeing things differently from the rest of one’s industry is the only reliable way to win in the open source era awash in information.

What do you think?