Comments on: About

By: ellendnaylor

ellendnaylor — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:50:52 +0000

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for your kind words. I imagine many people use the principles of cooperative intelligence in their lives, but haven’t called it that. This reminds me of when I learned about elicitation back in the 1990s and realized I had been doing that all along too, but didn’t know if was a practice in the “intelligence” field. If you would like to talk more about cooperative intelligence feel free to be in touch at renaylor at wispertel.net. And I would be honored to be added to your blogroll.

Best,

Ellen Naylor

By: Sarah Hinton

Sarah Hinton — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:41:49 +0000

Dear Ellen,
This is such a useful blog! The concept of co-operative intelligence is something I’m aware of having used from time to time in enquiry work I don’t think I’d have been at all succesful otherwise!), but the way that you explain and expand upon it will help anyone who wants to, to implement this idea much more effectively, so that it can be an “every time” way to work with people.
I’ve probably most often used co-operative intelligence in negotiating situations with suppliers. It can really help me find out the more hidden facts about rival products and also get a good deal when budgets are tight, but in such a way that the supplier wants to help as much as possible. Teh sharing aspect is important, eg. giving well-considered and valuable feedback after a free trial, or feeding them a bit of carefully chosen competitor intelligence comes in handy eg. “my current supplier offers this service, I would be very interested in your product if your company introduced something similar”.
Please may I add your blog to my blogroll?

Kind regards,
Sarah

By: ellendnaylor

ellendnaylor — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:45:05 +0000

Any good CI team likes to know about new hires as they’re hired. One is to debrief if they came from a competitors or had valuable experience for product development, for example. It can be touchy since you don’t want to overstep ethical boundaries, since they might have signed an NDA as they left their company. There can also be a certain amount of discomfort talking about prior employers if they got laid off or just don’t want to share everything. I start such a debrief that way: “I don’t want you to share anything with me that you’re uncomfortable with or that you feel is ethically compromising.” We also like to make new hires aware that we do CI, what that means and engage them to participate, & that we suspect others are doing CI on us. Ideally this should be part of new employee training, but isn’t at most companies. Maybe that’s a new biz for us! Cheers! Ellen

By: Dorothy Beach

Dorothy Beach — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:16:55 +0000

LOL – I was in the first pre-med class that had women ( 5 out of 125) at St. Peter’s College, Jersey City NJ, in 1968. I think ony one or two of us actually became a physician. I really like your profile – just long enough and yes, I enjoy reading your thoughts too. Very nice education lineage Ellen and I always admire your spunk.

Food for thought – at TalentNet LIVE! Jim Schnyder, a Talent Manager at Frito Lay, gave a presentation on sourcing candidates. This was very different from what I thought it was going to be because he told us how he leverages new hires especially for name generation and referrals. I told him later that I thought Frito Lay was unusual in that respect because in my experience Recruiting was not allowed to mine the guys on the block and doingnoutreach to more tenured employees was at your own risk. In your dealings with other companies, is Jim’s experience more normal than I think?

By: Matthew Theobald

Matthew Theobald — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:37:15 +0000

Hi, Ellen,

Enjoy your blog. You mght like mine as well. See blog.isen.org or just goto isen.org to see what we are doing with the deep or invisible web.

-Matt