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3 New Competitive Intelligence Books

Posted on February 13, 2015 by ellendnaylor

It is my pleasure to share 3 great competitive intelligence books that came to my attention this week.

Business and Competitive Analysis: Effective Applications of New and Classic Methods, 2nd Edition by Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan, Pearson, 2015.

So what’s changed in this version?

  • They have included new techniques not included in the 1st edition
  • They include Key Intelligence Questions for each technique
  • They give you ideas for other similar or complementary techniques you can use
  • There is a worksheet that you can use for each technique, handy for teachers too
  • They also teach you a better SWOT.
  • Babette Bensoussan promises once you use this improved SWOT, you won’t turn back to the old 4 boxes one.

Craig Fleisher informs that customer orders for printed copies overwhelmed their publisher, Pearson, this week. They should be available again next week. For those of you who need it more quickly, the digital version is available at Amazon and other digital on-line retailers.

The Guide to Online Due Diligence Investigations: The Professional Approach on How to Use Traditional and Social Media Resources by Cynthia Hetherington, Facts on Demand Press, 2015.

Learn “Hetherington’s methods” in this book which provide the information for you to:

  • Conduct an online background on any business, person or entity, foreign or domestic
  • Hunt down online social network profiles and locate assets
  • Set up alerts for asset tracking or any type of investigation
  • Learn how to keep up with cutting edge services that are coming up daily.
  • Expose fraudulent business enterprises, locate assets, and find undercover intelligence.
  • Learn about database resources and online sources for conducting research online.
  • A demonstration of actual Web sites to utilize in their own investigations.
  • Found Online – Learn where and how your personal life ends up databases and how it is sold.

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Market the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Harvard Business Review Press, 2015.  Following are excerpts from Amazon reviews.

According to John Gibbs, an Amazon Top 1000 reviewer:

“While not every reader of the book will discover a perfectly formed blue ocean strategy, almost every reader who spends time and effort working through the tools provided by the authors will come up with some creative strategic ideas which might not otherwise have arisen. This is one of my favourite books on strategy and, although the changes between the first edition and the expanded edition are not substantial, they are still enough to justify the price of buying the new edition.”

Another more anonymous reviewer adds:

“This new expanded edition adds new chapters at the back covering unanswered questions from the original. The new chapter on the issue of what the authors call “alignment”, that explains how to get your staff and suppliers on board with you when you decide to make a ‘blue ocean’ move, is particularly useful. That new chapter alone made this a worthwhile purchase for me.”

Zunaira Munar comments:

“The new expanded edition of the book now puts the big picture in perspective by showing how strategic alignment of value, profit and people propositions is achieved to create a successful blue ocean strategy. The new chapter about red ocean traps is particularly insightful as it shows, through interesting examples, what keeps companies stuck in red oceans and how to overcome those mental models. The addition of two new principles of blue ocean strategy for addressing execution risks related to renewal and sustainability answer some of the very important questions that my clients have asked over the years about blue ocean strategy. It is also interesting to see how the case studies described in the original book ten years ago have evolved over the years, presenting useful insights into the sustainability of blue oceans.”

Jacqueline Chang comments:

“My favourite part about the expanded edition is that there is even more emphasis on how Blue Ocean Strategy can be applied to illuminate the human dimension of organisations, to engage people’s hearts and minds in carrying out their activities. The book illustrates how to build execution into strategy and create trust among employees and other partners. I found many useful examples that other project managers can learn from, particularly in terms of how a new strategy can be implemented quickly and at low cost.”

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Filed under: competition, competitive advantage, competitive analysis, Competitive Intelligence, Denver, Ellen Naylor, social media, social networks | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Benefit from Analog Communication aka Conversation

Posted on January 24, 2014 by ellendnaylor

When you rely solely on the Internet and social media as sources of intelligence, you just have your interpretation of what you think is going on. You perpetuate your blind spots, which we all have. That’s why I like to engage in conversation with others when I seek information for important things in my life, such as where I will attend school. I have almost completed my health study at the Institute for integrative Nutrition (IIN) to become a certified health coach. I am so pleased with how much I have learned in just a year’s time. IIN is the largest nutrition school in the world and I found them on the Internet.

health coaching IINBeing a long time researcher, I was skeptical that I could learn enough in one year to be an effective health coach. I found other programs on the Internet including a couple in Colorado not too far from home that were 2 years programs. I spoke to people at one of the programs, and since the other didn’t respond to my call, they were disqualified. I interviewed people at out of state health programs. When I spoke to people at IIN, they answered my questions thoroughly and were professional. A former student is assigned to you when you telephone IIN. She ended our call by telling me that I would have a transformational year if I attended IIN as that was her experience. “Yah right,” I thought. I did, but that’s a conversation for another time.

The point is while I found the program on the Internet, this was an important decision for me, so I reached out to several people before I settled on IIN. At my age, I also favored a one year program, since I was anxious to get my new coaching business launched, Naylor Wellness, which will focus on corporate wellness programs.

It’s a relief to me that leadership in America is stressing the importance of conversation. Perhaps there is some correction from the imbalance and overreliance of digital connections to provide us with the answers we seek in our personal and business lives.

Here is what a couple of leaders have shared about conversation versus email communication:
According to Diego Rodriguez, Partner at IDEO, “Here’s the truth: when it comes to making stuff happen, email can’t hold a candle to talking. The root issue is that email makes it difficult to recognize critical communication signals such as humor, fear, anger, defensiveness, kindness, curiosity… Empathy gets stymied. The generative give-and-take of an in-person conversation devolves into a disjointed, inefficient volley of keyboard strokes.

There’s a productivity hack that riffs on that age-old military saying, “never stand when you can sit”:

* Never email when you can call
* Never call when you can video chat
* Never video chat when you can face-to-face

Whenever possible, talk. Listen. Talk some more. Digest. And then talk again.

Yes, plain old talking is the ultimate productivity hack in situations involving anything beyond your quotidian routine. Why? Because crafting solutions to new problems demands the highest fidelity communications possible. Success comes from grappling with the most important issues via the energetic collaboration of warm-blooded human beings, each a wonderful mélange of hopes, fear, talents, and foibles.” (Excerpt from LinkedIn’s Productivity Hacks: More Talk Less Type.)

Another LinkedIn influencer, Ilya Pozin, Founder of OpenMe and Ciplex recommends that people skip social media and pick up the phone as a way to improve productivity and reduce distractions. “Let’s be honest, sometimes the quickest route to information is to actually just pick up the phone. The typical employee sends about 43 emails per day and receives a whopping 130 messages. Instead of wading through a never-ending deluge of emails, picking up the phone can be a much faster and more personal way of getting the information you need. Not only will you be building connections with your coworkers, you’ll be cutting down on your distraction-filled inbox.” (Excerpt from LinkedIn Productivity Hacks: 6 Ways to Fight Distractions).

I have certainly found the conversation to be a useful conduit to great information in my competitive intelligence practice, and wonder what others think.

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, conversation, Cooperative Intelligence, Denver, Ellen Naylor, LinkedIn, research, social media, telephone | Tagged: , , | Comments Off on Benefit from Analog Communication aka Conversation

7 Steps to Prepare for a Choice Conversation

Posted on November 13, 2013 by ellendnaylor

ChoiceI have been realizing how much choice I have for just about everything I do in life, especially how I spend my time. The same thing is true when I prepare to conduct a telephone or in-person interview when gathering information to help clients make important strategic or tactical decisions.

How do I realize choice when interviewing? Interview Preparation is the key!

  1. I organize the questions I want answered.
  2. I hypothesize how people might answer my questions.
  3. I think about other questions they might be able to answer if I probe deeper based on what they share with me initially in the interview.
  4. I reorder the questions in a way that I think will make the person feel comfortable sharing. I think about a conversational approach rather than being so direct for some of the questions.
  5. I think why they want to help me. What’s in it for them? What motivates them to share? How does their profession and/or industry motivate sharing? Can I gain insight about the person through social media like LinkedIn or talking to someone who knows them? Is it worth the time to find out more about this person?
  6. I put myself in their place, receiving a call from me, whether a cold call or a warm call, possibly with a reference to someone we both know or the client who values their time and opinion.
  7. I get myself in the zone to make a call. How I get in the zone depends on my mood: usually it involves being still; doing some breathing exercises; thinking about why they will engage with me; and turning my ego off. Yet, I feel confident they will help me. In the spirit of cooperative intelligence I set the intention that they will feel better at the end of our conversation than they did beforehand.

Why do I go through these steps? This seems so rigid, methodical and analytical. Where is the choice?

If you go through these steps in preparation for a conversation, you will be prepared for a choice conversation. You will have the confidence, intelligence and intuition to be flexible enough for however the conversation flows. Conversations often don’t go as planned. You will be ready for those left turns and have the judgment to either bring the conversation back or have a sense that the left turn will take you to more sharing and better information.

Note these 7 steps work regardless of the reason you are conducting the conversation. You could be interviewing a book author, conducting a cold call to dig up competitive intelligence, conducting a win loss analysis interview, connecting on a deeper level with a friend or conducting a coaching call.

Try these 7 steps next time you prepare for a conversation, and let me know how your conversation goes. I assure you that you will notice a lot more sharing due to your preparation, parked ego and open mind.

Read Fast Company’s “What Improv can teach your team about creativity and collaboration” for more ideas on how to promote cooperation and sharing in a team environment.  Their suggestions also go a long way towards getting people to share in a one-on-one conversation.

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, conversation, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, creativity, Ellen Naylor, interview, LinkedIn, research, social media, telephone, win loss analysis | Comments Off on 7 Steps to Prepare for a Choice Conversation

Reach out to people for the best & most real-time intelligence

Posted on August 16, 2013 by ellendnaylor

Welcome to another episode of CI Life. In this episode, we’re going to tackle a subject that I think is really important, for basically every CI team that works inside a company. Especially a larger company. Which is the role of internally oriented human intelligence.  And by that we mean, talking with someone versus searching the Web.

Ellen Naylor‘s insight:

Many are too focused on what they can find from “big data,” the Internet and social media–which anyone can have access to who has time and money. If you want to learn what’s really happening, you need to talk to human beings on a regular basis, not just for competitive intelligence, but for anything in life that you care about such as my newfound hobby of birding and my new passions, nutrition, health and wellness. For those who don’t know I am studying to be a health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and I am now half way there at 22 weeks into the program!

I can read a lot about all of these topics on the Internet, and particularly gather great information from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media like Slideshare. However, I gain the most valuable insight, more expeditiously by engaging in conversation with a few people in my vast network of wonderful friends and colleagues.

I have been doing competitive intelligence and research since 1985 and having strong people connections is something that simply does not change. I think it’s even more important today to be connected to people, both inside and outside your company, since that is your competitive advantage. With the high turnover in many companies, it’s even more important to make a connection with new employees who have valuable knowledge.

My friend and colleague, Babette Bensoussan wrote a succint article about “Big Data does not make you smarter.” Babette reminds us that it’s the questions we ask based about data we read, and questioning the assumptions, hypothesis or bias we have, that gives us our competitive edge.

Find human sources to connect with both inside and outside your company by checking out this visual PDF to get you started with your communication reach. Happy connecting!

See on http://cascadeinsights.com/ci-life-35-humint-inside-the-4-walls/

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, conversation, Cooperative Intelligence, Ellen Naylor, LinkedIn, social media, Twitter | Comments Off on Reach out to people for the best & most real-time intelligence

The Enduring Importance of Communication & Curiosity

Posted on March 11, 2013 by ellendnaylor

Last week I saw a thought provoking video of Sally Blount, Dean of the Kellogg School of Management on the Enduring Importance of Curiosity and Communication. In the last 10 years, the world has become more complex, inherently unstable, a world that is reaching for a new equilibrium. The technological capabilities have far outstripped our very rudimentary human ability to organize effectively. Sally is amazed how important effective communication still is, and how important and well curiosity serves a human being.

She talks about “organizational intelligence.” We can see social networks in our brain; who is linked to whom; which groups convene regularly or not; and how if you interact and intervene in that system, you can change outcomes over time. By being an architect of collaboration, you can affect outcomes through team meetings or Facebook, for example. You need to orchestrate conversations in person and virtually to move the team forward.

As the school’s dean, she comes into contact with Millennials frequently. There are two things she would like to see them do since their brain works in new ways due to their early exposure to technology. They are excellent data collectors. She would like to see them get away from collecting information and into generating insight and inspiration for what to do with that information. The only way she knows to do this is to step away from the chatter and the stimuli.

Secondly, she ponders on how we develop more organizational intelligence. How do we think with more deliberateness about the conversations that we need to have in order to move humankind forward? Her hope is that the sacredness of face to face interaction isn’t lost.

I am also reading MIT psychology Professor Sherry Turkle‘s book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. From her extensive research, she concludes that people look at technology for ways to be in relationships and yet protect ourselves from being in them at the same time. In her 15 years of research, she describes the “always on, always on you,” relationship that many people have with their smartphones, which keeps them from living in their present space.

Short, shallow, frequent bursts of communication via Twitter, Facebook or texting do not develop deep and emotional relationships, whether among friends, parent to child or between business colleagues. Taking all this time to be social media connected has reduced individual’s time and capacity for solitude, which nurtures relationships and critical thinking that Sally Blount also alludes to.

I fear that people are losing their ability to hold a conversation in our infected society of social networks, which favors many forms of digital connection with numerous people who are practically strangers, rather than really getting to know fewer people a whole lot better.

I spend a lot of time talking to people on the telephone. They answer even though they have caller ID, and don’t know who I am. Some of these folks don’t use social media so they aren’t part of that overstimulated world. Most do, but many still answer their telephone since they are inherently curious, and there aren’t enough listening ears these days, at work or at home. Technology will never replace true human connection.

What has been your experience?

Filed under: collaboration, communication, conversation, Cooperative Intelligence, Ellen Naylor, interview, social media, social networks, telephone, Twitter | Tagged: | Comments Off on The Enduring Importance of Communication & Curiosity

Cooperative Communication: Digital versus Voice

Posted on February 15, 2013 by ellendnaylor

Everyday communication has become a complex business. When I started my job, it was so much easier. We had 3 choices: face-to-face, telephone and hardcopy. It was challenging enough then, since few of us received training on communication as part of our education. In years past, I picked up the telephone to communicate without an appointment. If it was a bad time, the other person would tell me and we would set up a better time.

Now we have so many additional choices ranging from old fashioned email, the various forms of social media, texting, blogs, wikis, and face to face electronic conferencing like SKYPE or Google hangouts. Where do you get trained on when and how to effectively use all these ways to communicate?

A recent HBR blog post, “Just Call Someone Already,” attracted over 100 comments and focused on when to use the phone versus email, often used instead of the phone. I resonated with the author, Dan Pallotta in his comment, “Much worse than the inefficiency of using email to set up phone calls are the missed opportunities and unnecessary misunderstandings that come when we use email instead of phone calls.”

Today many feel compelled to text or email a person to schedule a call, and better yet to avert the call, since many view phone calls as an inefficient use of time, an interruption to their day. Nobody has a monopoly on busy, and this attitude about interruption and efficiency at the expense of building human relationships seems unkind. It also feels selfish to me, since these folks are just considering their preferences, not the other person’s.

Email is often used to express emotions or feelings that people are too embarrassed to say. However, I think it’s better to confront the other person and clear things up over the telephone or better yet in person. I have received more rude emails, where people write things they would not have the nerve to say to my face or on the telephone. Another downfall of email is when it gets sent to too many people that don’t need to know or care about your communication.

I also notice rudeness in LinkedIn comments, Twitter and Facebook, where there is one up man ship professionally, for example. I resent the number of emails I get in my LinkedIn inbox asking for endorsements; please take a survey; buy my service—which these people presumably blast out to their LinkedIn connections just like email spammers. There is more blatant WIFM (what’s in it for me) in the digital world.

Everyone seems to agree that face-to-face is still the best way to connect as you can read the person’s body language which is so revealing. But in today’s world we are so scattered that many of us can’t easily or cheaply meet face-to-face. I always recommend that people connect the next best way which is often the telephone, SKYPE or Google hangouts.

However, email is still the steam engine for digital communication since it leaves a written trail, and you can communicate with many people simultaneously in one email, and time zones don’t matter. You can also attach a document for people to review, not an option with the phone, but an option with SKYPE or Google hangouts.

A best cooperative intelligence practice is to think about how the individual you want to reach likes to be communicated with, even if it’s not your preference. People in Sales figure this out pretty quickly.  They call; they fax; they email; they in-mail; whatever it takes connect to decision-makers. Another cooperative best practice is only send communication to those who will value it.

I am pretty open minded about communication. I like to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. In one win/loss project, I was doing one on one interviews. I emailed to set up a call with one non-customer. He refused, but did offer that he would be happy to email me answers to my questions. I got some of the best insight from this gentleman—all because I listened and accepted his preferred communication.

Filed under: communication, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, Ellen Naylor, LinkedIn, social media, social networks, telephone, Twitter | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Competitive Intelligence in 1985

Posted on August 17, 2012 by ellendnaylor

When I wrote my Pecha Kucha presentation for our SLA Competitive Intelligence tournament, I decided to go back in time to 1985, the first year I focused entirely on competitive intelligence. This is the first in a series about how I evolved in my career in competitive intelligence, and what I have learned over time. Overall I am glad I had a start back then for the critical thinking and deeper relationships I developed. I am glad to still be in this field today where I can reach out to sources quickly that I would never have dreamed even existed, thanks to social networking.

1985 was a very different time and I will focus on the US.

  • Gas was $1.09/gallon
  • Movies were $2.75
  • Rent averaged $375/month
  • The Fed’s interest rate was 10.75%.

Technical differences were also noteworthy:

  • Windows 1.0 was introduced
  • CDs were introduced in the US in 1985
  • The first mobile telephone call was made in the UK by Ernie Wise

I started to focus on what we called competitive analysis just before the Society of Competitive Intelligence (SCIP) was formed, and didn’t learn about SCIP until 1989, two years before SCIP published its first membership directory. I worked for Bell Atlantic, a new company then, a Baby Bell from the initial AT&T divestiture. We were working out our company infrastructure as I was figuring out how best to provide and collect competitive intelligence.

I did not have a PC at my desk. My telephone was the most immediate form of communication with most of the company, although I could easily have in-person meetings with our product and marketing managers who sat close-by. In fact I had to be careful not to attend too many of their meetings else I wouldn’t get my work done. It correlates somewhat to spending too much time on email and social networks today.

We shared a fax machine among many of us, and waited in line at the photocopy machine. Secretaries typed up memos and reports. We took notes by hand. We memorized people’s phone numbers and had a Rolodex of names. I cross referenced my Rolodex names by job function in case I forgot a person’s name. We used company mail and US mail (which we didn’t call snail mail) for written communication.

Presentations would be typed up, given on overhead machines or written up on flip charts. I spent less time putting together presentations through these primitive means than I do today on PowerPoint decks since our standards were lower. I think people spent more time listening to what you had to say back then, since what you produced wasn’t much to look at. It also meant you had to know your stuff since there wasn’t the crutch of media to support you. People asked more questions and had more comments since they couldn’t easily get smart before a meeting like we can today by accessing the Internet to read up a bit.

I read the news in hard copy. We distributed news sources like Time, Business Week and Fortune among ourselves. I got my own copy of The Wall Street Journal which I read daily. We noted who got which industry consultant reports and subscriptions throughout Bell Atlantic. It could be that our Philadelphia office would get the only copy of an expensive industry report, and we would have to wait our turn to read it due to copyright issues.

The first organizational thing I did was a personal SWOT. My strength has always been visionary. I can see the big picture pretty readily and am creative. I am not strong with the details and execution although I am highly intuitive. I was lucky and found a wonderful lady to work with who was great with people and had a similar work ethic to mine. Unlike me, she was attentive to detail and great with execution. Over time we became a strong team, and are still friends some 25+ years later, although we live 2000 miles apart.

Our opportunity and our immediate threat were the same thing:

  • Learn how each of our regions communicated
  • Learn each region’s culture
  • Learn how individuals were motivated to share
  • Learn how individuals and each region would accept facts and ideas from a centralized group outside their region, namely us

We had to talk with each other more often than we do today, since there was no email; no voice mail or social media connection. I got copies of company’s (competitor’s) press releases from my company’s industry liaison person soon after she received them, so I could pass on the scoop to my company clients.

We had to use our creativity to achieve real-time intelligence, since people were our only real-time source, and we had fewer people we could reach out to since our world was smaller. On a positive note, our relationships with people were deeper, perhaps since we had fewer relationships. Our critical thinking skills were naturally sharpened with these deeper relationships. I had a few people outside the company that I had provocative discussions with often. These people helped me reach outside of Bell Atlantic’s culture and expand my vision of the competitive environment.

Filed under: communication, competitive analysis, Competitive Intelligence, competitor, connection, Cooperative Intelligence, creativity, Ellen Naylor, real-time intelligence, SCIP, SLA, social media, social networks, telephone | 2 Comments »

Independence or Not?

Posted on July 5, 2012 by ellendnaylor

It’s Independence Day in the US, and it makes me wonder how independent we are as individuals. These thoughts were inspired by “The Busy Trap” in the New Times by Tim Kreider.

How many times have you heard people say, “I am too busy. I am soooo busy.” Are most of us really busier than we used to be? Or are we imposing busyness by all the distractions of everyday 21st century life? I think the only ones who are truly too busy are those who are pulling 3 jobs barely scraping by; students who also work long hours while at university; single parents who no longer have the means to support their family; and those who take care of their elderly parents while also raising kids and working. Not only are they too busy, they are tired and we are losing their creativity while they are in these circumstances.

I traveled a lot in the last month to Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, DC, Virginia and Maryland. While I didn’t think about it, I found myself engaging with the present, with the people I was around and paying less attention to my social networks. I found myself a lot more relaxed, and less busy! I slept longer and was in a better mood. Laughter, which comes easily to me, was ever present. How many ways do you need to connect every day? Do you have to be connected to Twitter and Google+ constantly? How often do you need to log into LinkedIn not to mention Facebook and Foursquare? Do people really need to know what you’re doing all the time and where you ate and what airline you’re flying? Knowing when to connect on social media is a competitive advantage for individuals and for companies. Knowing when not to connect gives you more independence.

We have have had a record amount of fire destruction in Colorado already this summer. I don’t watch TV, another way that I am less busy. Last week when the Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs expanded ferociously from the wind gusts and dryness, I was in touch with the present through Twitter feeds and the live video-stream on the Internet. Soon we will have systems in place to help the many families who lost their homes build back their lives.

So how does this translate into competitiveness? We are flooded with incoming information and ways that people steal our time from us, if we pay attention to all of it, or even to too much of it. You don’t need to know ALL the information out there about your marketplace, new technology, the economy, the political situation, your customers, your suppliers and your competitors. Rather you need to know WHEN to pay attention when you are NOTICING CHANGE. If you spend too much time listening to all the chatter you might miss the important changes or your ability to predict how the marketplace is evolving and what you need to do to stay on top or at least to stay competitive!

So on this Independence Day, think about how you are going to regain some lost time in your life by turning down some of that “social noise,” tempting though it be. Learn how to relax again. I plan to enjoy my Mom today who is 94 and is visiting us. Maybe that’s why “The Busy Trap” spoke to me. I want to relish the time I have with her today. BTW she is napping now.

Filed under: competitive advantage, competitiveness, competitor, Cooperative Intelligence, creativity, Ellen Naylor, LinkedIn, social media, social networks, Twitter | Comments Off on Independence or Not?

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