Competitive Intelligence in a Global Communications Age

Competitive Intelligence in a Global Communications Age
Hilary McLellan

Reality is what we choose: the imagination is not restricted. In business that thought may seem like an oversimplified exaggeration. There are, however, many more possibilities than we allow our minds to consider. The way we think opens the doorway to the future we can choose. The choices we make today influence the world we will experience tomorrow. We certainly want to choose wisely, but in strategy we want our minds sufficently free to see the range of possibilities lying in wait just outside our normal vision. Maybe we do want to be what comedian Steven Wright calls a periferal visionary --- seeing into the future but way off to the side." Stuart Wells

We were all warned that Algebra was going to be really difficult, whereas Einstein was told that it was a hunt for a creature known as 'X" and that when you caught it, it had to tell you it's name. Keith Johnstone

In an age of unprecedented global communication --- unprecedented in terms of both scope and speed --- competitive intelligence takes on a global scope. This presents both opportunity and challenge.

One person who serves as a role model for the competitive intelligence professional in the global communications age is Thomas L. Friedman, the international affairs columnist for the New York Times. Any competitive intelligence professional should make a practice of reading Friedman's columns in the opinion page of the New York Times --- and on the newspaper's web site. Currently, Friedman is traveling through Asia, including Japan and the Philipines, with a fascinating focus on technology and globalization. Friedman brings a very interesting perspective to his reporting, as he describes in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. "I learned you need to do two things at once --- look at the world through a multidimensional, multilens perspective and, at the same time, convey that complexity to readers through simple stories, not grand theories. That's why when people ask me how I cover the world these days, I answer that I use two techniques: I "do information arbitrage" in order to understand the world, and I "tell stories" in order to explain it." (p. 15)

Information Arbitrage

Here is how Friedman explains information arbitrage:

Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader who knows that pork bellies are selling for $1 per pound in Chicago and for $1.50 in New York and so he buys them in Chicago and sells them in New York. It was said of the great Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset that he "bought information cheal in London and sold it expensive in Spain." That is, he frequented all the great salons of London and then translated the insights he gained there into Spanish for Spanish readers back hone. But whether you are selling pork bellies or insights, the key to being a successful arbitrageur is having a wide net of informants and information and then knowing how to synthesize it in a way that will produce a profit.

If you want to be an effective reporter or columnist trying to make sense of global affairs today, you have to be able to do something similar. Because today, more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all. Therefore, to be an effective foreign affairs columnist or reporter, you have to learn how to arbitrage information from these disparate perspecties and then weave it all together to produce a picture of the world that you would never have if you looked at it from only one perspective. That is the essence of information arbitrage. (p. 15)

This is excellent advice for the competitive intelligence professional! In his book, Friedman recounts the diverse beats he covered as a reporter that shaped his powerful multidisciplinary perspective on the world, including the Israeli-Arab conflict, the U.S. Treasury Department and international finance, the White House, and information technology. Friedman reports that he brings six dimensions to his information arbitraging. Friedman emphasizes the importance of generalists who operate from a holistic world view. He quotes Yale international relations historians Paul Kennedy and John Lewis Gaddis as they describe generalists vs. specialists:

These people are perfectly competent at taking in parts of the picture, but they have difficulty seeing the entire thing. They pigeonhole priorities, pursuing them separately and simultaneously, with little thought to how each might undercut the other. They proceed confidently enough from tree to tree, but seem astonished to find themselves lost in the forest. The great strategists of the past kept forests as well as the trees in view. They were generalists, and they operated from an ecological perspective. They understood that the world is a web, in which adjustments made here are bound to have effects over there --- that everything is interconnected. Where, though, might one find generalists today?...The dominant trend within universities and the think tanks is toward ever-narrower specialization: a higher premium is placed on functioning deeply within a single field than broadly across several. And yet without some awareness of the whole --- without some sense of how means converge to accomplish or to frustrate ends --- there can be no strategy. And without strategy, there is only drift."

This is one more endorsement for the importance of broad-ranging competitive intelligence because CI is about strategy --- strategically determining where CI needs to be deployed to achieve strategic goals, strategically determing what intelligence is needed and how it can be obtained, and then using the intelligence strategically to enhance one's competitive position.

Friedman clearly brings to this experience a unique ability to learn and synthesize information. These are important skills for the competitive intelligence professional. The rapid pace of technological change has made continuous learning al the more important --- with concomitant benefits for those who master not only the technology, but the ability to learn. The more "arbitrage" perspectives that you can bring to bear upon a competitive intelligence challenge, the less likely you are to be constrained by the biases on a single perspective. What perspectives do you bring to your work? Can you recognize any biases? The perfect illustration of a limited point of view is Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker magazine cover "New Yorker's view of the world, which showed detail about the world fading fast west of the Hudson River. (Related to this, it is interesting to note that only a small proportion of the members of the U.S. Congress have passports.)

I must say that Friedman's ideas resonate very powerfully with me since I have experienced a wealth of different "beats" throughout my life. I have lived in nine different states in the United States (California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kansas, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota) as well as in three different cities in France (Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Paris). I visited Moscow and Leningrad in the Soviet Union in 1968 and I visited Moscow in Russia in 1994. I visited Prague in Czechoslovakia during the remarkable "Prague Spring" of 1968 and in 1994 I visited the same city --- but this time in the Czech Republic. And I bring the perspectives of having studied different subject areas (humanities, art, education, information technologies such as computers and virtual reality, business, and writing and stories) --- including much that has been self-taught. These are just some of the diverse "beats" that I have experienced.

Telling Stories

We have already examined the importance of stories. There are many different kinds of stories, but the structural patterns and archetypal characters of myths provide the basis of all modern storytelling Stories constructed on the mythological model have the ring of psychological truth. They feel right. They connect with people in a unique way. Stories contain universal narrative patterns which connect with people across time and culture. These stories center around character, plot, and theme. The best storytellers have utilized timeless principles of myth to create powerful, compelling stories which are dramatic, entertaining, and psychologically authentic. The story format takes many different forms. It has been adapted to each successive medium that has emerged, from the circle of the campfire to the silver screen, and now the computer screen.

Why are Stories Valuable?

1. Stories are good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that).

2. Stories are good for presenting them causally (this happened because of that).

3. Stories help us to understand what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes and effects of those events).

4. Stories help make diverse information cohere. There are many examples of this:

Economists tell stories in their models;
Scientists tell stories in their experiments;
Executives tell stories in their business plans;
Lawyers tell stories in their briefs;
Juries conceptualize information in terms of stories; and
the award-winning Algebra Project uses stories to teach algebra to junior high school students.

5. Stories permit people to share information and learning.

6. Stories convey not only specific information but also general principles. These principles can then be adapted and applied to particular situations, in different times and places.

7. Stories help us persuade people through illustrating arguments.

8. Stories emerge through a process of selection and definition. (Adapted from Brown and Duguid, 2000)

Four Types of Activites in Competitive Intelligence where Stories can Play a Role.

Story gathering Getting the lay of the land, getting feedback from users.
Examples: User stories, workplace anthropologists documenting user behavior

Story sharing Information transfer. bootstrapping on other people's experiences, inspiring insight, catalysts for communication
Example: Technicians sharing war stories

Story making Envisioning, sense-making, creating narratives to test the vision.
Example: User scenarios

Storytelling Framing information so that it's understandable, meaningful and memorable.
Examples: Presenting case studies, real-life examples, presenting simulations.

Source: McLellan (2000)

References

Friedman, T. L. (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
McLellan, H. (2000, May 6). Stories on Stage. Workshop Presented to the Society for Technical Communication. Malvern, PA.

Internet Resources

Thomas Friedman NYT Opinion Columns.

Story gathering	Getting the lay of the land, getting feedback from users. *Examples*: User stories, workplace anthropologists documenting user behavior
Story sharing	Information transfer. bootstrapping on other people's experiences, inspiring insight, catalysts for communication *Example*: Technicians sharing war stories
Story making	Envisioning, sense-making, creating narratives to test the vision. *Example*: User scenarios
Storytelling	Framing information so that it's understandable, meaningful and memorable. *Examples*: Presenting case studies, real-life examples, presenting simulations.