Conferences and Trade Shows: Are Your Employees Saying Too Much?

Conference and trade show intelligence is hot. Awareness of the opportunities for focused intelligence gathering at industry meetings, conferences, and exhibitions has perhaps never been higher. And rightfully so. Conferences bring together many people with valuable knowledge in one place to network and talk. With proper organization and advanced planning, companies can collect substantial amounts of competitive intelligence at such events.

However, for the same reasons that conferences and exhibitions represent such valuable intelligence gathering opportunities, they also pose intelligence risks. Just like other attendees, your company's employees attend such shows to meet new people, network, and talk. Natural human tendencies make it more likely that participants at a trade show or conference are disclosing more than they should about their companies.

People usually underestimate the value of the information they disclose, and want to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise, especially when surrounded by industry peers. These tendencies often lead to the improper disclosure of sensitive information, whether or not the employee was the specific target of an intelligence gathering effort by a competitor.

What, then, are ways to avoid the improper disclosure of information at conferences and trade shows?

• First, know what not to say. Make sure that all conference attendees from your company know what questions not to answer, and what information your company considers confidential.
• If you find that your employees are being asked the same question several times over, instruct them to direct all questioners to a single point of contact. Doing so helps coordinate a consistent, safe response. Your company can then also spot trends in the questions and identify who they are coming from, providing valuable insights into what your competitors want to know about your company.
• Stifle your natural human tendencies. Watch out for attempts to use flattery, challenging statements, and misinformation as a means to prompt your employees to disclose proprietary information.
  

Can an Organization's Relentless Quest for Market Share Drive Employees to Break the Law?

According to articles in The Wall Street Journal, a former Hewlett-Packard Co. vice president pled guilty earlier this month to stealing trade secrets after passing a confidential email from his previous employer, International Business Machines Corp., to senior H-P executives. According to an indictment filed June 27 in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., Atul Malhotra was a director of sales and business development in IBM's printing-services division in March 2006 when he requested confidential pricing information about IBM services. In May 2006, the indictment says, Mr. Malhotra became a vice president of H-P's printing division. That July, the indictment alleges, he "sent an e-mail to an H-P senior vice president with the subject 'for your eyes only'" with an attachment including the confidential information. He allegedly followed it up with a similar email to a second senior vice president. Malhotra, 42 years old, faces a maximum of 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco declined to say what penalties prosecutors would seek. A sentencing hearing is set for Oct. 29.

My first take on this incident was that it was the latest in a string of senior executives acting unethically in the false belief that doing so would afford competitive advantage. However, deeper inspection illustrates another more interesting explanation -- that ethical foul-ups are a symptom of companies’ misguided efforts to increase market share.

It has long been argued by strategists and economists alike that prudent corporations would be wise to compete on dimensions other than price. Because it is possible to segment out individuals, groups, and clusters of groups that share similar beliefs, goals, aspirations, needs, and desires, it is desirable for competing companies to target slightly different customer clusters and position their respective products accordingly, allowing multiple competitors to exist peaceably with each other. Look at Apple Inc., whose products are designed and positioned, not as commodities, but more as genuine appeals to a lifestyle. Apple’s reward? The company remains one of the only PC manufacturers able to sell every computer it produces at a profit.

If this is the case, why then, do so many companies destroy industry value by engaging in direct, head-to-head competition? One answer is likely found in the antiquated notion that market share is a legitimate measure of organizational success. In reality,  market share is such a malleable, perspectivist metric (it is entirely dependent upon how one defines their market) that it is practically useless as a gauge of organizational performance, despite the emphasis organizations put on as a metric of their performance.  Regrettably, to gain market share, firms often do what comes natural: they slash prices, a nasty side-effect of which is often the commoditization of their products, which, remember, the theorists argue is unnecessary.

The problem, of course, is systemic in many industries (particularly IT), which brings us back to our friend at HP. It could be argued that the pressure to gain market share is so indelibly entrenched in the consciousness of some organizations, that their employees are compelled to take the low road in an effort to gain incremental share.  Was the desire to help his organization achieve a stated goal what compelled Malhotra? Was it simply poor judgment or the prospect of personal advancement? Perhaps. But what if it was something more insidious. What if blind adherence to an antiquated metric created an environment so unrestrained in its single-mindedness that it prompted individuals to act without regard to creed, convention, or code of ethics. What if Malhotra is guilty of nothing more than toeing the party line? And if you can entertain this thought, then think of this: is your organization doing the same thing?

CI Practitioners Moving Beyond Five Forces...

Most of us have used Porter's Five Forces model when analyzing their industry. But how many of us apply the rigor of Porter’s other analytical technique, the Four Corners model to scrutinize specific competitors?

Here’s our take: while less widely used, Porter's Four Corners is an extremely valuable tool that integrates an understanding of a competitor’s drivers, strategies, capabilities and assumptions to determine what players are likely to do and recognize the "why" behind their actions. It is an essential tool for CI practitioners to master.

The Four Corners model, developed by Michel Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, is a model used to look at the behavior of an individual organization to predict competitor behavior. The model can also very useful in uncovering blind spots, assumptions that were valid at one time but no longer hold to be to true.

Examining all four "corners" of competitor activity enables a competitive intelligence professional to better understand what drives a firm to behave in a certain fashion and anticipate future actions. This insight then equips one to conduct the last step of Four Corners analysis, answering the Competitor Response Profile questions in the center of the four corners. The key questions include:

Is the competitor satisfied with its current position?
What likely moves or strategy shifts will the competitor make?
Where is the competitor vulnerable?
What will provoke the greatest retaliation by the competitor?

Hug a Librarian

Anyone who has been practicing competitive intelligence for the past several years cannot have helped but notice the increasing role information professionals are playing in the CI discipline. Consider:

• Membership in the Special Libraries Association CI division stands at over 700, up more than 25 percent in just two years. The Association reports that the CI division has been among the fastest growing divisions for the past several years.

• Information professionals are becoming more experienced in CI. More than a quarter of SLA CI Division members have been involved with CI for over 10 years.

• And, nearly half of the CI Division's members report dedicating more than half of their time to CI.

It's hard to imagine a successful CI function that is not accompanied by a solid information services function, either as an embedded part of the CI program or as an internal service provider to the CI function within the larger organization. Whereas information professionals were once limited to providing background research to more experienced CI human-source researchers and analysts, today's information professionals increasingly are involved in conducting intelligence analysis and preparing intelligence assessments for their organizations.

Why? Just as the lines between market research and competitive intelligence are becoming increasingly blurred, so to are the boundaries between what was once "the corporate library" and any organization's need for a unified and integrated view of its external environment. To be sure, a successful CI function must rely on more than just published-source information, and requires a solid human-source information network. Still, information professionals today have the expertise to tap a wealth of information sources to collect information that not long ago was the sole purview of primary source researchers, or that was not available quickly and inexpensively on the Internet. As a result, information professionals are now able to identify trends, define future outcomes, and determine competitive implications -- the very lifeblood of top-notch intelligence analysis.