aUTHORED BY tOM gROOMS
"Collecting What Needs To Be Known"
First, there is public information (from
marketing research), easily and openly available to anyone who wants it. This
includes everything from summary statistics and general background information
from a public library (make friends with a reference librarian), open sources
at government agencies (as Census Bureau, Commerce), international
organizations publications (as World Bank, EU in Brussels, IMF), or respected
publications (as Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times,
Fortune, Economist). There is a wealth
of useful and accurate information available from public sources like these and
it is amazing how heavily a good intelligence organization and professional relies
upon them. Best, it is free and legal to
collect. A good intelligence operation
should rely upon public sources for much of its information - in fact most of
it. Why spend time and money to
manufacturer information when it is already waiting and available - more often
than not, for free - on the shelf for the collecting.
Second, there is private information (from marketing
intelligence, competitive intelligence, competitor intelligence) not publicly
known but legally available to whoever is willing to seek it out and pull it
all together. This includes the kind of
information and analyses that is available from talking to knowledgeable
people. Say for example, if a company in
the widget products business needs to know whether Shanghai or Singapore would
be the better choice for its new Asian manufacturing headquarters, its market
intelligence officers will search around Washington, Dallas, New York, London,
Zurich, and Tokyo seeking out consultants in these political and financial
capitals who have the best grasp of Shanghai's and Singapore's economic and political
prospects. They will check out the
world's leading universities to see who among their faculties is worth talking
to about the subject. They will not take
the experts' word for it, regardless of their credibility and personal
reputations. If the intelligence
officers are any good, they will visit the countries themselves,
meet with as many people there from as many walks of life as time and access
permit. They will find out for
themselves what is going on, and more importantly, what is likely to go on in
these countries in the months and years to come.
Getting this kind of genuine information takes
less genius than effort. It takes a
telephone call, an airline trip, a credit card, and a good pair of walking
shoes. Most of all, it takes a bunch of
people each of whom has one of the major qualities of a good intelligence
officer - the willingness to go wherever the necessary raw information is
waiting to be had. And while there, they
should walk their feet off, stroll through good and bad neighborhoods, visit
markets, read newspapers, wander around the local universities, and so forth to
get a sense of the population's mood, its economic conditions, its sense of
discontent or tranquility.
Third and final category, now the part you spy
fans have been waiting for so patiently.
That is secret information (business intelligence) closely held by those
who possess it and not legally available regardless of how much money and
effort may be expended to get it. For
this stuff, you need spies. Real ones. Let us be
clear about one thing right now - business has no business messing around with
spies, secret information, or espionage in any form whatever. It is illegal, immoral, unethical, wrong,
stupid, and most of all it is not necessary.
The information the business requires to compete successfully in a
complex multinational environment is not secret as it is available in the first
two categories. Any CEO or business
executive who thinks they need secret information to achieve their objective
needs to think twice as they are trying to substitute an illegal quick fix for
brains, time, money, and analytic effort.
Secrets are never an end in themselves. This is the key point so many who have some
responsibility for management or oversight fail to grasp. Secrets are merely one form of unnecessary raw
information and a very small amount at that compared to the legal first two
categories. If you cannot figure out
what to do with a particular secret that is in hand, your organization probably
should not have bothered to collect it in the first place. This is to court disaster.
The problem becomes that secrets are
addictive. Like cookies, it is hard to
eat just one. A CEO or policymaker can
easily wind up stuffing themselves and being to full to eat a balanced
dinner. Likewise, intelligence
professionals can become addicted to secret information and as a result do not
have the time to collect and analyze legal open information. It then becomes easy for the CEO or executive
to loose interest in open information to the point it is ignored when it hits
them square between the eyes. This is a
looming catastrophe.
Organizations have grown so large that secrets
are not nearly as secret as they used to be.
Even the most closely held secrets are known to many people in the
organization. With so many people in the
know and so many who want to know, the only question is not whether a secret
will leak but when. Whatever is secret
today is common knowledge tomorrow and soon thereafter obsolete. The half-life of a secret is getting shorter
all the time.
Technically, there are two ways to collect
information - with people and with machines.
The driving question remains the same - what do we need to know to
achieve the CEO or policymaker's objective.
Thus, all too often this key question gets lost in the shuffle and
endless squabble over limited resources commitment - in other words who gets the money to do.
As we have now learned, when you know what you need to know, you know
what you need to collect.
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responsible for actions taken based on the information provided. The information
does not purport to be complete; therefore, consult with expert legal, tax,
business, and financial counsel before taking any action. The Latin maxim
"caveat emptor" applies.