Competitive Futures, a leading provider of strategic intelligence services for business and government, formally announced its strategic alliance with Aurora WDC, one of the top companies in the world for global competitive intelligence research and analysis. The alliance will build on the complementary strengths of each organization to achieve their shared goal of creating a world of future-focused leaders with sophisticated analytical skills.

Aurora WDC CEO Derek Johnson commented, “We’ve worked together with Eric Garland and Competitive Futures for years now to create the Intelligence Collaborative with the goal of uniting the analytical profession. Now, as Aurora WDC moves more into the vitally important space of intelligence education, we are excited to partner with the world’s leading firm in training executives in the area of foresight.”

Eric Garland added, “At Competitive Futures, we bring our clients the best possible information. When we need competitor research, there is no finer firm than Aurora WDC when it comes to global primary competitive intelligence. And as the firm moves in the direction of further elevating this profession through training, events, and media production, we could not be more excited to be official partners of Aurora.”

The firms will make their first joint appearance at the Special Libraries Association conference in Philadelphia, June 12 – 15, 2011.

About Aurora WDC:

Founded in 1995, Aurora offers clients of every kind global primary research, competitive and market analysis, monitoring and training services, software and systems consulting, counter-intelligence, integrated program development and a network of third-party solution partners to intelligence teams and their clients worldwide. For more information visit http://www.AuroraWDC.com or call 800-924-4249.

Culture is a huge issue in competitive intelligence. It all comes down to whether your organization can handle good news AND bad news, or just the happy “We’re number one!” sunshine reports. If a corporate culture can’t maturely deal with both positive and negative information, real intelligence is nearly impossible.

This is probably worst in America. In the words of former Senator Adlai Stevenson “You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.” In all but the most sophisticated companies, good news goes up the chain and earns a pat on the head, while if you try to pass along negative information about your competitive position, people may say that you’re “not a team player.”

That said, get a load of Nokia’s new CEO in a memo to his company about the competition in the smartphone market!

“The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.“

What? A CEO saying to the entire company that they are headed in the wrong direction and honestly assessing the position of their competitors in public? These are the Finnish, a wary and shrewd people historically surrounded by aggressive empires and bitter cold. Their skeptical nature is what led them to get into cell phones at the end of the Cold War, realizing that the end of the USSR could mean the end of their business – and they acted boldly to make new investments.

Want more? Check out the brutal honesty:

• “…there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.”
• “They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.”
• “Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.”
• “We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.”
• “…Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements…”
• “Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.”
• “We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.”

Read the whole thing.

Now tell me, does a culture of competitive intelligence come from the top, or what?

Arik Johnson is the chairman and founder of AuroraWDC, a top competitive intelligence firm based in the United States. Arik is one of the world’s top thoughtleaders in the field of intelligence and management. The concept he talks about most these days is stochasm, a funny but meaningful word that is Greek for the difference between what you think you know and what you actually know. In this world of Black Swans and wildcard scenarios, there is a lot of that going on these days.

Arik is concerned with the future, leadership, and the intelligence required to meet new, unprecedented challenges. In this thoughtful discussion, he covers:

• Why the chaos of the current moment is a perfect time to think about how you think
• Why our current obsession with “performance” may be misguided given the mysteries of the world
• How the corruption of the monetary system puts all of our business metrics in jeopardy

It takes energy and patience.

Since Tim Powell did such a great job summarizing our podcast, it would be a shame not to include his salient points here. This is why he’s such a great interview on the subject of market research, competitive intelligence, and more:

• Businesses have always wanted and needed to know about each other’s activities.  Until the 20^th century, this was mostly handled by direct conversations among business leaders.

• The conditions that created the need for modern competitive intelligence in the US began to be laid by the anti-trust legislation of the early 20^th century.  When businesses were legally prevented from sharing information, they had to devise some other way to obtain it.

• The mid-century rise of TV as a business force gave rise to one of the immediate predecessors of competitive intelligence – market research.  Companies needed structured information about the world outside their borders, so they could increase the return on their advertising spending.

• Another immediate predecessor of CI – financial securities research – was pioneered by Merrill Lynch and flourished during the latter half of the 20^th century.

• Corporate intelligence was first organized as a discipline in the mid-1980s, when the post-World War II world dominance by US business began to be challenged by Japan.  What was originally called the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals was soon amended to the Society of Competitive I.P. (the “-ive” implying a more global approach), and is now the Strategic and C.I.P.

• Since the 1990s, data collection has become much easier, thanks mainly to the Internet. So easy, in fact, that the primary problem now is one of determining, of the massive amounts of data, what has relevance to the job of business—creating value for shareholders, customer, employees, and other constituents.

• The Internet and other information technologies have vastly expanded our reach over information, but also can leave us without an organic connection to what it actually means for our organization.  Companies like Procter and Gamble have actively fought the tendency of their managers to sit behind walls of abstract information.

• Knowledge producers (business analysts) and knowledge users (decision makers) are often separated by a cultural and professional gulf or barrier.  Bridging these barriers is one of the primary challenges of intelligence professionals.

• The term “intelligence” does not translate easily to other languages and cultures, especially with people who have not worked with it before.  To some, it implies a self-serving smugness.   To others it connotes espionage.  Others find it just plain scary.

• Intelligence professionals need to move away from “stick fetching” – reactive and responsive data collection – toward strategic intelligence, where they become the stewards and curators of information about trends and events in the outside world likely to indicate opportunities and threats to their enterprise.

• Intelligence professionals need to become good at filtering things out and focusing management’s attention on those things that really matter.  In order to do this, they need to sensitize themselves to how the business actually works and creates value.

• To that end, intelligence should go beyond delivering data and analysis, and should also be comfortable with proposing a constrained set of options, and even with making recommendations.

• A rival or competitor is defined as any organization or product that attacks or diminishes the value of your own organization or product.  Competitive intelligence is too often defined narrowly to focus on direct rivals – and in so doing can miss the sea change disruptions that can change the economic rules that govern an industry.

• Business leaders typically are faced with an “information archipelago” populated by analytic fiefdoms that are usually poorly coordinated, and even sometimes at odds with each other.  These can include Market Research, Competitive Intelligence, Business Strategy, the Corporate Library, and Information Technology.  These must be integrated into a more holistic strategic intelligence capability.

• Your intelligence programming should be driven by your strategy.  A company like Apple actually creates its future, therefore has less need for traditional CI or even Market Research in order to be successful.

• Good intelligence does not obviate the need for making good decisions.  You can get killed in the marketplace by slavishly imitating what your rivals are doing.  We call this “competitive myopia”.  (I’ll post more on this soon.)

• The best research may not give you all the answers – but it should give you the strategic parameters around which decisions are needed.

• Corporate intelligence as a discipline has had mixed success.  It has succeeded in inculcating competitive thinking, research, and analysis into many more business decisions than previously.  Its goal of creating a “profession” of corporate intelligence analysts, however, has not yet been realized.

• It may be premature to seriously consider professional credentialing for business disciplines like intelligence, when business leaders themselves are not certified, licensed, or otherwise formally credentialed.  Even MBAs – which represent only about one-third of leading company CEOs – do not have to pass qualifying tests like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals do.  While this creates a more open and integrative talent pool, on the other hand it leads to significant variations in quality and, frankly, “professionalism”.

• Business strategy is now more about intelligence – continual flows of information and analysis about the outside, and about the future – than it is about “planning”.  Strategic planning is a Cold War-era concept that has diminished relevance for our fast-paced, turbulent world.

With a rapidly changing world, more and more organizations are hiring dedicated analysts to understand what’s next. Intelligence professionals are a hot commodity for both companies and governments in the years to come. That’s why the Competitive Futures Podcast is turning to our friend and colleague Tim Wood Powell, the CEO of New York City’s The Knowledge Agency, to tell us about the past and future of this most important discipline.

In this insightful interview, Tim tells us:

* Why Teddy Roosevelt’s antitrust laws made competitive intelligence necessary

* How most quantative management is “predicting the past”

* Why modern intelligence is a question of data vs. analysis

* The ways intelligence professionals are often at odds with senior management

* That getting beyond competitors is the next level of competitive analysis

With forty years of intelligence and decision making, Tim has insightful ideas about where the whole profession is headed. Enjoy.

The thrilling conclusion, in which we talk about social network analysis from a real-life perspective and why it represents a powerful holistic world view.

August Jackson shares how studying the link between people, companies, and technologies makes social network analysis a very powerful strategic tool.

August keeps on a roll, telling you how to run a network analysis yourself, how to pick good sources (not necessarily LinkedIn!) and how this type of thinking represents a more holistic way to see your markets.

Sure, your teenager may hear the word “social networks” and think of a great way to coordinate a social life. August Jackson, Competitive Intelligence and Strategy Professional, Tech Pundit and Social Software Evangelist working for Verizon, knows that social networks are the key to advanced competitive intelligence analysis and extremely relevant, accurate business forecasts.

In part one of this four part interview, August gives us the nearly fifty year background of this analytical discipline, how we can better understand competitors, partners and customers alike, and why you should NOT start with software but make your first attempts at this work just with your brains and pen and paper.

Corporate espionage. Security. Keeping your precious trade secrets from The Bad Guys, whether they be competitors or government agents looking to destabilize your economy.

This. Is. Serious. Stuff! Just ask Washington’s Eamon Javers, who just published Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy, about the use of former MI5, CIA, and KGB agents in the corporate wars over market share in the chocolate toy segment. Spies are involved!

He’s even on the Daily Show, the highwater mark of all important information.

So again, This Is Serious Stuff. Kids, break out your Cold War Mindsets!

This past weekend  I spoke at the George Washington University’s graduate program for high-tech security to discuss the future of intelligence. As the professors expect, I take this from a much more broad perspective, bringing competitive intelligence, futures studies, scenario planning, stochastic thinking, and general irreverence into a bouillabaise we call Intelligence 2.0.

The real news piece here is that I am excited for the next generation of leaders. The dialogue that ensued among these future security professionals was broad-ranging, insightful, and fun. We’ll need plenty of all three in order to meet the needs of organizations that exist in a world of pervasive media, and these young people seem up to the challenge.

Some major points that came out of our dialogue:

• A command-and-control mindset about information will not fit with a world of social media – the goal will be to limit risk for a certain number of activities, not to funnel all information through one conduit.
• Asymmetry of analysis will be more important than asymmetry of information – it’s not who collects the most data, but who is the best at deriving insights who will be most effective.
• A corporate culture of constantly hiring and downsizing employees with decreasing levels of engagement is no recipe for data security – many corporations are begging for their data to hit the wild Internet through shoddy HR practices.
• The shift to Gen X management will be huge – while Boomers came up on strictly hierarchical, militaristic command structures, Gen X and Y believe much more in sharing information, decisionmaking power, even credit. This will change what “secure” means in the future.
• Increasingly multinational corporations are turning to nation-state legal apparatuses to enforce their own security needs – even though the economic benefit will not necessary transfer to the nation-state in question. Over time, tension will increase about this issue.

Not bad for a grad school class on a Saturday before lunch, am I right? If these are our future leaders, I couldn’t feel any more secure.

There’s a forum discussion over at the Competitive Intelligence Ning community about the simple question:

How does the term “competitive intelligence” work in your country and in your language?

For our many readers from around the world, we’d love to hear your views and approaches!

A great interview with Arik Johnson of Aurora WDC on the future of intelligence and next-generation organizations.

Arik presents some really key ideas about how decisions need to come from the outside in, putting intelligence first and listening carefully to the external environment that is so important in understanding our future.

Some of my comments from last week’s IntelCollab meeting in Washington DC.

A sneak preview of August Jackson’s presentation at the inaugural Intelligence Collaboration meeting coming up this Thursday.

I’m very excited for our upcoming inaugural meeting, this Thursday of our new, increasingly global, professional society, The Intelligence Collaborative.

The following video explains what intelligence is, why we need to collaborate, and why now is the perfect moment.

Have a look at the video, and if you’re anywhere in the MidAtlantic region, consider a trip to our nation’s capital this Thursday. Tickets are free – just bring your interest in how social media will change the practice of intelligence.

It is more than enough work thinking about how the world is changing. Exceedingly few people think about how people think about the changing world. I’m proud to say I know some great folks who are on the cutting edge of understanding intelligence and decision making. Here, we’ve got a copy of the latest Competitive Intelligence Podcast, the brainchild of August Jackson. This time, he’s interviewing our friend and colleague Arik Johnson of the intelligence consulting firm Aurora WDC, on his view of the present and future of intelligence and its effect on leadership. The interview is broad ranging

• A new paradigm of intelligence: scarcity of analysis instead of scarcity of information
• The “perpetual beta” mindset, one of rapidly-changing technology and reduced barriers to entry
• The next decade of competitive intelligence: CI 2020
• CI’s evolving role as a mechanism and process to correct for cognitive bias
• The importance of a customer-centric model in delivering intelligence

It’s a great year to revisit our assumptions on how decisions are made. This is a great discussion to get you kicked off.

With the bankruptcy of General Motors, our economy has finally hopped over the plane’s wing into the Twilight Zone. Not that this event was surprising to anybody with a cursory interest in money or cars – GM bet its future on the world’s endless thirst for bloated Hummers and Yukons and left quality and disruptive innovation to Asian rivals, all while locked into being America’s largest private provider of healthcare and pensions. You can get six Jack Welches, ten Peter Druckers and those guys who started Google on board and even they aren’t going to figure a way out of that hole. Like any death of a long-sick relative it is still a shock without truly being a surprise. You’ll feel the same way when American healthcare self-destructs and when Social Security cracks in half.

The reason to stockpile peyote and brown acid is not the demise of a for-profit company, which should be a prosaic activity in a capitalist system. You’ll need some strong hallucinogens to deal with how this bankruptcy was done, and what it means. The failure of GM I was expecting; a failure accompanied by an additional thirty to fifty billion of my tax dollars was the pimp slap. Not only is the original “Fortune One” company declaring the death of its business model, now my children and I get to be 60% owners of the company for the foreseeable future. It almost makes me long for the good old days of 2008 when we simply handed bankers hundreds of billions to pay off their bad investments without the need to get seats on the board to protect collective shareholder investments.

The walls began vibrating songs and the chairs began dancing a frentic rumba when a psyche-shaking question occurred to me – How many freaking companies do I own as a taxpayer now? I am a proud owner of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a lovely deal for the 50/50 partnership in which government covers the “loss” part of the equation and private investors cover the “profits.” I get 80% of AIG, those masters of risk management who set the planet on fire by insuring every transaction on Earth from credit default swaps to Mexican cock fights. I have shored up most of the gargantuan banks on the planet through easy loans so big that our inevitable inflation will soon give Argentina, Brazil and Ukraine a hearty, nostalgic laugh. Now, my government has made me a majority shareholder in a automotive company that will need to atomize the oldest and most-established industrial infrastructure in the world before it could ever hope to compete with the supply chains of Korea, China, Japan and India – though not a word has been written to describe the difficulty of this transition.

As a taxpayer, behold the fantastic portfolio of my future prosperity! I will take this group of investments over any crap that Warren Buffet might cobble together! And that guy Soros will soon be proven to be no match for the investment genius of Obama, Geithner and Bernanke!

The drug trip has barely begun, my friends, and the buzz of bailout is now set to become a thrumming, pulsating multisensory experience as this new market moves ahead into the new physics of crony socialism.  There’s no longer any need to believe in gravity, density, or inertia since this new universe is created by executive fiat and is subject to change at any moment. Just consider one question about the moral hazard created in this hallucinatory plane of existence: who is responsible for competitive intelligence for all of these companies that I own?

In order to compete effectively, every company must have a system of intelligence to understand market developments and competitors behavior. This practice varies in sophistication from sending guys to trade shows once in a while to learn stuff, on up to formal intelligence bureaus working in the service of products managers, strategists, and the CEO him/herself. In a modern economy evolving as quickly – and if recent events are any indication, chaotically – making decisions without the benefit of up-to-the-minute data and analysis about the business environment is a sure way to catastrophe. In the world we used to call reality, organizations had a discrete, impermeable layer that separates “us” from “them” and “internal” from “external,” allowing us to look critically at the external world. Intelligence thus permits leaders to understand the future marketplace and take action to insure profitability.

The U.S. Government not only is providing capital to a variety of American industries, it has invested me as an American taxpayer with a majority position in several cases. Moreover, the layer between “us” and “them” is now more permeable than wet Kleenex – since corporations are taxpayers too, Ford’s taxes will make them part owner in GM. Consumers too have multiple interests at stake – buy a new Ford Fusion, and you may watch your investment in GM decline. Buy insurance from a smaller carrier and you may deny AIG, of which you own 80%, of one of the only sources of profit they have to offset their days at the craps table of global finance.

Let’s not forget the government agencies themselves – they are now shaping the market through legislation and regulation, financing the industry through the Treasury’s policy of monitarization, AND acting in the market – ostensibly – to assure the return on the billions of dollars of taxpayer capital they just promised for the coming decades. This is where some peyote may help you squeegee your third eye clean and see into the kaleidoscopic mask of the Bizarro Future. Some major questions loom:

• For America’s neo-mercantile companies, who collects the data in their search for competitive intelligence?
• Who does the analysis? The company that led itself off the cliff, or the federal government bureaucrats who have zero understanding of individual market dynamics?
• To whom do they report first? Cabinet secretaries or CEOs?
• What kind of information is the most important? Rational, measurable data about the objective business environment, or subjective data about political personalities and their connections to top companies? After all, the new shape of the market seems to have more to do with who had Hank Paulson’s cell number in October of 2008 and who had dinner with Geithner while he was at the New York Fed than it does any macroeconomic trends or intellectual property analysis.

I take it back, leave the hard drugs alone. The coming reality will rival anything that distorted neuronal activity might bring. Remember, this is about the moral hazard of the future. It is with the addition of an automotive company to the national portfolio that we finally complicate American capitalism to an unimaginable degree, like trying solve calculus regressions with ten variables. In a business world created through executive order and maintained through fake federal money, all other players in the market – if they are paying attention – should view future market dynamics with the confusion reserved for a fever dream. It makes competitive intelligence extraordinarily necessary, and partially impossible.

As promised these are the slides from this afternoon’s talk about telling negative stories with a positive, business development spin.

Great article in the Globe and Mail today about how competitive intelligence is especially useful in down markets.

Important quote: “All it takes is time.”

Indeed. This is a wonderful moment to stop, enjoy stillness, and contemplate what’s really happening, away from the strife of bad news. KEEP THINKING. All it takes is time.

I really enjoyed last night’s event at the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. True to this year’s theme, we discussed the future trends of 2009 and beyond, but moved immediately to positive action. About 25 of us put our heads together on the toughest problems of humanity, and tons of new business ideas came flowing out. Despite dire economic statistics, the mood is lighter and more positive than I’ve seen in years.

Here are last night’s slides for those of you who want to play along at home. We’ll likely have a webinar on this topic soon – we’ll keep you all posted!