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?