Interview with Dr. Ben Gilad - Competitive Intelligence Guru
  
  Brainovation is very excited to present an interview with Competitive Intelligence guru Dr. Ben Gilad.  Dr. Gilad is the founder of the Academy of Competitive Intelligence.  Formerly he was a  strategy professor at Rutgers University School of Management and is a renowned management educator. Dr. Gilad is considered a pioneer of competitive intelligence theory and practice in the US. The first to popularize the corporate CI unit, war gaming methodology and the strategic early warning process, Gilad's methodology and models are used by almost every consultant and practitioner in the CI field today.
 
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[Brainovation]  It's been over 10 years since you published your groundbreaking book Business Blindspots and you have worked with many organizations since then. From a Competitive Intelligence (CI) perspective, and over the years, what developments have you seen concerning the production and use of intelligence in organizations?
 
[Ben Gilad]  Calling executives blind is not really groundbreaking, but thank you, Anders. I wish I was that good. Barbara Tuchman in her 1985 groundbreaking book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, showed how leaders can get completely and utterly blind sided and stick to the wrong strategy until it ends up in a disaster. I just applied the paradigm to business and gave it some more research backing. Since I wrote the book I have seen CI becoming institutionalized in almost all of the Fortune 500 companies in the US and many in Europe (Asia is still lagging), but the production and use of intelligence has been fully accepted mostly at the product marketing level. I have not seen CI making big strides in the realm of blindsided executives. Not because CI can't, but because it hardly ever makes it to the top. Instead, the average tenure of CEOs in the US keeps falling (I think now it is at all time low of 3 years). They pay the price of their biased view of the competitive reality but still do not understand the need for intelligence to give them a reality check.  What I found out in recent years is a growing body of neuroscience research showing how people can fool themselves about reality to the point where they believe that what they wish will actually happen (called motivated cognition), and a growing body of research showing top executives suffer more from that biased cognition than lower level managers as they rise to the top. Which should make CI even more valuable, right?  Ahaa.  
 
 
[Brainovation]  CI is obviously helping individual businesses survive and compete. Have you seen cases where CI has also been successfully executed in extended enterprise environments or in industry clusters?  
 
[Ben Gilad]  That's an interesting question and I am not sure how to answer it. Can a model be developed for sharing intelligence across a cluster or extended enterprise - customers, suppliers, and business? CI is at its core a capability whose role is to find the advantage for its master. In other words, you may not want customers or suppliers to have the same insights as you do, because that will raise their bargaining power with you. However, some aspects of industry evolution may be "sharable" as in a joint five-force analysis exercise. When I run a war game, I at times invite customers or suppliers to take part in a portion of it, where industry evolution is discussed, so enterprises and customers develop a shared view of the future. But at a certain point, I politely escort them to the door, as competitive advantage comes from gaining an advantage, not from sharing it, right?
 
 
[Brainovation]  Do you see a particular role for CI in innovation and emerging technology investments?
 
[Ben Gilad]  Definitely, and it is not what many "techies" think. There is a "branch" of CI known as Competitive Technology Intelligence (CTI) which focuses on monitoring emerging technologies and innovations. I personally do not believe in CTI, I only believe in CI. Competitive intelligence includes a technology component, as in "What technologies are out there that can become Substitutes?" or "What technologies are acquired by competitors which will give the competitor a more than a transient advantage with customers, and why exactly?" etc. But technical intelligence which is detached from the business context in my view is not very useful. A new role of CI in identifying opportunities (including innovations which promise to be an opportunity) has been advanced in recent years by Orit Gadish of the consulting firm Bain & Co.  In this model, intelligence on your industry's value chain can be used to identify profit pools, and where your company can move to capture more of the industry's profit. We now teach a course on this new CI tool at our Academy of Competitive Intelligence.
 
Now if your question is in regard to using CI at the VC level, or the PE level, or by Hedge funds - forget it. Those guys who play with someone else's' money wouldn't know what CI is if it hits them on the head. Their model is "if one in 10 investments succeeds I am going to be rich", and in the meantime, what they do to decide which company and which technology is business worthy is a big black box, which one of those days will come back and bite many of their investors in a soft part of their body.  
 
 
[Brainovation]  You have done some pioneering work on early warning systems. In business, is there any fundamental difference between early warning and competitive intelligence?  
 
[Ben Gilad]  Yes. EW is strategic only, at the executive committee level. It addresses long term strategic threats which can bring the whole business model down. The organization of the process is different - it does not depend so much on professional work of CI analysts as the organization-wide cooperation of critical gatekeepers. It uses scenario work, while CI uses war gaming. So skills, tools, and organization are different. Still, my CI people always play a pivotal role in a SEW.  
 
 
[Brainovation]  What do you see as the most challenging issues for CI today and for firms competing globally?
 
[Ben Gilad]  The Two Cs: China, and Corruption.
 
 
[Brainovation]  Thank you so much for your time.  
 
Article Reprinted with Permission
 
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