Why doesn’t early warning work? While it’s a good idea in theory, in practice it seldom seems to have its intended effect. In every major intelligence failure I’ve looked at, there were clear, credible early signals — and even explicit warnings—that tragically remained unheeded. Why is this, and what can we do about it? For […]
It’s not the latest Halloween ritual (sorry, couldn’t resist), but rather the basic choice every investor, corporate executive, analyst must make in forecasting what’s most likely to come next. If you had been paying attention in March, you could have made 48.2% since then on your investment in the DJIA index. If you did, congratulations—but […]
When asked to name his favorite kind of music, pioneering jazz musician Louis Armstrong is said to have replied, ”There are only two kinds of music, good and bad. I like good music.” You could say the same about information—there are fundamentally only two kinds, good and bad. According to one definition (“Intelligence: An Economic […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
Still more ideas from the SCIP annual conference in Chicago… When I work with internal corporate practitioners of intelligence or research, one of my first recommendations is to run their operation as if it were a stand-alone business. That is, with clients (managerial decision-makers), suppliers (databases, contractors, etc.), and possibly even rivals of their own-both […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
Last week I went on vacation with my “lifemate” Ellen and the rest of my immediate family. We were on Cape Cod, MA, which is a pretty sophisticated area as far as vacation spots go, so I had assumed that there would be good Internet connections. Wrong. No Wi-Fi signals, only one bar (at best) […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
More ideas from the SCIP09 conference in Chicago… I’ve worked a lot during my career with business-to-business publishing and information services clients—and consider myself in that business as well. There are basically two business models for this kind of information—customized and syndicated. Customized information is that which is developed—often at great effort and expense—and which […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
Ideas from the SCIP09 Conference in Chicago… When I was in business school, my dean (William Donaldson—who earlier in his career had founded the brokerage firm Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette) had several homespun sayings that would guide those of us who knew him. One of these was “You have two ears and one mouth—you can’t […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
“The death of one company is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.” Originally said of catastrophic human events, so it is too with “The Economy”. It’s too easy to get lost in the quantified abstractions of the aggregate, and thereby lose focus on the realities that drive individual business enterprises. If […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
Now the tough get going. The economy will come back—not because it decides to come back, but because we together make it come back. How long this will take to happen, no one can say for sure. This much is clear: silly season is over. Things like having not one, but two places on your […]