In previous columns we discussed the importance of building your value by building your intellectual capital. Welcome to the next in a series of leadership articles what specific intellectual capital to target, and how to do it.

Our focus for this column is building knowledge of your competitors. In my 20 years of consulting, the most common issue I see is that people think they know their competitors and they don’t. They have a fossilized world view that an effective leader should not have. You can add a tremendous amount of knowledge and value to your own reputation and company if you know what your competitors are doing and can apply it to your own company. Remember the Spanish proverb: well stolen is half done.

As practitioners of competitive intelligence (CI), I can speak from experience that this is a very rigorous discipline and effort. I am not suggesting that you become a full time CI expert. However, there are a few tricks that will open your eyes and build your value if you invest your time in learning and using them.

First, a few myths to dispel. There is a code of ethics around CI that you must adhere to. All any of us have is our reputation. Doing anything to besmirch that will do long term and untold damage, let alone cause you to lose your job and end up in court. Dumpster diving, paying sources for information, appropriating competitor’s passwords, encouraging someone to violate their Non-Disclosure Agreement and acquiring your competitor’s proprietary information are all off limits. So is, as the recent Hewlett-Packard board incident reveals, ‘pre-texting’, or using a false identity or deceptive pretense to approach a source for information. If it is lying, stealing or trespassing, it is out. Whether you are religious or not, the 10 Commandments are a pretty good platform to operate from.
Below are a few quick high level CI tips for the non-CI professional. These should enable you to participate and anticipate in ways that others in your company can’t.

Before you get started:

1. Understand who your competitors are. Sometimes they are obvious, other times not. Expand your thinking to include non-traditional competitors that might be able to play in your sandbox.

2. What is the scope of the competitive information you are looking for? One product, one division, one company or an industry?

3. To make the competitive information relevant, you need to understand your own organization. For all of the competitive information and sources we list later in the article, make sure you are knowledgeable of your own firm in the same areas so useful comparisons and conclusions can be made.

4. Determine how to analyze the information. Do you simply pass it on, or should you synthesize it in some way, such as a comparison grid or SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats)?

5. Determine what you want to do with the information. You may want to save it to bring up at key meetings, or create a distribution list.

6. Keep in mind that information is much more readily available for US companies versus foreign ones.

1. Talk to people within your own company. New employees from competitors, sales people, purchasing agents and accounts payable personnel all may have valuable information.

2. An easy way to gather information is to use several tools that will send it to your inbox automatically. Clipping services such as CustomScoop and BurrellesLuce offer, for a fee, clipping and media analysis services. You can also set up a keyword-based email news feed from Google Alerts for free.

3. Search past articles for free at MagPortal and FindArticles. Factiva, Dialog and LexisNexis are more in-depth but there is a subscription fee.

4. Use job sites and resources such as www.monster.com and www.linkedin.com to get a picture of who is hiring what kinds of people. This could indicate a new initiative or shift in your competitor’s business. Please be cautious of doing it on your company’s email address. Sometimes those are watched by your own company and it could be assumed you are looking for a job when you are not.

5. PR Newswire, News Alert, News Index, and Industry Watch are all proven sources for press releases and trade publications.

6. Google's blog search engine, as well as others, enable free searches of blog posts. A word of caution here, however. While some bloggers have quite a following, reading blogs can be an entertaining activity that wastes a great deal of time. Reliability and relevance are not guaranteed. Anyone with any agenda can say anything, and they do. So do some initial review and keep your critical eyes open – and watching the time you spend on it.