It’s enough to make you paranoid. After reading a copy of How Competitors Learn Your Company’s Secrets, I’m amazed that any company anywhere is able to maintain corporate secrets. With all the possible leakage areas, from local chambers of commerce and country club bars to more obvious threats like disgruntJed former employees, information about a company can be surprisingly easy to come by.
The book, published by Washington Researchers, a Rockville, Md., firm that conducts competitive intelligence and also offers seminars and publishes a variety of books and newsletters on intelligence topics, aims to show how "any good researcher, using ethical and legal methods, will likely learn anything he or she wants to know about your company." That includes things like calling the local chamber of commerce to chat about your company and attending speeches by your company's principals.
The firm's experience shows that the keys to information security are:
- identifying what information is worth protecting;
- learning where competitors are likely to find that information;
- learning how trained competitor intelligence professionals exact detailed information through interviews; and
- identifying and training those individuals who are
likely to be approached.
To begin with, every company must decide what information is worth protecting, and then decide if the costs of having it fall into the wrong hands outweigh the costs of protecting it.
What information should you safeguard? The book offers three simple questions to ask yourself:
- Would you want to know the same information about your competitors?
- Would this information, combined with other data easily available to competitors, provide meaningful insights about your company?
- Would your company safeguard this information if a competitor directly asked for it?
If you're a veteran information hound, there may be nothing new here for you. But if you'd like to have your eyes opened to the world of competitive information gathering, you may want to read this guide.
I found the section on the interviewing techniques used by competitive intelligence gatherers quite interesting. In most cases, people want to be helpful, and we're all susceptible to flattery - two facts that are wonderful tools for the intelligence gatherer.
Also interesting is the chapter on "Competitor Capers and Safeguarding Solutions," which provides some real-life threats to company security (decoy job interviews, conversational customers) and how to defend against them. The book also shows how to conduct a security audit within your firm to stop leaks before they happen.
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Speaking of information sources, I also recently received a copy of Euromonitor's "World Directory of Business Information Web Sites." The directory's goal is to point researchers to business information that's available free on the Internet.
The main sections are organized by country (everything from Algeria to Zimbabwe) but a helpful index of sites by sector (with headings like advertising and marketing, food, statistics) might be the place you turn to most often. Sources include trade associations, trade magazines, government departments and private research bodies. Each entry includes the source's name, contact information (phone/fax/e-mail), a Web address and a description of the information available through the site.
Those of you compiling industry profiles might like sites that list things like the top 100 paint companies (www.bnp.com/pci) or Thomas Food Register Online (register.tfir.com), which is a "database of 30,000 U.S. and Canadian suppliers of food products, ingredients, equipment and supplies listed under 6,000 product categories," according to the write-up in the directory.
If you're in touch with your market(s), you may already know about these sites. But if you need a quick (in most cases free) education, this directory can tell you where to point your browser.
How Competitors Learn Your Company's Secrets (83 pages, softcover, $145) is available from Washington Researchers, 416 Hungerford Dr., Suite 315, Rockville, Md., 20850-4127. Phone: 301-251-9550. Web: www.researchers.com.
"World Directory of Business information Web Sites" (192 pages, softcover, $590 or $790 with Internet access and/or six-month hard-copy update) is available from Euromonitor's u.s. office: 122 South Michigan Ave., Suite 1200, Chicago, Ill., 60603. Phone: 800-577EURO. Web: www.euromonitor.com.