Past Articles

Kirk Tyson has written books and articles about his knowledge and expertise in the research and consulting fields. Here are excerpts from some of his classic published articles over the past 25 years.

Perpetual Strategy: A 21st Century Essential
(Published in Strategy & Leadership, January/February 1998)

"As we move forward from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age, success will come to those companies that build a knowledge base about their competitive environment and a perpetual strategy process to keep it continuously updated."
— Kirk W. M. Tyson

It's a fairly accepted fact that competition will become even more intense in the 21st century. As we move forward from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age, success will come to those companies that build a knowledge base about their competitive environment and a perpetual strategy process to keep it continuously updated. The ways of doing business have changed far more in the 20th century than they did in all of the 19 preceding centuries. Highlights of this evolution include:

• Early 1900s-Scientific management, incorporating universal principles of efficiency and the rise of industrial engineering.
• 1930s-Human relations management, covering the psychology of motivation, participation, and job enrichment.
• 1940s-0perations research, triggered by the advent of computers and problem-solving using quantitative models.
• 1950s, '60s, and '70s-Strategic planning, diversification, synergies, restructuring, redeployment of assets, and systems analysis.
• 1980s-Japanese-style management, quality assurance, and novel approaches to inventory control and production.
• 1990s-Efforts toward cognitive management with an emphasis on thinking, learning, knowledge acquisition, management of information and intelligence, vastly improved communications, and rapid developments in information technology.

In the beginning of the 21st Century, we find that most businesses have evolved into the Information Age, while a few forward-thinking companies are envisioning the next wave: The Intelligence Age. Although many Global 1000 companies have endorsed the information and intelligence concepts that evolved in the 1990s, their implementation of these concepts has fallen far short of expectations. (E-mail us for the entire article)

Is it ethical to gather competitive intelligence?
Published in Chemtech, October 1995

When 95% of everything you need to know is in the public domain, there's no need for cloak and dagger tricks.

Timely and relevant knowledge about competitors and other market players is necessary for making good strategic business decisions. Markets are becoming increasingly global, and the information revolution is slashing the time available for effective decision making. Competitive intelligence processes to distill and expedite the information are essential in managing this revolution. These processes allow decision makers to focus on the most relevant aspects of their company and industry.

Yet one problem has plagued the field of competitive intelligence from the beginning. In fact, as the field has grown, the condition has worsened. I suspect that it will prove to be extremely tough to eradicate, if only because competitive intelligence is highly vulnerable to corruption. This problem is the abuse of ethics.

Someone once told me, "Anyone who claims their employees have never violated ethical guidelines is either a liar or a hypocrite." This statement is very strong but probably not too far from the truth. Close to 100 people have told me of ethics violations within their companies. Evidently, these incidences form just the tip of the iceberg. We in the competitive intelligence business often quote World War II Navy Captain Ellis Zacharias, author of Secret Mission: The Story of an Intelligence Officer: "There is very little that confidential agents can tell that is not accessible to an alert analyst who knows what he is looking for. (E-mail us for the entire article)

Competitive Knowledge Development: Reengineering Competitive Intelligence for Maximum Success
Published in the Competitive Intelligence Review, Vol. 6(4) 14-21 (1995)

This article is based on Mr. Tyson's presentation, "Reengineering CI for Maximum Success," at the SCIP annual conference in Boston, April, 1994.

While presenting a talk to a recent regional SCIP chapter, someone asked me the most basic question relating to our field: What is competitive intelligence (CI)? This was a surprising question at first, considering the presentation was fairly sophisticated and the audience--mostly seasoned CI professionals-well up to the task of understanding it. After some thought, I realized it was actually an excellent question because CI has changed so much over its brief history. What is CI now, was not CI 10 years ago. In fact, CI now is not the same CI as two years ago. We need to ask ourselves on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis: What IS CI? What should it accomplish? What is its overall objective? We need to adjust our mindset to one of continuous reengineering. We cannot design the CI process just once and think that it will work smoothly forever.

Over the past 20 years, I have helped hundreds of companies to reengineer their planning and intelligence processes. Considering those experiences, I will address in this article the following:

• The need for continuous reengineering of the CI process.
• Issues to address in the reengineering effort.
• Creating a Perpetual Strategy Process to link CI and decision making.
• The importance of people and relationships for long-term process success.
• Roles of the CI professional in Competitive Knowledge Development.

(E-mail us for the entire article)

The Perpetual Strategist: Facilitating Linkage Between CI and Strategic Management
Published in the Journal of AGSI, July 1995

All things considered, the CI groups within many companies are doing a good job of gathering and analyzing intelligence these days. However, most CI professionals have encountered some 'difficulty in linking the intelligence with strategic and tactical decision-making processes. One reason, in fact the primary reason, for this difficulty is that intelligence coordinators assume that decision-makers know what to do with the information given to them. Big mistake: they do not.

The crux of the problem is this: Planning and decision-making are probably the two most important tasks of business leaders throughout the world. Yet, most business leaders do not really understand how to perform these tasks (through no fault of their own). Unbelievable as it may seem, no one has ever taught them. Almost no formal training exists at the university level. The vast majority of company training programs do not cover these subjects. Few books exist, and the few that do exist are usually more conceptual than 'how-to' in format. Management decisions will never be correct 100 percent of the time, no matter what methodology, but the percentage of correct decisions can be greatly improved in most companies by creating a stronger link between CI professionals and decision-makers. (E-mail us for the entire article)

Global Competitive Benchmarking: Case Study and Contrast with Competitive Analysis and Competitive Intelligence
Published in The Journal of AGSI (Association for Global Strategic Information), November 1992

The discussion of global competitive benchmarking is particularly challenging because it raises a host of new issues that must be addressed in order to emerge with quality results. This paper provides a look at the unique problems of benchmarking global competitors. It also discusses the role of benchmarking as just one analytical weapon in the competitive intelligence arsenal.

Pioneers of modern day benchmarking concepts include Xerox, Motorola, AT&T, Digital Equipment and General Electric. They defined benchmarking as 'functional process' benchmarking. This consisted of comparisons of well defined performance indicators of one function versus that same function within 'best-in-class' companies. The 'best-in-class' were not necessarily in the same industry. The pioneer companies and others soon discovered that the 'best-in-class' company could literally be located anywhere in the world. As such, many issues arise. (E-mail us for the entire article)

Business Intelligence: Much More than a Business-to-business Buzzword
Published in Quirk's Marketing Research Review, April 1991

Business-to-business research in the age of time-based competition is taking on a new look. It's called business intelligence, and everyone is getting into the act.

Companies are now realizing that more timely and relevant information about competitors and other market players is necessary for making good strategic business decisions. Companies now know that a once-a-year analysis of their business environment is not enough. Markets are becoming increasingly global, and the information revolution is slashing the time available for effective decision making.

Business intelligence evolved in the 1980s as a hybrid function of strategic planning, marketing research, and systems activities. It is not a function that replaces these activities, but augments them with time-based methods. Most companies have been developing or fine tuning their business intelligence function over the last several years. In the 1970s companies were just starting to engage in strategic planning activities on a broad scale. Competitor analysis, customer analysis, and supplier analysis were important ingredients in that overall process. However, most companies were not organized to collect and analyze the information in a routine and systematic way. In addition, research and planning activities were separate functions with no interaction. (E-mail us for the entire article)