Competitive Information On Leaders Unlimited

M V Rakimane Course Title

: Information Management : Gathering Competitive Intelligence information on Leaders

Unlimited

Table

of

Content

1. Introduction 2. Definition of Competitive Intelligence 3. What is Competitive Analysis 4. How can Competitive Intelligence help Heidrick & Strugglers?

5. Basic steps towards gathering competitive information on Leaders

Unlimited (CI cycle). 5.1.Background information on leaders Unlimited 5.2.Products and services offered by Leaders Unlimited 5.3.Marketing 5.4.Human resource 5.5.Operations function of Leaders Unlimited

5.6.Management profiles of Leaders Unlimited 5.7.Sociopolitical landscape of Leaders Unlimited 5.8.Technology utilized within Leaders Unlimited 5.9.Organizational structure of Leaders Unlimited 5.10.CI capacity of Leaders Unlimited 5.11.Strategy 5.12.Customers 5.13.Finance 6. Conclusion 7. Bibliography

1. Introduction The business is taking a different direction because of the hyper-competitive environment, so in order for Heidrick & Struggles to survive in the global business environment it needs to take correct business decisions in which has to be provided by the competitive intelligence team. To develop a competitive intelligence programme will come handy as the market is becoming more global and competition is getting toughen up by many players in the market so, to become the one provider of service a regular environmental scanning needs to be done. Heidrick & Struggles competitor in the

market is Leaders Unlimited. However, for Heidrick & Struggles to gain a competitive edge over Leaders Unlimited in the market place it is advisable that it invest more money on competitive intelligence and gather better intelligence on its core competitors especially Leaders Unlimited. Turning raw data that is not off important to the organization is a waste of time and resources so, this competitive strategy is going to give an in depth company profile of Leaders Unlimited and identify opportunities and improve strategic operations of Heidrick & Struggles.

2. Definition of Competitive Intelligence The concept is not new to the business environment as it was many years ago and many authors have clearly defined the term differently but on the same track, according to Hodges (2005:441) “is the systematic collection, evaluation and organization of information, meaning is a process that involves the focused gathering of pieces of information about competitors, customers, suppliers and economic”. Other authors regard competitive intelligence as a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing and managing external information that can affect company’s plans, decisions and operations (Kirkwood:2007). There are different categories of competitive intelligence according to Kirkwood (2007:10) “thus, market intelligence (government regulations & industry), partner intelligence (monitoring company’s major suppliers), competitor intelligence (detailed monitoring & analysis of competitors), technical intelligence (technical development) and prospect intelligence (determining & monitoring internal influences)”.

3. What is Competitive Analysis According to Pollard (1999:24) “it is the step in the production of intelligence whereby information is subjected to a systematic examination in order to identify relevant facts, determine significant relationships and derive key findings and conclusion”. In other instances it means taking information and turning it into intelligence. The essence of competitive analysis is to better understand the market and players in order to make decisions and to develop a strategy that will provide competitive advantage that achieves prolonged performance that will give superiority to the competitors out there.

The returns of the analysis generated should be actionable, meaning that they are future oriented and thus, they should help the decision makers develop better competitive strategies, facilitate a better understanding than that of competitors and identify current future competitor’s strategies and plans.

4. How can Competitive Intelligence help Heidrick & Struggles The benefits of using competitive intelligence in a company it will enable Heidrick & Struggles to facilitate strategic direction of business changes and technological development. The ability to build strategic alliances with companies that are self-driven machines in this industry of executive search, that’s why the collaboration of Leaders Unlimited and dynamic strategic research company (Terranova). The intelligence department can be used to identify and assess a company’s own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, something that it typically required to do for the competition. There are various ways in which CI can help Heidrick & Struggles like for example to predict a competitor’s next move about changing its own product or direction. A well planned competitive intelligence can help a company to turn weaknesses into an advantage and as well to become aware of changes as it happens, before it’s too late to act. 5. Basic steps in gathering competitive information on leaders unlimited The gathering of information will involve the use of public sources in order to extract intelligible and raw data on Leaders Unlimited and the external environment that will be analysed in order to transform the information into intelligence that is able to support business decisions. There are varieties of sources like for example internal sources, primary sources as well as secondary sources. Internal source refer to information gathered from within the business. Primary source are those that can be obtained directly and secondary source on the other hand, are regarded as public information.

5.1.

Background information on Leaders Unlimited

Leaders unlimited was established in 2002 due to the fact that brain drain was causing havoc in the South African population because they were leaving the country to and work abroad so, leaders unlimited came handy because now more people working abroad they want to come back home to work. The founding partner Brain Khumalo and

Auguste (Gusti) Coetzer both have successful track records in the search industry and the staff of this niche company has all been professionally trained. The educational level of each and every member at leaders unlimited they are qualified practitioners in their field of profession. The company objectives are the key source of better-quality leadership solutions, and its mission is basically to master in the art of identifying and cultivating superior talent for its clients and enhancing the careers of leaders of excellence (Coetzer:2003). The transformation of the company from locally operating to international functioning was through the influence of Korn/Ferry international a company that partnered with it to become the monstrous it is today. Apart from that, Leaders unlimited dedicated much of its energy to head-hunt back skilled expatriates to help grow economics across the African continent. It is characterised by values including honesty and integrity, trustworthiness and dependability, privacy and confidentiality, professionalism and quality as well as genuine belief in African talent. Their first priority is to drive for a speedy and accurate completion of the assignment as a means to get the candidate that matches their client's needs.

Moreover, it is the tradition of Leaders Unlimited to seek to recruit boards of directors and consult on matters of corporate governance. Leaders Unlimited as a matter of principle moulds its approach to the specific needs of each client, with a clear recognition that the most powerful element of an effective board is its composition. The Board Services recruitment approach of Leaders Unlimited presents candidates who have the appropriate blend of knowledge, skill, attitude, experience and commitment. In addition, Leaders Unlimited conducts the main proportion of the assignments each and every year, which entail recruiting international as well as previously disadvantaged individuals, an area in which its Board Services team has developed particular expertise and a reputation for creativity and success (Coetzer:2003).

5.2.

Product and services of Leaders Unlimited

The quality and benchmarking of Leaders Unlimited is extremely amazing because it provides its clients with high specialized services that will suit any organisational form.

The services which are offered by this niche company are as follows executive search, meaning its task or core of their portfolio of services is senior-level search, the firm’s largest and most developed platform of searching qualified candidates. The reciprocal relationship of Leaders Unlimited with Terranova make their search for executives and highly qualified candidates more easier because the itself specializes in dynamic strategic research for candidates and compiling reports as well for other companies. It has search consultants at the senior-level, that are organised and aligned into industryspecific components that are determined at dishing up clients with cutting-edge search capabilities in key areas such financial service, industrial / manufacturing / mining / energy, consumer, retail andhospitality,information technology and telecommunications, educational/not-for-profit institutions as well as government departments/ state-owned entities (Coetzer:2003). The services and products which are offered at Leaders Unlimited are provided by a suite of services to choose from, including full search, targeted recruitment advertising and response management, as well as extracting from the database of pre-screened professionals by the use of speedy technology-based assessment tools designed to meet client’s specific recruitment requirements. However,

Leaders

Unlimited

offers

management

and

leadership

competency

assessments and executive coaching services and just to elaborate more on the matter assessment tools and methods are used to do that. The other crucial service is board service practice whereby a well dedicated practice whose sole focus is recruiting for boards of directors and consulting on matters of corporate governance. It has partnered with organisations in both the private and public sectors throughout the African continent, so as to put the standard of their services to greater heights. The executive coaching services are aimed at helping executives get the best out of their performance. This whole process is lead by an assessment which weighs up the leadership style of both the organisation and the individual executive. The outcome forms the basis of the individual plan and the programme of coaching.

5.3.

Marketing

The advertising of the available post are most placed on the internet that’s the marketing strategy of Leaders Unlimited and it does most of its marketing on the printed media it can either be newspaper or any other printed format. Its marketing is enabled through Korn/Ferry website portal for candidates abroad and it has capabilities of applying online. Leaders Unlimited makes a contribution of an amount of money annually to Buskaid and Business & Arts South Africa is a member whereby it receives free publicity as its marketing strategy. Buskaid is a charitable trust or organisation whose vision is that all township children will be given the opportunity to channel their creative energies and talents through learning and playing classical music to the highest international standards. The other institution which received support from Leaders Unlimited is Agricultural Business Chamber (Khumalo: 2003).

5.4.

Human Resource

The human resource at Leaders Unlimited is tougher because office politics and tension among individuals working there are just other issues they have to be dealt with. The biggest task the human resource at Leaders Unlimited would have to do urgently is to retain African executive and reverse the diasporas that has robbed the continent of its brightest and best man and women. Meanwhile, leaders unlimited is a world leader in the objectives assessment and development of people, jobs and organisations and are continually helping their clients increase productivity through the effective use of their human resources. The applicants or candidates should interact with the assessors during examination, thus after a candidate has been approached and submitted the curriculum vitae well they are been assessed through an intensive research strategies and are approached as being a potential match our client’s needs (Coetzer: 2009). The process of assessing candidates when their CV’s are requested is firstly Personal details including name, address, contact telephone numbers (especially cell phone number) and e-mail address should be added and not forgetting educational details including qualification, name of institution and date of graduation. Please do not send copies of your certificates. Work history including names of organisations, dates of employment, designations, responsibilities and important achievements. Moreover, the use of psychometric test is used as a method to evaluate candidate ability to complete

any task given. By approaching potential candidates we are encroaching on both their professional and private lives and to respect them in this regard (Staff Reporter: 2007).

5.5.

Operation functions of Leaders Unlimited

The organizations operation helps the client to create a competitive employment offer consistent with the client’s objectives and to build a diverse management team. The professionalism at this company is extraordinary out of hand because it regularly gives feedback to ensure that the candidate is successfully integrated into client’s organisation and is happy about the position in order to avoid bad image. The strategy of Leaders Unlimited is that every assignment is treated as a valued partnership with the client, using a custom-designed strategy focusing on the requirements and expectations of the individual client. Leaders Unlimited is committed to a flexible and creative approach to get together the evolving needs of its clients. The people within Leaders Unlimited have defined roles that allow an individual to have specialised knowledge and skills of their area of work. This company has a very great specialisation (Coetzer: 2003). The operation of leaders unlimited is that the company prepares for a client interview and emphasises on the idea that a candidate should conduct a research on their client before an individual is been interviewed. The research process could be delayed sometimes by a diary constraint of senior executive of their clients company or by individual candidates applying for a post. Leaders Unlimited has grouped people together into departments where tasks are carried out. Responsibility for decision making is defined with a structure framework, showing the roles, control and monitoring of other staff members and on the performance of staff knowledge management tool is used to check staff development on their career and post in the company (Coetzer: 2009).

5.6.

Management Profile of Leaders Unlimited

The organisation is rich in resources like knowledge, expertise, information why is that is simply because of is mostly populated by qualified staff. Their main focus is with servicing primarily major corporations, state owned entities and government

institutions. The founding partners, Khumalo and Coetzer have experience of working in Africa (north and south of the Sahara), as well as internationally. •

Gusti Coetzer holds a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology and a Postgraduate Diploma in Industrial Relations from the University of South Africa. Before joining this company Gusti Coetzer worked in executive position in the motor and retail industries, as well as with the Chamber of Mines. The responsibilities which were entrenched in the portfolio of search industry have been delivery, tenacity and being a top biller for a number of years.

•

Brian Khumalo has been in the corporate management for more than ten years and the field which was the most favoured was sales and marketing. Brian Khumalo on the other hand, possesses BSc. (Chemistry) and MBA degrees, both of where studied at the University of Cape Town. While working as general manager at ACSA, brain was responsible for the establishment of the company’s marketing division from grass roots.

•

Rene van Wyk is a CA (SA) and holds an MBA (Wits) and a diploma in Advanced Banking from the then RAU. The work experience of fifteen years in executive management help her to gain a cross variety of industries and sector.

•

Annelize van Rensburg has a post-graduate degree majoring in political science from Rand Afrikaans University (UJ) after graduating she was a Liaison Officer at the SA Forum and thereafter she was appointed Vice Principal of a private business collage (Leaders Unlimited: 2009).

5.7.

Sociopolitical Landscape of Leaders Unlimited

The policies of the government always influence the workings of a company to its success. As far as socio-political landscape of Leaders Unlimited is concerned it is committing itself to complying with the policies of the current government, as it is working very hard to attract suitably qualified candidates so as to fulfil the requirements of their desired clients. The ICT Industry Company has not taken the government’s aggressive policies of non-compliant companies for granted. Leaders Unlimited is the first global search executive company to adopt the BEE initiative in South Africa. This

company is also committed to finding and keeping competent black executives (Maluleke: 2003).

5.8.

Technology utilization at Leaders Unlimited

Leaders Unlimited uses its own portal together with that one of Korn/Ferry to assess and get candidates because it has capabilities of applying for a job online thus, for example ekorn/ferry.com that’s where CV’s are uploaded electronically. Technology tools can be used to analyse information such as performance output ratings, poor performance, competency gaps and development interventions in an organisation so, that’s the reason why Leaders Unlimited has invested more money on computer system technology. Leaders Unlimited uses expert finder software in its executive recruitment functions, as it supports everything in the search process of executives (Mackenzie: 2008). Expert finder helps in the provision of suitable candidates and information on the background and candidate profile. The expert finder is sometimes called executive search software because is used for searching executives or mainly because is designed specifically for executive search. The company uses knowledge management tool to improve the culture of sharing information and knowledge and because the company deem KM tool is vital for the organisation as they are in the information and candidate driven sector (Mawhinney:2002).

5.9.

Organizational Structure of Leaders Unlimited

The organisational structure is bureaucratic in nature and is in such a way that every department in the company, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. The founding partners of Leaders Unlimited occupy the crown of the company. Members of this company principally communicate with their superiors and subordinates. This way of structuring is useful to Leaders Unlimited, partly because it reduces the communication overhead by limiting information flow, which is also a major limitation on the other hand and the other good thing about it is that information leak will limited if

departments in an organisation are structured well. The problem with hierarchical structure is that decisions are always top down (Leaders Unlimited: 2009).

5.10. CI capacity at Leaders Unlimited The more often a company is doing research and conducting surveys it will be able to identify information gap and trends that may impact on the business success like for example recent global finance meltdown in the sense that is it going to affects the company because their clients are retrenching workers instead of employing. The assessment of candidates is of a high standard because it has the ability to identify candidate’s performance using executive quiz and sophisticated psychometric test methods which helps in making sure that the individual really hold those capabilities and skills as well as observing that if task allocated to such individual will be done best. By assessing candidates in key areas such as, leadership and emotional intelligence competencies and cognitive profile it enables them to identify not just qualified candidates, but also people who have the competencies required to grow into senior positions over a period of time. Terranova is enhancing CI capacity of Leaders Unlimited in the sense that the searching department is done by it and Leaders Unlimited task will be evaluates and analyse their findings (Khumalo:2008).

5.11. Strategy The company is committed in the provision of a professional and highly effective search capability. This search capability hits leading the very best candidates anywhere they may be located. The only purpose of this whole implementation is to help the clients put together an attractive and an assorted leadership team. In order for Leaders Unlimited to achieve this, it should make things fit into place in the manner that it is not careless and little provision of a flexible and creative approach so as to meet the growing needs of the clients. The company values professional partnerships with the clients and candidates as its principal aim is to meet and go beyond the client’s expectations (Coetzer: 2003).

However, Leaders Unlimited has committed itself in the maintenance of complete secrecy as it does not reveal privileged information about its clients and candidates without their consent and prove is on their corporate portal there is no enough information what so ever concerning their candidates or profits. The searching process is conducted in five different phases namely, defining objective, specialisation, identification and assessment of candidates, client interviews, selection of candidates as well as closure and feedback with client and candidate. The client is kept updated as there is a clear communication with the client. They tolerate mainly information on every assignment and thus enabling the company to help the client purify and focus the search objectives and produce a detailed brief. The selection of the best-suited consulting team for the assignment is regarded as a key component of Leaders Unlimited executive search process. The company is able to develop an appropriate sourcing strategy for each and every search assignment for the simple reason being that, it understands culture of the client, the requirements of the position, together with the source-related criteria (Khumalo:2008).

5.12. Customer In the hyper competitive environment companies need to have a well competent staff in order to survive and that’s what Leaders Unlimited is offering to its customers in all different field of work or post only on executive level. In order to meet their customer needs Leaders Unlimited decided to an exclusive alliance partnership for the African continent with Korn/Ferry international, the world’s premier provider of executive search solutions because according to their surveys more individuals from abroad prefer to come and in Africa to advance in their careers and some not for advancement but to explore other countries as well (Coetzer: 2003). Leaders Unlimited works with organizations in both the private and public sectors throughout the African continent. Clients include multinational corporations, African companies, institutions, government departments and state owned entities. The company is committed to a flexible and creative approach to meet the evolving needs of their customers. Their first priority is to satisfy and make their customers happy at all

times in order for them to create that image that’s why executive coaching was initiated to avoid disappointment from their candidates. By understanding clients culture, the requirements of the position and success-related criteria we are able to develop an appropriate sourcing strategy for each assignment search in order to give their best service. Part of clients satisfaction leaders unlimited review progress regularly with the client and strategy review sessions held as appropriate whereby a detail targeted organizations and individuals, highlight qualified candidates. During the session’s feedback is given to their clients on market reaction and the post as well as comparative salary data and any other

pertinent

information

and

summary

profiles

of

qualified

candidates

(Khumalo:2008). 5.13. Finance Korn/ferry international has agreed to acquire 100% of the stock of Lore International Institute, Inc a provider of leadership development, executive education and coaching services. Upon completion Lore International will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Korn/Ferry and will be part of the company’s leadership and talent consulting business. The transaction it was closed on November 2008. The type of deal which was initiated is acquisition and it was announced on 15 October 2008, so this deal will be crucial to Leaders Unlimited in the sense that resources will be available to them in bulk like for example when the company needs a capital injection from Korn/Ferry (korn/Ferry:2008). On the other hand Leaders Unlimited at home acquired Terranova a company providing services on company report, scenario planning for appointing new directors, consultative advice on composing new executive boards and searching for new directors (Coetzer:2003).

6. Conclusion Therefore, Heidrick and Struggles can indeed outshine their counterpart which is (Leaders Unlimited) and if this competitive intelligence information is accurately and appropriately used and analysed the company will gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Leaders Unlimited has established itself as a major South Africa’s truly empowered executive search company with global and local experience. The company

complies with the government’s rule and regulations as well as policies and that has contributed a lot in creating its image and voice heard in the market place. It has also invested a lot of money in acquiring system tool like knowledge management to be able to enhance knowledge sharing among its staff because the organisation is rich in knowledge. However, creating an understandable Competitive Intelligence strategy can help Heidrick and Struggles to continuously identify opportunities and learn from the successes and weaknesses of Leaders Unlimited. This can really help this company manage and reduce risk, avoid information overload, ensure privacy and security of information and use corporate information strategically. This valuable information can be used by Heidrick and Struggles to improve planning, decision making and enhance forecasting of competitive threats, for counter intelligence and being up to date with changes that can affect its business.

7.

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(2008).

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