Intelligent New Strategies For New Battles
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Intelligent
New Strategies for New Battles
Managers everywhere are under siege. Yesterday’s paradigms – economic, political, social, technological, and more – are no longer valid. And what is worse, it seems virtually impossible to fully grasp or make sense of the evolving patterns of forces they are likely to face tomorrow. By Douglas Bernhardt
88
wbs journal • july-september 2008
B
UT PERHAPS the most frightening phenomenon of all, even for the most seasoned of executives, is that the very business models which seemed so robust, and appeared to work so well, in an industrial age have today crumbled into irrelevance. Indeed, as businesses from Africa to America to Asia ratchet up their efforts to gain yet another point or two of market share and profitability, one is reminded of what the crew and passengers of the Titanic would have achieved by re-arranging the deck chairs on that ill-fated vessel some 96 years ago. Today, it often seems that we are floundering in a period where the dynamics of asymmetric warfare apply as much to the world of business as they do to the ‘global war on terror’. The consequence is that many, if not most, executives seem all too ready to wring their hands in frustration as they retreat into the familiar comfort of their cubicles and office suites in search of ostrich-like respite from the new realities – or as some would say predictable surprises – of the early 21st century: • $100 and more for a barrel of crude oil and the tsunami-like effect this has had on commerce everywhere; • About $1 000 for one troy ounce of gold; • A cascading US dollar worth about 65 Euro cents; wbs journal • july-september 2008
• A world-wide banking crisis precipitated by the collapse of ‘subprime’ lending schemes; • Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical companies swamping the world with generic substitutes for expensive ‘blockbuster’ drugs and; • The ubiquitous internet spawning not just new enterprises and services, but entirely new business models. Indeed, as managers prepare to engage growing armies of new enemies, they are seldom certain of just who it is they’re fighting. Is it any wonder then that business leaders, including those whose MBAs prepared them so well to manage in the 20th century, find themselves overwhelmed? And as they catch their breaths to take stock of the uncertainties around them, at which altar do they pray for salvation? In many cases, if current management literature is any guideline, it is at the altar of ‘management innovation’. “Please help us,” they intone to the high priests – or gurus – of leading business schools and consultancies. “Help us ‘innovate’ our way out of sub-standard performance, belowaverage returns, and the dis-equilibrium caused by environmental forces outside of our control (and which we failed to anticipate or see in time). Help us, we beseech thee, to meet our legitimate aspirations for success.” And why not? After all, as the consultancy McKinsey &
[Apple] appears to understand its competition and its customers in equal measure, a powerful recipe for continuing success.
89
Many firms, now resting in corporate graveyards everywhere, were not equipped to give serious consideration to how and where innovation might help them achieve competitive advantage or how their rivals intended to compete in the future.
* We prefer the term ‘strategic innovation’.
90
Company observes: “Innovation has become a core driver of [corporate] growth, performance, and valuation.”1 But what do we mean by ‘management innovation’?* Gary Hamel, visiting professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School puts it this way: “Management innovation is anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organisational forms, and, by so doing, advances organisational goals.”2 Moreover, adds Hamel, “Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met: the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy; the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or the innovation is part of an ongoing programme of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time.”3 Innovation should not, of course, be mistaken for invention. “Invention is the creation of something new. Innovation is the creation of something new that makes money; it finds a pathway to the consumer.”4 In our experience, however, the real issue is not whether management innovation significantly increases a firm’s odds of winning its competitive battles; it clearly does. Rather, we suggest, the key issue is one which we elect to frame in terms of the question: what role for intelligence in management innovation? By intelligence (or competitive intelligence) we refer to the co-coordinated, systematic collection, analysis, and timely dissemination of ‘all source’ information about external forces that have, or are likely to have, a material impact on the strategic ambitions, interests, objectives, and plans of the firm. The dimensions of intelligence can be thought of in terms of activity (process), knowledge (the end product, or deliverables), and organisation (function and structure). Intelligence products (the analytically derived assessments and estimates that give objective, in-context meaning to raw data and information) in particular exist to ‘support senior decision makers in their capacity as strategists,5 the very leaders whose main job it is to understand and cope with competition.6 Thus, if the essence of truly innovative strategy springs from thinking and actions which differ radically from what we’ve done, and how we’ve done it before, or what our rivals are likely to expect us to do in the future, a firm’s
executive team is far more likely to defeat its opposition if it possesses real-time knowledge and foreknowledge of its rivals’ capabilities, intentions, and plans. Ask yourself, is this what your company and other companies with which you are familiar doing? Or do they continue to wage tomorrow’s competitive wars using strategies and tactics developed and refined for last year’s battles. Do they, in effect, focus on trying to improve business performance through operational effectiveness rather than by means of strategic reinvention and positioning based on future-oriented intelligence? Consider the example of the South African textile industry. This is what the country’s Textile Federation had to say in their report on the trading environment for 2007: The South African textile industry is currently facing extremely difficult trading conditions. Employment in the industry has declined from 70 500 in 2003 to just below 50 500 in 2006. In addition a number of textile mills have recently closed and have been forced to retrench staff. Imports are at an all time high. Imports of yarns have increased from 77 000 tons in 2001 to 99 000 tons in 2006, an increase of 29% while imports of fabrics have remained relatively constant with 94 900 tons in 2001 and 95 300 tons in 2006. Much larger increases were recorded by imports of made up textiles which have increased from 4 900 tons in 2001 to 28 700 tons in 2006 an increase of nearly 500% and imports of clothing which increased from 139 million items in 2001 to 567 million items in 2006 an increase of over 300%. Historically textile and clothing imports into South Africa originated from a wide range of countries chief amongst which were Taiwan, South Korea and Europe. However since 2001 imports have increasingly been sourced in the main from China. In the case of clothing imports, 89% currently originates from China, 3% from India and the remaining 8% from the rest of the world while 60% of all made up textiles (blankets, bed sheets, towels and curtains) originate from China.7 This state of affairs begs two questions: First, why didn’t the industry see the Chinese coming? Neither the capabilities nor the intentions of China should have come as a surprise. Did the South African textile industry assume that 1.4 billion people were sleeping all day? And second, why, instead of innovating its way out of competitive submission, has the industry reacted by pleading with the government on bended knees for protection in the form of more and tighter quotas and other measures? wbs journal • july-september 2008
Wits Business School
INTELLIGENT NEW STRATEGIES FOR NEW BATTLES
Developing timely, innovative strategies for commercial success are, ultimately, the only chance the textile – as well as other industries – have at regaining their diminished standings. A prime example is Zara, the flagship fashion brand of Spain’s 9bn Inditex Group, which boasts a growing network of some 1 150 stores in 68 countries. Zara does not attempt to compete on the basis of low-cost against the Chinese, India or other Asian states. (More than 70% of its production takes place in Europe). Zara’s success is attributable, in large, to a business concept based on the premise ‘that national borders are no impediment to sharing a single fashion culture’. What Zara has done is translate this notion into a highly innovative business model where “information from [the company’s] stores is constantly transmitted to a design team made up of over 200 wbs journal • july-september 2008
professionals, informing them of…customers’ [present and future] needs and concerns”. Zara has not asked the Spanish government or the European Union to protect it from the Chinese; it succeeds by out-innovating and out-smarting competition from the Far East. The South African textile industry’s experience is not, of course, unique. It is not only once-thriving companies in South Africa that have fallen prey to management’s failure to systematically monitor, understand and assess future threats. The executive leadership of global giants such as General Motors, Kodak, and Swissair have also suffered from the blindspots associated with de facto arrogance and thus, an unwillingness to routinely integrate intelligence into their strategic thinking and planning processes. Their cognitive biases, rather than insistence upon
hard truths, overshadowed their thinking and behaviour. As a result the management teams of these and many other firms now resting in corporate graveyards everywhere were not equipped to give serious consideration to how and where innovation might help them achieve competitive advantage, or how their rivals intended to compete for the future. Consider some of the specifics: including ‘special items’, the once mighty GM Corporation reported a loss of $38.7bn for 2007. For many years Kodak’s overpaid executives continued to regard Fuji and other makers of camera film as their main competition even while the digital revolution was taking place outside their factory gates. And the once premium European air carrier Swissair, despite 70 years in business, apparently refused to believe the forecasts for the competitive storms approaching their rich
91
Wits Business School
INTELLIGENT NEW STRATEGIES FOR NEW BATTLES
mountain enclave as their company entered a spiral dive into Switzerland’s most infamous bankruptcy in 2001. Unfortunately for these and many other leading firms, the innovation taking place in their industries is clearly not being launched from their boardrooms or marketing departments. But how could it? How in the absence of steady streams of intelligence can managers even begin to act as innovators? Innovation, or creativity generally, seldom takes place in a vacuum. Even artists feed on inspiration from somewhere, whether tangible or virtual – sometimes a photograph, sometimes a landscape, but always with a unique interpretation of an event or scene, real or imagined. Raw, especially open-source (public domain) data and information alone are not enough. Information does not in and of itself leap onto a silver platter and hand itself to the user proclaiming: “This is what it all means for you”. Information priorities need to be established, then collected from all – including human – sources and, finally, evaluated and interpreted before it begins to resemble an intelligence product. Again, is this what the firms you know are doing as part of their routines? In the corporate arena, Apple Computer, ranked number one in Fortune magazine’s 2007 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, offers an excellent example of what it means to create and implement winning strategies based on a deep understanding of the world around it. Since the return of Steve Jobs as the company’s CEO in 1997, it has consistently ‘innovated its way out of the doldrums’8 by means of strategic innovation. If Apple’s results serve as any indication – 94% total return to shareholders over the past five years – the company appears to understand its competition and its customers in equal measure, a powerful
Management must embrace and nurture a culture of intelligence in the firms they lead and ensure that it is integrated into the organisational architecture as a discreet discipline and function. 92
recipe for continuing success. Although we are not aware of the extent to which Apple relies upon a formal competitive intelligence function for strategic foresight and insight; what is apparent are the company’s rare competencies in looking outwards and in placing winning bets on opportunities (think iPod and iPhone) its rivals haven’t yet dreamed of. So what remedies to strategic failure do we propose? Or expressed differently, what must companies do to join the ranks of the world’s most admired companies? While there are no ready-made templates, and a full discussion on strategic innovation is outside the scope of this paper, there are two important steps which we regard as prerequisites for success. First, management must embrace and nurture a culture of intelligence in the firms they lead, and ensure that it is integrated into the organisational architecture as a discrete discipline and function. Innovation and strategy without intelligence are little more than educated guessing games played at shareholders’ expense. Knowing the current state of play in one’s industry and markets is not enough. Managers need to be able to assess and forecast the likely future impact of competitors and other key players, as well as a host of other environmental forces on their businesses. Similar to its role in government, a core purpose of the intelligence function is to advance and protect organisational interests and security. In part it accomplishes this by warning about existing and potential threats and explaining what these threats mean for high-level policy formulation and actions. Second, management innovation must be regarded as much as an art as a science. Let us return to the example of artists: although they are generally measured in terms of the unique interpretative qualities of their work – the way they perceive reality or fantasy – underlying their craft is a wide-ranging array of professional skills and techniques. Creating the next iPhone is a worthy corporate goal but only if conceived of within a context of timely, objective facts and analysis about the marketplace and overall competitive environment. Zara and Apple do not rely upon simple good luck, or even rapid responses to environmental change, they anticipate opportunities and threats, they set the standards of management, product, and service against which other firms are forced to benchmark themselves and they continuously modify their business models to conform to analytically-derived estimates of unfolding futures. And they do so intelligently.
1 Barsh, J., Capozzi, M.M., and Davidson, J. (2008) ‘Leadership and innovation’, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, pp. 37-47. 2 Hamel, G. (2007) The Future of Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press 3 Ibid. 4 Fisher, A. (2008) ‘The Worlds’s Most Admired Companies’, Fortune (Europe Edition), 157(5), pp. 37-44. 5 Bernhardt, D. (2003) Competitive Intelligence: Acquiring and using corporate intelligence and counterintelligence. London: FT Prentice Hall. 6 Porter, ME. (2008) ‘The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy’. Harvard Business Review, 86(1) pp. 79-93. 7 http://www.texfed.co.za/main.htm (2008) (Accessed 12 March 2008). 8 Morris, B. (2008) ‘What Makes Apple Golden, Fortune (Europe Edition), 157(5), pp. 40-44.
Douglas Bernhardt is a guest lecturer at WBS where he teaches an MBA elective on Competitive Intelligence. He also teaches at the Rotterdam School of Management and other leading business schools. His professional time is divided between consulting on competitive intelligence and lecturing. He can be reached at stratcon1@ hotmail.com
wbs journal • july-september 2008
New Strategies for New Battles
Managers everywhere are under siege. Yesterday’s paradigms – economic, political, social, technological, and more – are no longer valid. And what is worse, it seems virtually impossible to fully grasp or make sense of the evolving patterns of forces they are likely to face tomorrow. By Douglas Bernhardt
88
wbs journal • july-september 2008
B
UT PERHAPS the most frightening phenomenon of all, even for the most seasoned of executives, is that the very business models which seemed so robust, and appeared to work so well, in an industrial age have today crumbled into irrelevance. Indeed, as businesses from Africa to America to Asia ratchet up their efforts to gain yet another point or two of market share and profitability, one is reminded of what the crew and passengers of the Titanic would have achieved by re-arranging the deck chairs on that ill-fated vessel some 96 years ago. Today, it often seems that we are floundering in a period where the dynamics of asymmetric warfare apply as much to the world of business as they do to the ‘global war on terror’. The consequence is that many, if not most, executives seem all too ready to wring their hands in frustration as they retreat into the familiar comfort of their cubicles and office suites in search of ostrich-like respite from the new realities – or as some would say predictable surprises – of the early 21st century: • $100 and more for a barrel of crude oil and the tsunami-like effect this has had on commerce everywhere; • About $1 000 for one troy ounce of gold; • A cascading US dollar worth about 65 Euro cents; wbs journal • july-september 2008
• A world-wide banking crisis precipitated by the collapse of ‘subprime’ lending schemes; • Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical companies swamping the world with generic substitutes for expensive ‘blockbuster’ drugs and; • The ubiquitous internet spawning not just new enterprises and services, but entirely new business models. Indeed, as managers prepare to engage growing armies of new enemies, they are seldom certain of just who it is they’re fighting. Is it any wonder then that business leaders, including those whose MBAs prepared them so well to manage in the 20th century, find themselves overwhelmed? And as they catch their breaths to take stock of the uncertainties around them, at which altar do they pray for salvation? In many cases, if current management literature is any guideline, it is at the altar of ‘management innovation’. “Please help us,” they intone to the high priests – or gurus – of leading business schools and consultancies. “Help us ‘innovate’ our way out of sub-standard performance, belowaverage returns, and the dis-equilibrium caused by environmental forces outside of our control (and which we failed to anticipate or see in time). Help us, we beseech thee, to meet our legitimate aspirations for success.” And why not? After all, as the consultancy McKinsey &
[Apple] appears to understand its competition and its customers in equal measure, a powerful recipe for continuing success.
89
Many firms, now resting in corporate graveyards everywhere, were not equipped to give serious consideration to how and where innovation might help them achieve competitive advantage or how their rivals intended to compete in the future.
* We prefer the term ‘strategic innovation’.
90
Company observes: “Innovation has become a core driver of [corporate] growth, performance, and valuation.”1 But what do we mean by ‘management innovation’?* Gary Hamel, visiting professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School puts it this way: “Management innovation is anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organisational forms, and, by so doing, advances organisational goals.”2 Moreover, adds Hamel, “Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met: the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy; the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or the innovation is part of an ongoing programme of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time.”3 Innovation should not, of course, be mistaken for invention. “Invention is the creation of something new. Innovation is the creation of something new that makes money; it finds a pathway to the consumer.”4 In our experience, however, the real issue is not whether management innovation significantly increases a firm’s odds of winning its competitive battles; it clearly does. Rather, we suggest, the key issue is one which we elect to frame in terms of the question: what role for intelligence in management innovation? By intelligence (or competitive intelligence) we refer to the co-coordinated, systematic collection, analysis, and timely dissemination of ‘all source’ information about external forces that have, or are likely to have, a material impact on the strategic ambitions, interests, objectives, and plans of the firm. The dimensions of intelligence can be thought of in terms of activity (process), knowledge (the end product, or deliverables), and organisation (function and structure). Intelligence products (the analytically derived assessments and estimates that give objective, in-context meaning to raw data and information) in particular exist to ‘support senior decision makers in their capacity as strategists,5 the very leaders whose main job it is to understand and cope with competition.6 Thus, if the essence of truly innovative strategy springs from thinking and actions which differ radically from what we’ve done, and how we’ve done it before, or what our rivals are likely to expect us to do in the future, a firm’s
executive team is far more likely to defeat its opposition if it possesses real-time knowledge and foreknowledge of its rivals’ capabilities, intentions, and plans. Ask yourself, is this what your company and other companies with which you are familiar doing? Or do they continue to wage tomorrow’s competitive wars using strategies and tactics developed and refined for last year’s battles. Do they, in effect, focus on trying to improve business performance through operational effectiveness rather than by means of strategic reinvention and positioning based on future-oriented intelligence? Consider the example of the South African textile industry. This is what the country’s Textile Federation had to say in their report on the trading environment for 2007: The South African textile industry is currently facing extremely difficult trading conditions. Employment in the industry has declined from 70 500 in 2003 to just below 50 500 in 2006. In addition a number of textile mills have recently closed and have been forced to retrench staff. Imports are at an all time high. Imports of yarns have increased from 77 000 tons in 2001 to 99 000 tons in 2006, an increase of 29% while imports of fabrics have remained relatively constant with 94 900 tons in 2001 and 95 300 tons in 2006. Much larger increases were recorded by imports of made up textiles which have increased from 4 900 tons in 2001 to 28 700 tons in 2006 an increase of nearly 500% and imports of clothing which increased from 139 million items in 2001 to 567 million items in 2006 an increase of over 300%. Historically textile and clothing imports into South Africa originated from a wide range of countries chief amongst which were Taiwan, South Korea and Europe. However since 2001 imports have increasingly been sourced in the main from China. In the case of clothing imports, 89% currently originates from China, 3% from India and the remaining 8% from the rest of the world while 60% of all made up textiles (blankets, bed sheets, towels and curtains) originate from China.7 This state of affairs begs two questions: First, why didn’t the industry see the Chinese coming? Neither the capabilities nor the intentions of China should have come as a surprise. Did the South African textile industry assume that 1.4 billion people were sleeping all day? And second, why, instead of innovating its way out of competitive submission, has the industry reacted by pleading with the government on bended knees for protection in the form of more and tighter quotas and other measures? wbs journal • july-september 2008
Wits Business School
INTELLIGENT NEW STRATEGIES FOR NEW BATTLES
Developing timely, innovative strategies for commercial success are, ultimately, the only chance the textile – as well as other industries – have at regaining their diminished standings. A prime example is Zara, the flagship fashion brand of Spain’s 9bn Inditex Group, which boasts a growing network of some 1 150 stores in 68 countries. Zara does not attempt to compete on the basis of low-cost against the Chinese, India or other Asian states. (More than 70% of its production takes place in Europe). Zara’s success is attributable, in large, to a business concept based on the premise ‘that national borders are no impediment to sharing a single fashion culture’. What Zara has done is translate this notion into a highly innovative business model where “information from [the company’s] stores is constantly transmitted to a design team made up of over 200 wbs journal • july-september 2008
professionals, informing them of…customers’ [present and future] needs and concerns”. Zara has not asked the Spanish government or the European Union to protect it from the Chinese; it succeeds by out-innovating and out-smarting competition from the Far East. The South African textile industry’s experience is not, of course, unique. It is not only once-thriving companies in South Africa that have fallen prey to management’s failure to systematically monitor, understand and assess future threats. The executive leadership of global giants such as General Motors, Kodak, and Swissair have also suffered from the blindspots associated with de facto arrogance and thus, an unwillingness to routinely integrate intelligence into their strategic thinking and planning processes. Their cognitive biases, rather than insistence upon
hard truths, overshadowed their thinking and behaviour. As a result the management teams of these and many other firms now resting in corporate graveyards everywhere were not equipped to give serious consideration to how and where innovation might help them achieve competitive advantage, or how their rivals intended to compete for the future. Consider some of the specifics: including ‘special items’, the once mighty GM Corporation reported a loss of $38.7bn for 2007. For many years Kodak’s overpaid executives continued to regard Fuji and other makers of camera film as their main competition even while the digital revolution was taking place outside their factory gates. And the once premium European air carrier Swissair, despite 70 years in business, apparently refused to believe the forecasts for the competitive storms approaching their rich
91
Wits Business School
INTELLIGENT NEW STRATEGIES FOR NEW BATTLES
mountain enclave as their company entered a spiral dive into Switzerland’s most infamous bankruptcy in 2001. Unfortunately for these and many other leading firms, the innovation taking place in their industries is clearly not being launched from their boardrooms or marketing departments. But how could it? How in the absence of steady streams of intelligence can managers even begin to act as innovators? Innovation, or creativity generally, seldom takes place in a vacuum. Even artists feed on inspiration from somewhere, whether tangible or virtual – sometimes a photograph, sometimes a landscape, but always with a unique interpretation of an event or scene, real or imagined. Raw, especially open-source (public domain) data and information alone are not enough. Information does not in and of itself leap onto a silver platter and hand itself to the user proclaiming: “This is what it all means for you”. Information priorities need to be established, then collected from all – including human – sources and, finally, evaluated and interpreted before it begins to resemble an intelligence product. Again, is this what the firms you know are doing as part of their routines? In the corporate arena, Apple Computer, ranked number one in Fortune magazine’s 2007 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, offers an excellent example of what it means to create and implement winning strategies based on a deep understanding of the world around it. Since the return of Steve Jobs as the company’s CEO in 1997, it has consistently ‘innovated its way out of the doldrums’8 by means of strategic innovation. If Apple’s results serve as any indication – 94% total return to shareholders over the past five years – the company appears to understand its competition and its customers in equal measure, a powerful
Management must embrace and nurture a culture of intelligence in the firms they lead and ensure that it is integrated into the organisational architecture as a discreet discipline and function. 92
recipe for continuing success. Although we are not aware of the extent to which Apple relies upon a formal competitive intelligence function for strategic foresight and insight; what is apparent are the company’s rare competencies in looking outwards and in placing winning bets on opportunities (think iPod and iPhone) its rivals haven’t yet dreamed of. So what remedies to strategic failure do we propose? Or expressed differently, what must companies do to join the ranks of the world’s most admired companies? While there are no ready-made templates, and a full discussion on strategic innovation is outside the scope of this paper, there are two important steps which we regard as prerequisites for success. First, management must embrace and nurture a culture of intelligence in the firms they lead, and ensure that it is integrated into the organisational architecture as a discrete discipline and function. Innovation and strategy without intelligence are little more than educated guessing games played at shareholders’ expense. Knowing the current state of play in one’s industry and markets is not enough. Managers need to be able to assess and forecast the likely future impact of competitors and other key players, as well as a host of other environmental forces on their businesses. Similar to its role in government, a core purpose of the intelligence function is to advance and protect organisational interests and security. In part it accomplishes this by warning about existing and potential threats and explaining what these threats mean for high-level policy formulation and actions. Second, management innovation must be regarded as much as an art as a science. Let us return to the example of artists: although they are generally measured in terms of the unique interpretative qualities of their work – the way they perceive reality or fantasy – underlying their craft is a wide-ranging array of professional skills and techniques. Creating the next iPhone is a worthy corporate goal but only if conceived of within a context of timely, objective facts and analysis about the marketplace and overall competitive environment. Zara and Apple do not rely upon simple good luck, or even rapid responses to environmental change, they anticipate opportunities and threats, they set the standards of management, product, and service against which other firms are forced to benchmark themselves and they continuously modify their business models to conform to analytically-derived estimates of unfolding futures. And they do so intelligently.
1 Barsh, J., Capozzi, M.M., and Davidson, J. (2008) ‘Leadership and innovation’, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1, pp. 37-47. 2 Hamel, G. (2007) The Future of Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press 3 Ibid. 4 Fisher, A. (2008) ‘The Worlds’s Most Admired Companies’, Fortune (Europe Edition), 157(5), pp. 37-44. 5 Bernhardt, D. (2003) Competitive Intelligence: Acquiring and using corporate intelligence and counterintelligence. London: FT Prentice Hall. 6 Porter, ME. (2008) ‘The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy’. Harvard Business Review, 86(1) pp. 79-93. 7 http://www.texfed.co.za/main.htm (2008) (Accessed 12 March 2008). 8 Morris, B. (2008) ‘What Makes Apple Golden, Fortune (Europe Edition), 157(5), pp. 40-44.
Douglas Bernhardt is a guest lecturer at WBS where he teaches an MBA elective on Competitive Intelligence. He also teaches at the Rotterdam School of Management and other leading business schools. His professional time is divided between consulting on competitive intelligence and lecturing. He can be reached at stratcon1@ hotmail.com
wbs journal • july-september 2008
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