DECEMBER 2014 / NO. 2

TAGS: COMPETITION, ROB DE WIJK, MANAGERS, GOOGLE

Out-thinking competition

“Being overtaken by competitors is your worst nightmare” – “It is never too late to listen”, Beeckestijn Business School, The Netherlands

You will have the ability to out-think your rivals in the marketplace if your company is able to observe emerging trends before its competition does. A key challenge is to organize the early warning signs of critical changes. You have to ask yourself: (1) what market developments should we be looking for? (2) what are the leading indicators before these developments appear? (3) are we able to observe these leading indicators? and (4) where can we track this information and how can we monitor it?

How not to do this?

In the majority of organizations, common daily practice is to use information on the web to find documents and other sources of data and information relevant to the topic, select the best sources within one’s comfort zone, gather the most relevant information, copy and paste the bits and pieces of the information, and then edit the compilation thereby creating a report. Rob de Wijk, Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden has a highly-applicable comment which relates to this: “Most managers are not able to make the connections, they collect information from Google and don’t understand the context: That’s not knowledge, that’s just basic information”. Do you want to challenge yourself and management?

“Here the success of everything depends on … seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment…”, Joseph Schumpeter

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