商界搞情报工作要学习中情局

    商业间谍活动或许是违法的，但企业仍然可以想办法密切关注竞争情况。全球各地，有些企业每年要花200多万美元，用于聘请外部机构，或是让内部部门追踪和分析竞争对手的行为及策略。这些公司通常通过公开资源或情报研究来达到这个目标，这种做法通常被称为竞争情报。

    竞争情报与研究机构Fuld & Company的总裁莱纳德•富尔德说：“竞争情报就是收集信息，收集到一定程度，你就可以据此进行决策。”这里的收集信息包括收集竞争对手的产品、定价、企业文化和投资等信息，此外还有市场行况、政府监管等外界因素。”

    竞争情报最重要的一个目标就是减少意外情况。摩托罗拉公司（Motorola）前情报总监詹•海令指出：“过去五年，企业好像被颠覆性的新技术打了个措手不及。因此企业高级管理层对收集情报越来越重视，而且我们看到情报应用的范围也在扩展。”

    海令在加盟摩托罗拉前曾是一名美国中情局（CIA）官员。80年代中期，摩托罗拉要求海令把他在政府情报部门的工作经验带到摩托罗拉来。海令说：“我相信，像政府一样，跨国企业也需要自己的情报部门，以便做出正确的决策。”

    从许多方面来看，竞争情报的历史，几乎和商业本身一样悠久。早在19世纪末，著名的犹太财阀罗斯柴尔德家族就把一批银行家送到法国，学习欧洲的银行技术并借鉴他们最佳策略。不过，海令认为，现代意义上的竞争情报是在20世纪80年代诞生的。海令特别提到了哈佛商学院（Harvard Business School）教授迈克尔•波特的《竞争策略：行业和竞争对手分析技术》（Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors）一书。他说：“正是这本开创性的著作，让大家开始把情报收集当成一门专业进行关注。”

    抗衰退的商业服务？

    尽管在经济开始衰退后，许多企业都在削减预算，但情报支出却不减反增。Fuld & Company对400家全球性企业进行的一项调查显示，过去五年内，在那些设置了竞争情报部门的企业里，在竞争情报上投入超过100万美元的企业的数量从5%增加到了10%。

    在那些对竞争情报投入超200万美元的企业里，制药业企业占了27%，远远高于其他部门。”海令说：“制药企业可能最擅长收集竞争情况的企业。另外社会上也有大量他们可以利用的公开信息。”相比之下，过去五年里，金融服务业的竞争情报支出下降最多，科技业的竞争情报支出增长最快。

    制药企业（以及他们聘请的外部机构）通过多种方式进行竞争情报收集。大型制药公司为了给新产品造势，往往会召开一些科学会议，像Fuld & Company这种商业情报机构经常参加这种会议。他们会睁大眼睛，竖起耳朵，搜集小道消息和内幕消息，同时也仔细倾听参会者询问的问题，因为这些都可能有助于更好地理解行业内的动向。

    Corporate espionage may be illegal, but companies can still keep tabs on the competition. Some large corporations around the globe spend more than $2 million a year hiring outside firms or staffing internal departments to track and analyze the actions and strategies of their competitors. These companies pull this off with the help of public resources and investigative research, a practice collectively known as competitive intelligence (CI).

    "Competitive intelligence is gathering information, which is analyzed to the point where you can make a decision," says Leonard Fuld, president of competitive intelligence and research firm Fuld & Company. This includes gathering information about competitor's products, pricing, business culture, and investments, as well as external factors like market conditions and government regulations.

    More than anything, CI aims to eliminate surprises. "Companies seem to have been caught off guard more by new and disruptive technologies in the last five years," says Jan Herring, former director of intelligence at Motorola. "As a result, senior management has become more appreciative of gathering intelligence and we're seeing expanded areas of application."

    Herring, a former CIA officer, was asked to bring his government intelligence experience to Motorola in the mid-80s. "I believed that, much like governments, multi-national companies were going to need their own intelligence departments to be able to make the right decisions," says Herring.

    In many ways, competitive intelligence is as old as business itself. In the late 1800s, the Rothschild family sent its bankers to France to observe banking techniques and adopt the best strategies. However, Herring says the modern incarnation of competitive intelligence took root in the 1980s, pointing to the publication of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. "It was the seminal document that caused everybody to focus on intelligence gathering as a profession," says Herring.

    Recession-proof business service?

    While businesses have been slashing budgets in the wake of the recession, expenditure on intelligence has actually edged up. A survey of 400 global companies by Fuld & Company reports that in the last five years the number of companies that spend more than $1 million on CI has increased from 5% to 10% of all companies with CI programs.

    The pharmaceutical industry accounts for 27% of companies that spend more than $2 million on competitive intelligence, far more than any other sector. "Pharmaceutical companies are probably the best at doing what we do now," says Herring. "Plus there is a lot of public information out there they can utilize." Predictably, the financial services world has seen the largest decrease in spending while technology is the fastest growing sector for CI programs in the last five years.

    Pharmaceutical companies (and the outside firms they hire) perform competitive intelligence in a variety of ways. CI practitioners like Fuld attend scientific conferences, often hosted by drug companies looking to generate buzz for their latest product. They keep their eyes and ears open for gossip, insider information, and questions asked by attendees that might lead to a better understanding of what's actually going on in a given industry.