Competitive Intelligence For Dummies

Chapter 19

Ten Questions to Help You Assess CI’s Effectiveness

In This Chapter

Determining whether your organization has the right mindset

Evaluating CI’s ability to predict future events

Gauging the support of your organization’s leaders

Auditing CI is an ongoing process with the ultimate goal of achieving and maintaining best-in-class CI capabilities. In this chapter, I lead you through the process of answering ten questions that you need to consider when gauging how effective and efficient your CI program really is.

Do Your Leaders Have a Healthy Case of Intuitive Paranoia?

Intuitive paranoia is a sixth sense that enables an individual to immediately recognize potential threats without having to gather a bunch of information and analyze it. If your organization’s leaders aren’t intuitively paranoid, they should be.

Although the definition of paranoia technically refers to an irrational and unsubstantiated fear of being harmed, not being afraid of threats in an ever-changing competitive environment is truly irrational. Although your competitors may not specifically set out to destroy your company, your organization needs to continually adapt to changes in the industry or in specific ...