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Contact: Debbie Morton at Mercyhurst College, 814.824.2552
Corporate Conundrum: Smart people doing dumb things
Today’s corporate climate is ‘full of very smart people who do the dumbest things when it comes to gauging where the competitive world is heading,” said competitive intelligence professional Liam Fahey.
Failings stem from observing a competitor develop a breakthrough product and not responding strategically to witnessing a competitor’s local triumph with a new product and not preparing for its success in a larger market.
Case in point, he said, “Harley-Davidson looked at Honda when it first debuted in the 1950s and saw products that were slow, cumbersome and small and figured they would never grow to become a dominant force in California, let alone the greater national market. Nineteen years later, Honda had 85-to-90 percent of the market and Harley-Davidson had about 7 percent.”
While Harley-Davidson has come back big time, Fahey said, it is not the dominant force it once was. GM, Ford and Chrysler, he added, have survived, but they are not the market forces they were.
When corporations take competitor data and convert it into insights about competitors' current and potential actions, these kinds of dangerous, competitive mistakes could be avoided or, at the very least, mitigated, Fahey said. He also said companies must go beyond the competitive past and present and look to the future in order to shape more incisive decision-making.
Fahey , co-founder and executive director of Leadership Forum, Inc., Wellesley, Mass., will share his insights in the effective use of “marketplace intelligence” at the July 11-13 Dungarvan (Ireland) Conference.
The global intelligence summit, sponsored by the Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies, Erie, Pa., will bring together intelligence practitioners from across multiple disciplines representing medicine, the law, finance, technology, journalism and the sub-disciplines of national security, law enforcement and business intelligence. The first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, will deliver the keynote address.
