ACI Articles
6 Habits That Will Help You Become a Better Leader, According to Someone Who Coaches CEOs
By Helen Rothberg, ACI Faculty Over the past 25 years, I’ve coached a mix of executives in for profit and not-for-profit companies like Kellogg’s, Monsanto, SoCalGas, Newark City Government, The United Way, IBM, and AT&T. I’ve been in board rooms with people...
Can One War Game Change a Company’s Path?
Originally published in LinkedIn In a 2010 book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal (Harvard Business Press), author Mark Johnson describes a path changing event for Dow Corning- the creation of Xiameter, a...
Perspective or die
By Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty For the past 18 years at the Academy, I’ve been preaching the mantra that competitive intelligence is never the facts, only the perspective, and that for strategic intelligence, perspective is the most important element for decision...
The 8 most positive trends in Competitive Intelligence in 2017
By Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty I am typically a negative person. Well, not in my mind- I of course think I am a realist. But I hardly find reasons to celebrate in my field of competitive intelligence, until recently. Following the publication of my Pharma Executive’s...
Can You Think Like Someone Else?
To compete, you need to understand the mindset of other parties - from competitors to regulators to customers to disruptors. To compete in the long run, you need an early detection system that engages management in proactive discussions about strategy, risks and...
Competitive Intelligence in Companies: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
By Dr. Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, ACI Faculty Almost all of the Fortune 500 companies today recognize the need for competitive intelligence (CI), though not all interpret the role the same way. The vast majority of these large companies designates dedicated...
What Bugs Intelligence Practitioners the Most?
By Dr. Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, ACI Faculty At the Academy, we’ve been very aware of the challenges facing CI practitioners in their daily work in Corporate America or Europe. In every workshop we run we face questions from practitioners about how to overcome some...
How To Actually Put Your Marketing Data to Use
In most companies, marketers are in charge of assessing the competition. Because of this, close to 60 percent of all competitive intelligence professionals report to marketing. Yet the majority of marketers fail to use their competition analysts strategically…
Companies Collect Competitive Intelligence, but Don’t Use It
Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty has written another article featured in the Harvard Business Review: The first requirement for being competitive is to know what others in your space are offering or plan to offer so you can judge the unique value proposition of your moves....
Do Blues Guitarists Understand Competitive Strategy?
By Thomas Blailock, Master of CI CIP-II Certified I am a longtime fan of the blues. Specifically, I am a blues guitar fan, and living in Texas gives me exposure to some extraordinary work by blues guitarists. I also do consulting work in the areas of technology...
Market Intelligence Is Evolving. Are You Ready?
Dr. Ben Gilad has written a third featured post for the American Marketing Association: A director of market intelligence at a Fortune 50 company called me last week. He wanted my advice about how to recharge the competitive intelligence process in his company. I have...
The Intelligence Mindset
By Cliff Kalb, ACI Faculty I’ve been fortunate to have served as both a consumer and producer of intelligence over many years in corporate life. I was lucky to have helped start and manage a CI function at a leading global pharmaceutical firm that has been...
Eliminating Your Blind Spots – Your Worst Enemy is Within
Dr. Ben Gilad has a featured post for thoughtLeaders LLC: Business blind spots can lead intelligent leaders to make uninformed, poor decisions. Having regular access to new perspectives is key to avoiding blindspots. In September 2014, RadioShack announced that it may...
A Tale of Two Analysts
By Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty “Just what does a Competitive Intelligence analyst do all day?” It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this question – in fact, it’s not even one of the first 50 times. The fact of the matter is that there are two answers to that...
ACI Virtual Roundtable: Lessons They Wished They’d Learned
The diverse alumni from the Fuld Gilad Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence work in many industries across the world. In this edition of the ACI Virtual Roundtable, we asked a selection of our alumni: What is one lesson you wish you had learned before...
Fourteen Years Later: Revisiting the Intelligence BOK
By Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty Do you know what BOK is? No? Don’t worry. It makes no practical difference. BOK stands for Body of Knowledge. Professions often create them to help define and distinguish their fields from other professions and disciplines. In addition,...
Knock, knock! Can you hear me, asks the CEO?! Throw Out Market Share!
An ACI C-Suite Webcast with Lots of Critical CI Lessons (Listen to the full Webcast, "Throw Out Market Share”) Recently, a couple hundred ACI alumni and others spent 45-minutes with Patrick O’Keefe, former CEO of Watts Water Technologies. Pat gave us the reasons and...
ACI Virtual Roundtable: Advice to New Competitive Intelligence Managers
Alumni from the Fuld Gilad Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence are spread throughout the world and work in nearly every industry. Their experience and insights are a valuable resource to our students. So, in this, our inaugural edition of the ACI Virtual...
The Myth of ‘Actionable’
By Dr. Ben Gilad, ACI Faculty Quite often experts urge competitive analysts and other corporate researchers to deliver “actionable intelligence”. Top management, they claim, must see a possible course of action or the analysis/recommendation/information will go to...