You hardly have to join the CIA to become tell spy. In fact, these
things are going on in all aspects of our overall society where people
are using human intelligence gathering to get a leg up on their
competition, whether it be in foreign negotiation, military effort, law
enforcement investigation, or even in the modern day corporation.
If
you are in business you need to keep quite a bit of information very
close to the best, meanwhile you want the information about your
competitors to flow into your hand. Information as it has been said is
much like water, it wants to be free, it wants to flow, and more often
than not it has a life of its own. In fact, if you have a few moments I
would like to discuss this with you.
You see, there is a very good
book that I own on intelligence and information gathering for
businesses and corporations. Regardless of the size of your business you
can use these techniques to help get a leg up on the competition, and
stay ahead of the game. You'll also learn how to prevent information
leakage from your organization. The name of the book is;
"Confidential
- Uncover Your Competitors' Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly -
and Protect Your Own," by John Nolan, Harper Business Publishers, New
York, NY, 1999, 385 pages, ISBN: 978-00666-1984-2.
The author
suggests "using a well-planned conversation" to suck out information
from competitors. Some of the best sources of information are employees
of other companies, newsletters, their marketing material, interviews
they give, as well as their vendors and customers. You might also look
into their factory workers, sales and marketing teams, minor government
employees the do regulatory enforcement, and believe it or not the law
firm or lawyers they hire who are busy bragging about their list of
clients.
None of this is illegal, and if you aren't doing it,
perhaps you should, because your competitors are doing it to you whether
you realize it or not. No, most aren't that sophisticated, but many
are. And they spend time doing this sort of information gathering. The
authors also get into the tactics to keep your competition from stealing
your information using social engineering strategies and leading a
conversation to their benefit of information gathering.
You might
be surprised at fact that the most important information about your
competitors whether large or small is some of the easiest to get using
simple strategies and tactics. In fact, the authors have a 12 step
strategy to getting that information flow through casual conversations.
They suggest provocative statements, trading information, simple
flattery, and using the instinct to complain to your advantage.
In
the category of manipulating conversations they explain how word phrase
repetition helps very well, and quoting facts and reports, or even
giving criticism allowing the other party to deny, defeat, or help you
get to the truth of that criticism. Another strategy is to use incorrect
information or false facts, and let them explain why they are false.
Further, if you tell them you don't believe them, they might further
elaborate giving even more information away as they try to clear their
good name, or have you believe them.
Indeed I hope you will please
consider all this and think on it, you should own this book just like
me if you are in business for yourself.
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