The Essence of Leadership

December 1, 2009 · Posted in Competitive Intelligence

The Essence of Leadership is Making Decisions. In its simplest form, it is two people coming to a fork in the road. Both paths look very similar. One decides which path to take and the other follows.

The follower may have even read more about both paths and yet he questions or fears choosing one over the other. The leader takes stock of what he knows, maybe even asks the follower about what he knows about the two paths. He then makes the decision to choose which path to take and plunges head long by taking the first step. That’s the Essence of Leadership.

Where does Competitive Intelligence fit into all this? It fits into all of it.

The Dilemma

In the case of our simple story above, the dilemma is the fork in the road. Which one should they take if neither knows which path leads to?

In real world situations, these dilemmas can be anything from:

How can we deliver our products quicker?
What is my competitor up to?
Should we purchase this company?
Why are my products being returned?
What do people say about my company and my products?

Gather Intelligence & Recommend

In the story, the leader takes what he knows about the 2 paths. He can opt to ask the follower what he knows. While he may have the Essence of a Leader, how he acts at this stage answers if he is a good leader or not.

In the real world, you might say that this is so obvious. The leader will always ask what he doesn’t know. That’s common sense. My answer is to repeat that this is a real world situation. Most people who start up are one-man bands or have at most 2-3 people including him. These 2 or 3 people do multiple roles for the start up company due to a limited budget. So this pressures them into not asking for people’s help simply because they don’t have the budget or the time for it.

Competitive Intelligence teaches that you should have knowledge of your company before knowing about your competitors. You will be surprised. Most actually proceed to knowing about their competitors first. In a low budget enterprise, knowing what you have should be first priority so you don’t expend resources getting answers from outside when you can get the answers freely from the inside.

For one-man bands, identify your reach. What are the expertise of your friends. What communities do they belong to? That is your reach. Sometimes you would hear people say,

“I could have helped you out on that if you had let me know”.
“Sorry, I forgot you were into these things. I had a lot on my mind.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I know this guy we could ask. He knows these things in his sleep.”
“Oh man. That would have saved me a lot of time. I could have done more of something else.”

For two to three person start ups, the same conversation pieces above applies. Just substitute the both talkers with the members of the start up company. This actually hurts more as you are talking about your partners. But this still happens. This is because when you are already stressed about meeting a big deadline, these things understandably escape your mind. So having it in writing or stored in a computer file along their contact info would be a quick and easy investment of time at the beginning. When the company grows big enough, a more sophisticated Competitive Intelligence system could be implemented.

Recommend and Decide

When the information has all been gathered from himself and the follower. The leader analyzes and decides on which path to take and walks on.

In the real world, specially now with the Internet, Leaders or Managers often get stacks of reports. Information overload actually has the opposite effect to making a decision. It paralyzes.

Competitive intelligence doesn’t just collect information. It also calls for analysis and a recommendation. In the story above, since the follower has read more about the two paths, he should come out and recommend which path to take then give the reasons. If he just gives all the information to the leader, he will paralyze his leader or cause him to make the wrong decision. This is because the leader will not have the luxury of absorbing all the information at a comfortable pace. The follower had the luxury of absorbing the information so he must make the recommendation and justify then filter out all the rest. The leader listens, weighs the justification against what he knows and then decides which side to take.

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