The Role of CI in Strategy

Continuing Education Course

10

FACULTY: GILAD 0.7 CEU CREDIT

February 21, 2008

Unless CI practitioners fully understand the meaning of strategy, and more important, the meaning of a superior strategy, they can not hope to be recognized by management as experts on strategy. CI practitioners must be able to critique competitors’ strategies and assess their probability of failure (or success). They should be able to provide meaningful evaluation of their company’s own strategic initiatives. The current situation, where intelligence people are excluded from strategy formulation is an aberration. This anomaly to a large degree is a result of CI people themselves, who stick to the information they provide rather than study strategy and how their intelligence tools can help shape it, evaluate it and identify risks to it. In this course you will learn about the role of CI in strategy. Everyone knows what strategy is, and everyone knows what tactical is, and yet when you drill down to specifics, most can only give an intuitive answer about which is which. Yet, every CI professional I know complains about doing tactical work. But what is the true distinction between tactical and strategic? Is it a matter of time only? No! Size of investment? No! Involvement of executives? No! The truth is, except for Michael Porter, few understand what strategy is. Michael Porter does, and defines it in very clear and actionable terms. His definition opens up the field for CI practitioners to do some true strategic work. In this course, you will learn to define strategy the way Michael Porter does, and to distinguish it from academic abstracts. You will dissect superior strategy from a HBS case study and learn to use 9 tests to evaluate it. You will learn when tactical work can add up to strategic insight. These issues are crucial to the ability of CI people to insert themselves into their companies’ strategic deliberations. In Ben Gilad’s course, The Role of CI in Strategy, you will learn:

• What strategy is, what it is not, and where is intelligence in all of this
• How to identify and evaluate a strategic position – your competitor’s and your own
• How to move up from tactical contribution to actually adding incredible value to your company’s strategy
• How to assess if a strategy is good, bad, or ugly and how to judge which strategic initiatives are good and which can harm your company