According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Nobel Prize Committee for Economics honored Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, in part, for paying attention to what happens in the real world.” They understood that “standard approaches of economics are inadequate at explaining what actually occurs.”
Paying attention to the real world, the larger world outside your industry or profession – what a concept! Why is this new thinking? These two Nobel laureates understood that long-held theories don’t always explain reality. Ostrom and Williamson looked beyond their discipline and gained their just rewards, and it’s equally applicable to business.
You must look beyond your own disciplines and market sectors and immediate competitors as well, to gain a true competitive advantage. Far too many companies focus on conventional thinking. These are not conventional times. Companies that hope to seize the opportunity of this economic downturn will benefit from expanding their thinking.
Basic competitive intelligence assesses your own market’s forces. Exceptional competitive intelligence goes beyond the usual research, and uncovers the reality of your entire business landscape, including diverse information that explains today’s business realities for your company. It looks in adjacent market sectors. It checks the behavior of users in other countries to understand and refine your positioning. It compares your product against products in other, counter-intuitive markets, examining your customers’ behavior towards these other products to learn more about your own customers. While the reward may not be a Nobel Prize, this kind of exceptional competitive intelligence will result in better business decisions and a healthier bottom line for your company.
Now if you had asked Ostrom and Williamson about their chances of winning the prize, they probably would have been as skeptical as their Economics colleagues. Their peers regarded them as unlikely because their thinking extended beyond the traditional boundaries of economic investigation.
However, paying attention to what’s happening in the world beyond your desk, beyond your field, and beyond your country’s borders is the key to succeeding in many endeavors. As the book “Freakonomics” – an early proponent of taking a boarder view in economics pointed out – disparate information can be used to explain economic realities, and they can also be used to evaluate and respond to the realities of every business in every industry.
In economics and in the business world, an external perspective helps evaluate and understand all the forces at play, and allows you to make the decisions that will be most beneficial to your company.
Seena Sharp of Sharp Market Intelligence is my long-time colleague who identifies your competitive edge by uncovering opportunities, threats and growth segments. Visit Seena at www.sharpmarket.com and download the free chapter in Seena Sharp’s new book, Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World (Wiley) http://bit.ly/8XLKmj. And read the great Amazon reviews http://bit.ly/5FCHtL .
