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When the economy went south several years ago, and
executive search work became scarce, we created a subscription service
for monitoring the Internet for leaks of client company secrets and
other sensitive internal information.
Not long after we started providing this service we
were naturally asked about “penetrating” a competitor’s firewall. I
laughed and said, “Why bother! With the web most companies leak
important information constantly. You just have to know how to
listen. And we’re very good listeners. Don’t bother with the
firewall—there’s plenty of fruit to pick up outside of it. And
it’s legal.”
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Your employees must assume
everything they post onto the web will be examined by your
competition. Sometimes a competitor sets up a honey pot simply to
attract your employees and get them chatting… |
Sun Tzu said spies were the most efficient use of
the sovereign's money. And why not? Great Generals know that no war is
best, but when you have to have one you need to keep it short. War is
expensive in many ways. A shorter war is cheaper. Same thing goes for
wars in the marketplace. “Know your enemy and in 100 battles you will
have a 100 victories.”
Good intelligence of your competition’s plans and
capabilities is just good business. The issue is how to get the
information. Once upon a time, not too long ago, corporate spying was a
tough, nasty business. And often not legal.
Today, it’s a different story. Why? Here are
some good reasons:
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Forums
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Message Boards
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Chat Rooms
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Blogs
Not too long ago if a competitor wanted to know
what was going on deep in your company he had to resort to some fairly
devious means. Not so anymore. See the example below. Never before in
the history of mankind has it been possible for the “common man” to say
something that the whole world can hear. These days lives don’t need to
pass in relative obscurity then pass into the vague memory of friends
and relatives.
These days any person can jump onto a message board
and say anything they want… anonymously. Text has
always been a way to amplify the human voice. But before, there was a
natural selection about how far the text reached. With the Internet
everybody with anything to say, regardless of how good or bad it is, can
have those words read by millions of people within five minutes.
And if they accidentally (or, god forbid, on
purpose) say something negative about your company you can be screwed in
a pixel second because a New York Minute is now too long!
Below is a typical example from our
monitoring service.
Keep in mind this service typically looks inward toward the client’s
employees, and monitors the web for things that can inadvertently, or
otherwise, somehow damage the client’s company. The service can just as
easily be pointed outward directly at your competition. We’re pretty
good at that too.
Take a look at what we turned up a few months ago
on behalf of one of our clients, a pharmaceuticals company. The image
was taken from an obscure message board. A fairly senior researcher in
the client’s company made this comment onto a board he had “stumbled
across”. Turned out it was no accident. He had heard about the board
from somebody at a Starbucks kiosk while attending an industry function.
What we found was that the message board was, in fact, created by the
client’s competition for the exclusive purpose of ferreting out
information about their competition “Penetrate their firewall?” Why
bother when your employees can be tuned into “accidental spies” like
this person became.
So this was an unfortunate thing. I eventually
flushed out who the writer was (we posed as a fellow employee) and that
was gratifying because like most posters he was running cloaked. We
turned in the report to the CEO and then were conferenced into the
meeting when the person was vigorously reprimanded. Until seeing the
“plain as day” report he honestly believed his postings were a minor
security breech because he thought he “was having a quiet conversation
with a fellow researcher”. Huh? I wanted to climb through the phone line
and punch the guy. The message logs alone indicated a few dozen people
frequented the board (about a dozen were alias’ of the competitor that
had set it up, but still). He was described as a brilliant researcher
but all I saw was a myopic, naïve corporate liability. The CEO later
told me this “quiet conversation” cost them about a million dollars.
If you think this was an isolated case you would be
badly mistaken. Hundreds of thousands of people reach out into chat
rooms, forums, message boards and blogs every day. It’s phenomenal what
people will say over the Internet. We turn this stuff up all the time.
You start combining the swarming capabilities of
the Internet and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and it starts getting
very scary. The Internet really is the ultimate stand-off weapon for
harming large, organized social structures (e.g. your company) or even a
competitor’s products, for that matter.
It’s not going to be long before everybody figures
this out. Now, it’s mostly just smart people who tend to be more
responsible. But soon it’ll be everybody. And then watch out.
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You have to be careful these
days how you define The Enemy. Because very often he or she is us,
and they don’t even know it. In fact, the destruction of
shareholder value is the furthest thing from their mind. But that
doesn’t mean they can’t cause a meltdown. |
Ultimately it's my job as an executive recruiter
(and the charter of this newsletter) to legally improve my client's
profits. That’s YOUR job too, isn’t it? While we accept fees, and you
accept a paycheck, everything we all do has to focus on improving
sustainable shareholder value. Our efforts don't have to be pretty--they
just have to be effective.
This includes preventing letting the competition
knowing what we’re up to. And that means making sure your employees
understand that anything they do online, anything they say, no matter
how seemingly innocuous, they must assume your competition is watching
and taking notes.
Think about it...
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