SCIP Oregon

Interview with Mark Asher – Competitive Intelligence Manager – Adobe

Posted by campsean - 29/12/08 at 04:12:04 pm

Interviewee: Mark Asher – Adobe

Interviewers:Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights

• Examples of how CI can fit into a larger organization
• Responding to corporate threats with CI planning
• Interacting positively with other parts of the business
• Ferretting out information about competitiors’ activities
• The roles of primary and secondary intelligence sources
• Tips and tricks for the CI practitioner
• Tactical versus strategic roles for the CI practice

Sean Campbell: Mark, tell us about yourself, your role at Adobe, and your experience with CI.

Mark: Sure; I have been at Adobe just under eight years, and I have held a number of different roles in product management, business operations, and now in competitive intelligence through the corporate development organization for about two years.

Our competitive intelligence practice has two main charters. The first of those is primarily to keep our management team aware of competitive developments across all of Adobe’s business thrusts and interests, as well as providing them with thoughtful implications and recommendations about how to react to those events as they occur.

In this context, events can be anything from earnings or product releases to acquisitions or major management shifts–pretty much any activity that impacts our interests. Most of that is backward looking, as you might expect. Something happens, and we provide thoughtful insight about it.

Continue reading Interview with Mark Asher – Competitive Intelligence Manager – Adobe…

Meeting Minutes – December Committee Meeting

Posted by campsean - 29/12/08 at 04:12:16 pm

Just wanted to get out a short post that contains some of the highlights from the last committee meeting.

Last Face to Face Event Feedback – Positive.

• Content was great.
• Some good nuggets, could have maybe used a little more information that people could use without the full modeling.  For example, “If something free enters the market, think about raising your price because everyone price sensitive has left.”
• Very solid attendence – 20+

Interview with James Major – Author of Communicating with Intelligence

Posted by campsean - 08/12/08 at 08:12:39 pm

Interviewee: James Major

Interviewers:Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights

Link to: Communicating with Intelligence and James upcoming book – Writing Classified and Unclassified Papers for National Security

Topics Covered:

• The positive and negative aspects of technology in communication
• Zeroing in on the meaning in a large document, as a writer or as a reader
• Placing approriate gravity upon your point of view
• Attributing information to direct or indirect sources
• Improving the quality of one’s writing
• The value of collaborating with different personality types

Scott Swigart: To get us started, could you please take a minute to introduce yourself? To frame that introduction, there’s a lot of stuff out there on collection and analysis, but we’d really like to take advantage of your insights into how you communicate results to people once that analysis is done.

James Major: I joined the Army in 1963 as an infantry officer, but I decided that I didn’t want to spend twenty years running up and down hills, so I branch transferred to military intelligence in 1966, which at that time was called Army Intelligence and Security.

I spent twenty years in that profession, most of it in tactical and strategic intelligence, largely with the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was trained as a foreign area officer in Indonesia, and I studied the language for a year in Monterey, California, then got a master’s degree in Southwest Asian studies, focusing on Indonesia.

I spent a year in the country as a student at the Indonesian Army Command and General Staff College, and then I came back to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where they put me in charge of the Korea desk.

It was a fascinating tour, and I gained a lot of insight into strategic intelligence through DIA, and then back and forth to Europe in the 5th U.S. Corps, where I did tactical intelligence work.

Throughout my career, I found myself writing a great deal and giving briefings, and I found that I liked to focus on the presentation aspects of my work. Many of my colleagues and my subordinates came to me for help, and I just kind of gathered experiences over the years.

I reported to the Defense Intelligence College in 1985, and I spent three years there teaching writing and briefing. When I retired from the Army in 1988 as a lieutenant colonel, I became the head of the writing center at what was then the Joint Military Intelligence College. It’s now called the National Defense Intelligence College.

Throughout my twenty years with the Joint Military Intelligence College, I taught writing and briefing, ran the writing center, and helped students write. I found that there were unique requirements for the intelligence community, to teach the type of writing that we needed to do.

I sat down in 1986 to write a book, and the first words that came out of my IBM Selectric typewriter were a quotation to the effect that we can collect all the information in the world–gather rooms full of it–but unless we effectively communicate it to someone, we’ve wasted our time.

That’s what I focused the book on, and over the course of my twenty years at the college, I wrote another fourteen books, all of which were published by the government. When I retired from government service in 2005, I decided to work on a book for the community, to be published outside. My colleague Jan Goldman put me in touch with Scarecrow Press.

Scarecrow has been just wonderful, helping me through every aspect of it, and the book hit the street last April. I do have another book coming out at the end of December, which is basically a style guide for writing papers in the national security community.

Continue reading Interview with James Major – Author of Communicating with Intelligence…

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