SCIP Oregon

CI links from April Chapter Meeting

Posted by campsean - 25/04/09 at 08:04:20 pm

During the April meeting we pulled together a variety of sites and resources to use when gathering competitive intelligence.

Here is the full list.

People Searches:

Emailpattern.com – Look up the pattern that a company uses to assign email addresses.  If you know someone’s name, this helps you guess their email.

Pipl.com – look people up by name, email, Web nickname, or phone number.  Find out their other contact information and what social networks they’re a part of.

Linkedin.com – Find people for interview recruitment, determine where your employees have gone off to, use saved searches to receive alerts when new people go to work for competitors.

Search Engines

LexisNexis and Factiva are struggeling to index relevant content because they focus on publishing content, which is waning.  But, Factiva is only $70 per year, and there’s no additional charge for searching.  There is a $2 charge per article to view.  People report finding document titles on Factiva and then looking for those exact title with Google to save money.

Clusty is a meta-search engine that groups results into logically related clusters. 

Touchgraph visually shows how sites on the Web are related to other sites.

Archive.org – (a.k.a. “The Internet Wayback Machine”) keeps historical copies of Web pages, letting you see what products or services a competitor used to offer, or how their positioning has changed.

Books.google.com, scholar.google.com – Find people who have authored or been interviewed on various topics.  Useful to find candidates for qualitative research or subject matter background.   

Search for PDF or PPT file types under a company’s site to get more in-depth information.  Use wildcards to pick up subsidiaries which are more likely to leak information.  For example:

                positioning messaging filetype:pdf site:*.somecompany.*/*

www.google.com/alerts – monitor competitors and detect recent news.  Often lags breaking news by 24 hours.

bizjournals.com – backend site to all the business journals.  Small companies might make lot of news locally, but not show up in Google.

Silobreaker.com – Company information, leadership, connections to other people, news, etc.

Company Info

Finance.yahoo.com – company filings and other statistics, and investor message boards.

Hoovers.com – Company statistics, leadership, jobs, news, competitors, and other background information. 

Indeed.com – Search for company job postings across many jobs sites.

Glassdoor.com – Get information, for a company’s employees, about the company moral, culture, strengths and weaknesses, and salaries.

Seekingalpha.com – Has financial information and earnings call transcripts.

Delphion.com – patent search database

Innography.com – A startup with pricing better than Delphion.  Lets you search inventors, companies, etc. 

footnoted .org – Digs into the footnotes of financial filings

Allconferences.com – lets you know what conferences a competitor will attend as a sponsor or exhibitor.

Other

Web Site Monitoring Tools – A list of Web based and downloadable tools for monitoring Web sites for changes. 

Edgar-online.com – Company information, financial filings, and other company information

Twitter – Many competitor employees twitter important news, customer meetings, and other information that won’t show up in formal writings.  Said one CI professional, “I’ve been profoundly struck by the things I’ve discovered.” 

Tweetdeck, Digsby – let you view and manage your twitter streams.  Digsby also integrates with Linked-In.

Slideshare.net – Companies often post product or service pitch decks here.

Fedspending.org – Information about the business a competitor has done with the federal government.

http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm – makes “publish or perish” software that uses Google Scholar data to determine citation information.

Thefoundationcenter.org  – grant writing research

Quantcast.com – finding traffic and demographics for who’s going to certain web sites.  Only works for larger sites.

Software Tools

Traction software – tag articles and send information out daily to the right people in the organization.

June 9th – Wargaming Event – Noon to 4pm…

Posted by campsean - 16/04/09 at 11:04:07 pm

Oregon Chapter Meeting

Surprise!  How Business War Games Shock Strategists into Beating the Competition—an intensive half-day program where you participate in a genuine business war game!

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009      Jake’s Grill, Portland, OR     Noon – 4:00pm

Networking Event – 4:00pm to 6:00pm – Jake’s Grill

Program Description

What would you do if you were the GM CEO? Or Alan Mulally of Ford, Akio Toyoda of Toyota, Tom Purves of BMW, Robert Cosmei of Hyundai, or another industry leader? And not only what would you do, but how well would your strategies work?  Here’s your chance to find out. What’s more, here’s your chance to learn how to stress-test your strategies and anticipate your competitors with business war gaming. You might even have some fun while you’re at it. Not to mention the cool Top Strategist bragging rights, complete with official certificate and web-wide recognition, you and your team will secure if you win the war.

War games and simulations almost always lead to surprises. Why? Not because they have more decimal points or curvier demand curves. Rather, because they help us think better. They help us take competitors into account realistically, not optimistically.

They help us focus on cause and effect. They help us think things through and see the big picture. They help us learn to think strategically.

And while there are no sure things in life, business war games tilt the odds in your favor. That’s what happened for companies like British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, Weyerhaeuser, and a couple dozen more around the world, when they worked with Advanced Competitive Strategies. You’ll get a taste of what they discovered in this special, hands-on, half-day session facilitated by Mark Chussil, ACS’ Founder and CEO (www.whatifyourstrategy.com), a veteran of 100 business war games and a frequent writer and speaker about business war-gaming.

Speaker

Mark Chussil

A highly rated, thought-provoking, and entertaining speaker, Mark lectures and consults around the world about strategic thinking, advanced business war games, and computer simulation. Mark has worked with ACS clients around the world, including Astra Merck, AT&T Wireless Services, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), British Airways, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, Kodak, Methanex, Nortel, Novartis, Organon (Schering-Plough), Petronas, Shell, Sprint, Sprint PCS, USWEST (now QWEST), Weyerhaeuser, and others.  Mark earned his MBA from Harvard University and his BA from Yale University.

Location

Jake’s Grill

611 SW 10th Avenue

Portland, OR 97205

Phone: 503.220.1850

Directions

http://www.mccormickandschmicks.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=content.display&pageid=96&id=21

Registration Fees (Includes: Presentation, Full Breakfast & Networking)

SCIP Members – $35.00

Non-Members – $45.00

*Please Note* Registration will close via the web Monday, June 8, 2009 (EDT).  If you are not able to meet the deadline, you will be able to register on site.

To register, please click the link below:

http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=7156

Agenda

Breakfast and Program:  Noon to 4pm.

No Host Networking Event: 4pm to 6pm

Contact Information

Sean Campbell, Oregon Chapter Chair email, sean@cascadeinsights.com, 503.631.7552.

Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager, email, rreals@scip.org, 703.739.0696 x107.

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations not received in writing by Tuesday, June 2^nd, 2009, will not be refunded.  

April Event – When Time is Short: Best Practices for Gathering Intelligence via Web Based Tools

Posted by campsean - 27/02/09 at 08:02:32 pm

Our next face to face event is going to be on April 7th at Jake’s Grill at 8am.  As with previous events we’ll start with networking from 8:00am to about 8:20am and then move onto the event topic.  Details follow.

Registration link - http://www.scip.org/training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemNumber=6817

Sponsored by:  Traction Software- www.tractionsoftware.com

When Time is Short: Best Practices for Gathering Intelligence via Web Based Tools

The Internet provides a wealth of resources, well beyond Google, that competitive intelligence professionals use to gather information.  Join us for the April Oregon SCIP event, where panelists and attendees will share their best tools and techniques for gathering specific kinds of competitive information.

Learn how CI professionals use the Web to get details on the following:

• How have a competitor’s products or services evolved over time?

• Are they launching new strategic initiatives?

• Are they expanding into other geographies or industries?

• How are their products or services priced?

• Are they growing or shrinking in this economy?

• What tools to CI professionals use to organize and disseminate information throughout their organization?

The structure of this event is designed to allow attendees collaborate and network with each-other, as well as CI professional panelists, and share the best resources for acquiring competitive information.

Speakers

• Kathry Brost – Mentor Graphics
• Dennis Muscato – ATI Wah Chang
• Charlie Davidson – Attensa
• Sean Campbell – SCIP Oregon Chapter Chair and Principal of Cascade Insights

Moderator

• Roger Courville – 1080 Group

January Event – Upcoming Events – Committee Meetings

Posted by campsean - 05/02/09 at 09:02:35 pm

Thanks to all who attended the last event in January. It was a great success and we had a very solid crowd (25+).

Upcoming events include our next face to face event on April 7th, 2009 and upcoming committee meetings on February 17th and March 17th.

All committee meetings and events are at Jake’s Grill on 10th.

Feel free to attend committee meetings as they are open to all – regular committee member or not.

The Pricing Strategy Simulation

Posted by scottswigart - 02/02/09 at 05:02:53 pm

By Mark Chussil, Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc.

Participants at the January 27 SCIP Oregon meeting faced a challenge. Three, actually. What pricing strategy should they implement in a fictitious ailing industry, mature industry, and fast-growth industry? And who, among the strategists, would win?

We gave each participant information about the industries in which their businesses would compete, and we asked each of them to design pricing strategies for their businesses. They could choose from strategies such as match the market average, cut, tit for tat, do whatever the most-profitable did, and many more, and they could select different strategies at different points in time. All told, they could choose among 14,739 combinations, in each industry, to find the strategies just right for their businesses.

Continue reading The Pricing Strategy Simulation…

First Bridge Chat – Audio and Deck

Posted by campsean - 03/01/09 at 12:01:57 am

Recently we held our first “bridge chat” with Mark S. Corcoran – CFA. The topic of the chat was Uncovering CI in Financial Statements. 

Attached to this post are the slides from the presentation as well as an audio stream of the chat.

We’ll be looking forward to our second bridge chat occurring sometime in February. 

Slides

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…

Oregon Chapter Bridge Chat: Ask the Financial Analyst: Uncovering CI in Financial Statements

Posted by campsean - 25/11/08 at 08:11:05 pm

All,

As mentioned in our last (and very successful) face to face meeting on November 20^th, we will be initiating a series of “Bridge Chats” that will allow us to engage in open teleconference based discussions with individuals who have valuable and actionable information to pass along to the Oregon CI community. 

There is no cost to attend these bridge chats and the chats are open to both current SCIP members and non members.

These bridge chats will be in addition to the face to face events we already have planned.  Our next face to face event is scheduled for January 27^th at Jake’s Grill.

Bridge Chat Topic: Ask the Financial Analyst: Uncovering CI in Financial Statements, featuring Mark Corcoran, CFA.

Date and Time

Tuesday, December 16 at 04:00 PM PST

Audio Information

Direct Dial Number: 215-383-1005
Access Code: 356-288-056
Audio PIN: Not necessary

Mark’s Bio:

Mark S. Corcoran, CFA, is a vice president and senior research analyst for D.A. Davidson. Mr. Corcoran has extensive equity research and portfolio management experience, spanning fifteen years and several billion dollars in equity investment capital. He has interviewed in excess of 300 management teams and has published research on over 150 publicly-traded companies in the technology, health care, industrial, consumer, and financial industries.

Mr. Corcoran graduated from the University of Puget Sound with a degree in International Affairs, has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and serves on the Board of Directors for the Portland Society of financial analysts. He is also a guest lecturer at Portland State University’s School of Business Administration and is an adjunct graduate finance instructor.

Mr. Corcoran has been quoted extensively in the financial press, including CNBC, Investors Business Daily, Money Magazine, The Washington Post, Barron’s, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Street.com, Red Herring, Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones and Individual Investor.

Call Abstract:

The job of a financial analyst is to dig into the story behind the story…both in the numbers and words in financial statements, filings, and conference calls transcripts.  In this "Ask the Expert" tele-conference Mark Corcoran, CFA, will share tips every CI professional can use to uncover insights in the published information of public companies.  Bring your questions or email them ahead of time to sean@sciporegon.com.

In this teleconference you will learn:

- What different financial filings are for and what you can look for in each

- The most common places companies ‘hide’ bad news

- What to listen for in a quarterly analyst call

Closing Thoughts

I also want to say a special thanks to Roger Courville, a local SCIP member, who was instrumental in identifying Mark as being a great choice to lead this discussion.

Finally I hope you all have a wonderful and restful Thanksgiving with your friends and families.

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