The Art of Intelligence

Think

Intelligence, is at its core, the analysis of information. It is the search in information for competitive insight or predictive meaning. This is brought to light by applying analytical techniques. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that intelligence is also a interdisciplinary field. If you are in the business intelligence field for example reading up on other fields such as science, or philosophy, or politics, or sports can provide numerous examples for improving and applying intelligence in the business field. Peter Schwartz in his book, The Art of the Long View, makes a point of stating that if you want to know what the next trend will be then you will need to expand your reading list.

Thus, I would like to use an example from the sports field and apply its use for understanding the current Wall Street crisis. Harvard professor Rossabeth Moss Kantor in her book Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End studied sports teams to see how confidence produced winning streaks and the lack of it produced losing teams. One of the characteristics of a winning team is how much more willing they are to share information and help each one another out win games. The information is free flowing. On losing teams as things go from bad to worse information becomes scarce. As blame become a focal point mistrust begins to display itself.

Now take the current crisis on Wall Street over the last 15 years. If you put yourself back in the Dot-Com era of the 1995-2000 period you will remember things on Wall Street were good. Real good. If you were a start up technology company you could easily get funding. Conversation at parties was about stocks and people were happy to share their winning picks. Confidence was high.Now fast forward to today. There have been virtually few IPO’s in the past several weeks. Information has become scarce, not because you can’t find it on the internet or CNBC, but because true insight is now being clouded in personal self interest. Commentators and finance professionals report how they are approached by countless people in the street asking “What do I do??? Confidence is now low. This means, like losing sports teams, blame is common and mistrust is prevalent. While finance professionals come on the air to plug the “ride it out or just “hang in there” investors continue to sell. Now who is right? The professionals? Maybe. Yet, if you look at your portfolio become wiped out you maybe asking yourself if you have been duped. This is all points to a common them in intelligence which is beware deception. You have to realize a rising tide may lift all boats, but in a sinking ship the elbows appear for the lifeboats. It is something similar to what John Najarian would call the “Lifeboat Ethic.”

So the question then becomes how do you protect yourself? One of the ways you do this is by relying on your own unique knowledge. Technologist and Forecaster Paul Saffo makes this argument in the Long Now presentation “Embracing Uncertainty” as did economist Friedrich Hayek whose following quote appeared in the book Crowdsourcing.” Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possess by all, all each therefore is ignorant of most of the facts on which the working society rests.” In other words, you have knowledge no one else has and vice versa. Your own insight is your true competitive advantage. Why is competitive advantage important? It is important because it is your lifeline in what is a now a competitive environment. It is as simple as that.

Take your own council.