Competitor Intelligence Quotes

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Talent silences your competition; genius deafens them.

Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem, to decipher a riddle, to master a set of facts. Judgment is the ability to orbit a problem or a set of facts and see it as it might be seen through other eyes, by observers with different biases, motives, and backgrounds. It is also the ability to take a set of facts and move it in place and time—perhaps to a hearing room or a courtroom, months or years in the future—or to the newsroom of a major publication or the boardroom of a competitor. Intelligence is the ability to collect and report what the documents and witnesses say; judgment is the ability to say what those same facts mean and what effect they will have on other audiences.

It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you just need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them!

Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that teach competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Comtesse Molé did not justify the extraordinary reputation for intelligence that she had acquired, which made one think of those mediocre actors or novelists who, at certain periods, are hailed as men of genius, either because of the mediocrity of their competitors, among whom there is no artist capable of revealing what is meant by true talent, or because of the mediocrity of the public, which, did there exist an extraordinary individuality, would be incapable of understanding it.

What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. Sometimes, it's because you're poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.... But once you learn that you've got to work harder than everybody else, it becomes a way of life as you move out of the alley and on your way. In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances and if you do your homework many of them pay off. It is then that you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage because your competitors can't risk what they have already. It's a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can't stop playing the game the way you've always played it because it is a part of you and you need it as much as you can do an arm or a leg. So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.

Bostrom and many others also believe that the most likely scenario is that the very first computer to reach ASI will immediately see a strategic benefit to being the world’s only ASI system. And in the case of a fast takeoff, if it achieved ASI even just a few days before second place, it would be far enough ahead in intelligence to effectively and permanently suppress all competitors. Bostrom calls this a decisive strategic advantage, which would allow the world’s first ASI to become what’s called a singleton—an ASI that can rule the world at its whim forever, whether its whim is to lead us to immortality, wipe us from existence, or turn the universe into endless paperclips.

Good leaders constantly worry about their limited ability to see. To rise above those limitations, good leaders exercise judgment, which is a different thing from intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem, to decipher a riddle, to master a set of facts. Judgment is the ability to orbit a problem or a set of facts and see it as it might be seen through other eyes, by observers with different biases, motives, and backgrounds. It is also the ability to take a set of facts and move it in place and time—perhaps to a hearing room or a courtroom, months or years in the future—or to the newsroom of a major publication or the boardroom of a competitor. Intelligence is the ability to collect and report what the documents and witnesses say; judgment is the ability to say what those same facts mean and what effect they will have on other audiences.

Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again. Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to. And to anyone who questioned the morality, he replied that 'The Star-Spangled Banner' was the greatest piece of music ever composed. The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.

Steps in the IPB Process  First, define the battlefield environment. Identify characteristics of the battlefield that influence both friendly and competitor operations. Establish the limits of the battlefield and identify elements that are unknown but should be known.  Second, describe the battlefield’s effects on operations. This step always includes an examination of terrain and weather but may also include the characteristics of geography and infrastructure and their effects on friendly and threat operations, as well as such factors as politics, civilian press, local population, and demographics.  The third step is to evaluate the competitor. If the competitor is known, determine how it normally organizes for combat and conducts operations under similar circumstances. This information can be drawn from historical databases and well-developed threat models. With new or less well-known competitors, intelligence databases and threat courses of action may have to be developed simultaneously.  Finally, determine the competitor’s possible courses of action. The main question to be answered here is: Given what the competitor normally prefers to do and the effects of the specific environment in which it is operating, what are its likely objectives and courses of action?

Perhaps the gravest charge was that America conflated commercial espionage with statecraft. That would be shocking if true. It would be illegal under American law. It would confer unfair advantages on the lucky US companies that received intelligence titbits from the government, and disadvantage their competitors. It would discredit America's reputation for fair dealing in the eyes of the rest of the world.

As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.

More desirable women have more bargaining power on the mating market, and they can elevate their standards. They want higher levels of resources, education, and intelligence; higher social status; good parenting skills; and raft of other traits. American men with resources are more likely to marry physically attractive women. Most men can obtain a much more desirable mate if they are willing to commit to a long-term relationship because women typically desire lasting commitment, and highly desirable women are in the best position to get what they want. Men are preoccupied with a woman's youth. Men want wives who are pretty, attractive, beautiful, gorgeous, comely, lovely, ravishing, and glamorous. Men seek attractive women as mates not simply for their reproductive value but also as signals of status to same sex competitors and to other potential mates. Although most men place a premium on beauty, it is clear that not all men success in satisfying their desires. Men who lack the status and resources that women want, for example, generally have the most difficult time attracting good looking young women and must settle for less than their ideal. Indeed, a man's occupational status seems to be the best predictor of the attractiveness of the woman he marries. Men who are in a position to get what they want often partners up with a young, attractive woman. As a man's income goes up, he seeks younger partners.

As you study the sources of growth and profit, stay on the lookout for positives as well as negatives. Among the good signs: The company has a wide “moat,” or competitive advantage. Like castles, some companies can easily be stormed by marauding competitors, while others are almost impregnable. Several forces can widen a company’s moat: a strong brand identity (think of Harley Davidson, whose buyers tattoo the company’s logo onto their bodies); a monopoly or near-monopoly on the market; economies of scale, or the ability to supply huge amounts of goods or services cheaply (consider Gillette, which churns out razor blades by the billion); a unique intangible asset (think of Coca-Cola, whose secret formula for flavored syrup has no real physical value but maintains a priceless hold on consumers); a resistance to substitution (most businesses have no alternative to electricity, so utility companies are unlikely to be supplanted any time soon).

Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are.

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

Day One” at Amazon is code for inventing like a startup, with little regard for legacy. It’s an acknowledgment that competitors today can create new products at record speeds—thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and cloud computing especially—so you might as well build for the future, even at the present’s expense.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with all these large manufacturing companies, it’s that this shift can truly drive growth. What happened to the technology sector is going to happen to the manufacturing sector—I’m sure of it. Why? Because IoT allows you to rediscover your customers. It lets you learn what they really want. In fact, I would argue that the only true competitive advantage is your relationship with and knowledge of your customers. Think about it—what’s the first thing your competitor does when you put out a new product? It buys that product on the open market and sends it to the R&D lab, which then proceeds to dismantle it, benchmark it, and reverse-engineer it in a thousand different ways. Your competitors can’t do that with the collective intelligence of your customer base. That’s something that you, and only you, can own. It’s an incredibly powerful advantage.

In medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. Asking the right questions will help you discover a person’s needs and concerns so that you can respond intelligently and appropriately. Yet salespeople, consultants, or managers often try to push their solutions on you before they even know what your needs are. This is a fast way to alienate people and push you toward their competitor, isn’t it?

For Facebook, the acquisition was crucial. While people were escaping the watchful eye of their governments, they were unwittingly giving Facebook competitive intelligence. Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it. They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8

Know who is your competitor and who is your mentor. Most people fail because they get confused about who is who and they end up getting nowhere.

Neural networks, consisting of very large numbers of densely interconnected simple processing nodes (resembling the human brain), are used in machine learning, a process by which a computer learns a task by analyzing training examples. But the progress has been complicated and beset by numerous and sometimes deadly failures. Neural networks are not only brittle (good at specific tasks but deeply deficient in general intelligence, and hence easily overconfident or underconfident in their “judgment”) but biased (realities may be far more complex than the training algorithms), prone to catastrophic forgetting, poor in quantifying uncertainty, lacking common sense, and, perhaps most surprising, not so good at solving math problems, even those routinely mastered by high school competitors.

When it comes to developing and maintaining a competitive advantage for your business, there is no question in my mind that you’re going to need to incorporate both data science and business intelligence together in order to survive the future hyper-competitive environment.  If you are not doing so, I can guarantee that your competitors will be doing it.

Think of each employee as an individual scout picking up data from the outside world—from articles, books, and classes, but most important, from other friends inside and outside the industry. Each employee can receive and decipher intelligence from the outside world that helps the company adapt. For example, what’s a competitor doing? What are key tech trends? It’s the manager’s job to recognize and encourage the power of each of these scouts. A more networked workforce generates more valuable intelligence, and when your employees share what they learn from their networks back into your company, they help solve its key business challenges

Most human cultures have been overtly polygynous. In hunter-gatherer cultures the men who are the most charming, the most respected, the most intelligent, and the best hunters tend to attract more than their fair share of female sexual attention. They may have two or three times as many offspring as their less attractive competitors. In pastoral cultures the men who have the largest herds of animals attract the most women. In agricultural societies the men who have the most land, wealth, and military power attract the most women. Before the middle ages, in urban civilizations with high population densities, the men at the top of the hierarchy almost always had harems of hundreds of women producing hundreds of babies.

To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.

Keynes thought that professional money managers were playing an intricate guessing game. He likened picking the best stocks to a common competition in the male-dominated London financial scene in the 1930s: picking out the prettiest faces from a set of photographs: Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole: so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees.

At the Puerto Rico beneficial-AI conference mentioned in the first chapter, Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road. He also argued that government regulation can sometimes nurture rather than stifle progress: for example, if government safety standards for self-driving cars can help reduce the number of self-driving-car accidents, then a public backlash is less likely and adoption of the new technology can be accelerated. The most safety-conscious AI companies might therefore favor regulation that forces less scrupulous competitors to match their high safety standards.