The results are in!

My cry for help with the title of my new upcoming book received 77 comments in just one day. I am sincerely moved by the overwhelming response.

I want to share my insights and declare the winners. But first, let me be me: While I am grateful for the engagement, I didn’t fall madly in love with any title suggestions.

You didn’t expect me to serve empty platitudes, did you?

Ironically, the reason I didn’t get smitten is that the suggestions were actually good. Very good at times. Excellent in drilling down the essence of the book for competitive intelligence practitioners. They were business-like, corporate, conventionally targeted. If I decided to go with a conventional publisher, that would have been the approach. Publishers today want a targeted, clearly defined audience.

No one can accuse me of being remotely business conventional or corporate.

The book is not written for CI professionals but for all managers facing the overwhelming task of competing in a contested market where their company is not an only child, and their big bosses don’t listen. The book hopes to awaken executives to the true value of their market-facing managers and professionals’ competitive perspectives (my CI people included). So a conventional title with an explicit target leaves me cold. There is no enigma in it, no pizzazz, no curiosity of: What the f%$#@k is this about?

Being obvious might be good for marketing, but thankfully, I don’t care how many copies are sold.

Third choice the worst

I did a little behavioral economic manipulation in my post: I posed a lousy title (competitive intelligence 2.0) and two other preferred titles. It’s an old trick I teach in the How to use bias to your advantage course (CIP- III level). People tend to reject a clearly inferior choice, making them more likely to gravitate towards the architect’s choice.

Many rejected the CI 2.0, but didn’t go for the other two in large numbers. Instead, this little psychological experiment resulted in the following curious phenomenon: No one clicked on other people’s choices. Instead, I got 82 suggestions from 77 people. Curious.

I was hoping The Opposite of Noise will garner more votes. It is intriguing (to me) precisely because many people think the opposite of noise is silence which is linear, conventional thinking. ?For me, true CI is anything but linear reporting and busy, conventional work. I know many CI people have to do it, and it trumps Big Picture thinking, but in the long run, I have a track record of teaching them Big Picture thinking that gets them noticed (and promoted.)

Two people liked The Opposite of Noise, so I declare @Leon Markham and @Antonella Martini the winners, which of course, confirms the worst you think of me because it seems I was just looking for confirmation of my prior preference.

Welcome to the real world.

In my “defense,” Antonella says it the best: “the other titles are less originals and taken for granted.” I totally agree: Just like many CI people are taken for granted.

No more?

Now all I have to decide is on the subtitle, which is important because of SEO indexing. And I am thinking, F#$@%k SEO. I’ll leave it just The Opposite of Noise.

PS. Antonella, I expect your school to buy a bunch of copies for every class from now on, except Social Responsibility (if it has one of those). And Leon, I nominate you as my VP of Market Strategy. You’ve done a great job at Salesforce with that. Let’s see you do the same for ACI ??

PS 1 Thank you, people. I want to make sure you know I do NOT expect you to buy the book. This wasn’t that type of cheap engagement. I love that you showed up for me in droves. You are my most important asset…oh, never mind.. ??

PS 2 Next week, I’ll be back with my acerbic, anti woke, pro progress column. In the meantime, I am starting a comic take on CI (no politics) on Twitter, @InfoAcademyci. I need an outlet for my creativity.