Test your CI Age

An article on Fast Factory (whatever this is, maybe a grandson of Fast Company?) suggested several terms used in different eras that defined that period.

1942- Hyper

1943- Duh

1950- Beautiful people

1951- Nerd

1953- Hippie

1955- Cool

1956- Nitpicker

1961-Bratty

1962- Drop Dead (gorgeous)

Today, of course, Hyper and Bratty will be called ADHD and prescribed Adderall. “Beautiful people” and Drop Dead Gorgeous will be considered sexual harassment terms. Nerds will be labeled billionaires, Hippies will be loud quitters, cool mostly applies to being high, Nit-picker is a Karen, and only Duh remains.

Duh.

A quick test of how long you’ve been in my field

In competitive intelligence, my field, terms have also come and gone. Below is a very partial list. I challenge my readers to add to it. Since I haven’t gone to conferences for over a decade, and I don’t read articles/books on CI (not even mine), and I don’t post on CI groups or participate in CI forums and discussions or listen to podcasts (still waiting for a CI musical show), I am by definition a CI hermit. So, I have little chance to be connected with the current lingo. Let’s see if you are (put your 2-cent contribution in the comments section!)

@Luis Madureira, a true scholar, and a CIP-II among other titles (the title I give him is entrepreneur, the highest compliment one gets from me), identified dozens of different definitions and terms for CI that popped up over the years, for his Ph.D. thesis at Nova, a Portuguese university. (Side note: That’s why I left academia.) Instead, I focus on the few that I personally remember as someone who actually lived through the words that defined generations of CI. I absolutely expect my fossil remains to be discovered 60 million years from now clutching an iPad tablet with a carving saying, There is only one true CI. Historians will decipher the words and declare them the earliest evidence of the monotheistic concept of CI.

The evolution of CI terminology throughout the ages

3500 BC- Scouting (Old Testament)

1967- Environmental scanning (F. Aguilar)

1967- Organizational intelligence (H. Wilensky)

1980- Competitive analysis (M. Porter)

1985- Business intelligence (B. Gilad)

1985- Competitor intelligence (Leonard Fuld)

1986- Competitive intelligence (SCIP)

1988- Business intelligence system (B and T Gilad)

1999- CI platform software (Comintelli)

2000s- Marketing intelligence, strategic intelligence, market intelligence, sales intelligence, market and competitive intelligence (various conferences, various consultants)

2015- Competitive enablement (Klue?)

blah

blah

blah

-

2022- The Opposite of Noise (B. Gilad)

Let’s see who among my 3,800+ subscribers can add to this list. The winner will get an opportunity to buy my last book if they provide their email, bank account and credit card number as well as their social security number and date of birth (why wait until you are hacked? Be proactive!)

Alternative perspective: Call it whatever you want, as long as you are doing it right? Not necessarily. Jeff Deist’ terrific article in The Austrian, the Mises Institute’s publication, titled Evolution or Corruption? correctly argues that “Words are just a means to an end.” Deist’s criticism aims directly at political correctness- what George Orwell called “Meaningless Words” - by which the Left redefines, reshapes, and substitutes words that have no connection to the original concept, such as racism, equality (substituted with equity, a totally different meaning), and “social justice” among others. ?

On a much smaller scale, language corruption, apparently, hasn’t escaped my beloved CI. While CI has a precise meaning as competitive insight, calling everything under the sun competitive intelligence may sell products, software and services, but it is indeed, corrupted language...don’t let it corrupt your mind!

#competitiveintelligence #competitiveintelligencetraining