reconverge-g2

After a long weekend by a lake in southern Illinois, it’s time to get back to blogging.  Especially to download on the excellent insights and fellowship enjoyed at Reconverge:G2 last week in Indianapolis.

First, big thanks to Gail King at Eli Lilly for hosting and to Aurora WDC for running the show.  Also, next time you find yourself in Indianapolis, try the Alexander Hotel.  Very stylish and modern, very comfortable, and located close to all the hip joints in downtown Indy.

Over the coming days, I’ll post more specifics, especially from the Thursday program that we premiered in the Reconverge Blog series last week.  But here are a couple of great top lines from Wednesday’s keynote, Peter Johnson, VP of Strategic Planning at Eli Lilly.

These come from Peter’s 20 years of trying to manage and make use of Competitive Intelligence in strategic planning at the senior executive level.  What he said resonates strongly with my experience over the years sitting on the other side of the table:

  • If you don’t do good CI on your own organization, you’re toast!  Specifically, how well do CI folks understand how decisions get made or how the internal culture operates?  If CI folks can’t place their work product effectively into their organization’s true decision making flow and match its cultural norms, then CI will make only token impact.
  • If CI doesn’t understand the company’s strategy implicitly, it can’t influence it!  Seems simple enough but if CI isn’t on the inside of the discussion, doesn’t understand the assumptions, the aspirations, and the history behind the organization’s strategy, then it might as well be speaking a foreign language when it tries to report insights.