The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence the Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence by Leonard Fuld

Author:Leonard Fuld [Fuld Leonard M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307545558
Goodreads: 8139484
Publisher: Crown Business
Published: 2010-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

SHOCK AND SHAPE

Sometimes there is no better way to sense reality than to see a news report. At one of the first meetings with the committee of messengers, Dale crafted a fictional newspaper headline and flashed it before the group.

VISA GOES UNDER

The headline’s purpose was to shock the committee into realizing the responsibility each member had. The mind game worked. The future somehow felt real, perhaps for the first time since Dale began his initiative.

Fehringer kept pushing them forward, meeting after meeting, with the goal of developing a road map of Visa’s possible futures. One of those futures could be bleak, he warned, if management either ignored the warning signals or failed to prepare a strategy to reduce potential damage.

During the committee’s first meeting, Julie Boland, an analyst on Dale’s staff, reviewed the scores of potential new entrants into the emerging payment solutions market and concluded that NetYouPay was the entity that the group must focus on first.

At least they now had a target, and it wasn’t Microsoft.

NetYouPay was a true threat, Boland concluded. It was well financed, was beginning to negotiate with banks to help it sign up merchants, and offered merchants lower transaction fees than did Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.

That is today. Now what about the future for NetYouPay? Once the target was decided, Fehringer’s next goal was to have the committee begin to examine the major events that were expected to change the credit card industry. These major industry-shaping events are called drivers.

Drivers are common parlance in the world of scenario building. Drivers are the rules by which you design your road map that contains the various scenarios. They are the key ingredients for all future scenarios. Drivers can emanate from technology, government regulation, shifts in the economy, or shifts in competitive power, as would occur through mergers or increased buying power of a particular customer, such as a Wal-Mart.

In thinking about the drivers, the committee of messengers were always thinking about the three groups that made up Visa’s universe: the merchants (or acceptors, as they are called in Visa-speak); the financial institutions, such as the banks, that distribute the Visa-branded cards; and the consumers, both individual and corporate. This was Visa’s world and any drivers it considered would emanate from this world.

Thus, the drivers that Dale and his team drafted included the following imperatives:

> SUCCESSFULLY SIGN UP MARQUEE ONLINE MERCHANTS. Any would-be contender in the online credit card industry would need at least one to three premier merchants, such as Amazon or eBay, in order to succeed.

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