Psyching Out the Competition

Want to know more about the competition? Have a corporate spy investigate their CEO.

By PT Staff, published on July 01, 1998 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

Know the competition is basic business wisdom. Now professional sleuths will get the goods for you, compiling a psychological profile of your rival's CEO.

These "competitive intelligence agents" may try to identify their subjects' styles of leadership, management, and negotiation. They may be after an understanding of relationships in the company's inner circle: who's in, who's out. Or they may simply find out what an executive has done before.

"It's a fundamental law of business intelligence that people tend to do the things that have worked for them in the past and avoid the things that have failed," says Tim Ogilvie, vice president of the New York intelligence firm Kaiser Associates.

In their search for clues about their quarry, these psychological spies may pore over Who's Who, company bios, and college yearbooks, or call subordinates, superiors, and coworkers for the scoop."You may only get one or two tidbits from each person, but when you put it all together, you get a pretty good picture," says Ogilvie.

Some agents attempt a more systematic approach. Cheryl Pourier, an analyst at Whitestone Group consultants, relies on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality test used by psychologists. Since she can't administer the test directly, "we fudge it a little bit," she says. "By looking at the signals the person gives in the marketplace, we infer the answers that he might give on the test. Then we deduce from that whether he's extroverted or introverted, neurotic or easygoing."

Though psychologists might frown on this use of the test, Pourier finds it useful in indicating the moves an executive is likely to make. But "you can never predict what people will do the future," she says. "All you can do is narrow down the possibilities."