| Enforcing Security |
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Houdini, the greatest magician of them all, swore there was not a jail from which he could not escape. And he proved himself right many times. In his day, the concept of industrial espionage hadn't been developed, but today it's a fact of life. And though the likelihood of one of your competitors hiring someone to infiltrate your marketing team is not high, the likelihood of an amateur spy offering to sell your competitor information (a printout of every fax your proposal team has received and sent over the last two weeks) is great. Today, it's not the professional magicians you have to worry about, it's the amateurs. If you think espionage and spying are unlikely, just talk to someone who has had the experience of losing a critical competition and then looking at the winner's proposal and realizing they could have only produced it with information from within your organization.
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A Too True Story
If only this story weren't true, I'd feel a lot better, but I'm not making this up. I came into my office one day to find a man who had talked his way past our receptionist offering me a "unique business proposition." For $100 a month, he said, he would tape record all mobile phone conversations within a 30-mile radius of our office. I could have copies of any conversations in which one or more of 20 words of my choosing were used. Client names, project names, competitors, our own names, whatever - he was simply anxious to "provide a service." I wondered, realistically, what are the odds my competitors declined his offer? (And just in case you're wondering, what he was offering to do was perfectly legal.) The cost for the equipment needed to eavesdrop on conversations in offices has fallen to less than $500.00. Anyone with a clear "line-of-sight" to my office window can record all conversations taking place in that room, from a distance of up to 2 miles!
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Another Sad Story
One night one of my clients was shocked to find two engineers from a competing firm riffling around in the dumpster behind their office. They were reading all of the pages they found there, looking for anything that might help them in an upcoming procurement. The client called the police, but when the police came they told my client that "dumpster diving" is perfectly legal. And the engineers told the police that if their firm didn't win the next contract, they might be laid off, so they were taking steps to see if they could help. |
Ricci Legacy
The Ricci family has been consulting and supporting success for hundreds of years.