Information is what keeps a company ahead of others – once it leaks away to a
competitor, playing fields get leveled.
My mother-in-law still hasn't given me that recipe for home made fruit-bread
my husband loves – she's got the information that stretches her emotional
value to her son. If I were to ‘steal' it from her, she would lose one more
little hold on her only son. And if Proctor and Gamble were to get hold of Lakme's latest plans for increasing market share, it might give it a
decisive edge in their on-going marketing war.
If
information is so valuable, why do we treat it so casually? Two commuters on
Calcutta's busy metro got talking one Friday evening on the way home. Though
absolute strangers, one of them confided in the other that he worked for Dunlop and they were pulling out of West
Bengal, overnight and unannounced. The other man happened to work for MRF, a rival manufacturer and this
amazing bit of news gave them time to put together an emergency plan to move
into the vacuum. It was a major coup for them and netted crores of profits.
