William Faulkner wryly commented, “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” Unfortunately, he was often correct. Different truths can be divined from a single set of facts. Or as I have seen many times in my career business, truth can be divined from a single fact or set of facts. We believe facts are facts, that is, they are concrete, measurable, consistent, and confirmable. But remember the phrase, “Lying with Statistics” or hearing that the wording of questions on a survey slanted the answers? As a CI professional, you have to obtain agreement on the facts before you and your organization can even begin to derive the truth from them. As researchers, we always attempt to obtain confirmation from multiple sources for important data to insure its factual validity. We also check our data points from different sources for consistency. Only then can we analysis the facts for truths or conclusions about a competitive situation. Only when agreement is reached on the facts, can truth be established. And only with an agreed upon truth, can action be taken to improve your competitive standing in your marketplace.
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