Stockbrokers know which companies have how much working capital, can assess the power of a brand, and can evaluate a company's potential growth in the market. By learning to formulate an inquiry concisely and meaningfully, we have a better chance of building workable scenarios than by asking global questions and trying to paint a picture with too big a brush. Distrust your own biases, such as wishful thinking. The goal of environmental scanning should not be simply to support strategic decisions you've already made. Once they're in the stewpot, they can't be separated and evaluated on their own merits.
Labels mask a great deal of diversity, the author notes.
We're guessing what our competitors will do. We're guessing what a national government will do about a particular trade issue. We need to learn to evaluate our guesses, rate them in terms of the confidence we can place in them, and consider the level of uncertainty they introduce in our models of the world we're trying to cope with. Hence the effort manufacturers make to develop the next new thing before the old new thing fades from popularity. Scanning the corporate radar should be part of the management strategy, Albrecht believes.