The power of bias
And, apropos of the 5553 class (Competitive Intelligence), there was an excellent question about bias there the other day, because the week’s project involved the use of Edgar Schein’s approach to corporate cultural analysis in analyzing our target firms. The question was, “In doing this, should we worry about bias?” (Thanks, Wyatt!) My response was:
“Since the goal here is to ‘achieve’ bias (by trying to think ourselves into seeing how our target firm perceives the world), ‘use’ bias (by scouting out a variety of sources representing the views of stakeholders involved in some way with our target firm), and ‘transcend’ bias (by ending up with a realistic competitive strategy for the firm), I would say that yes, we should worry about bias, but make it work for us.”
I’ve been trying to build a few bridges during curriculum committee meetings for this type of “relevance work” as an addition to our more traditional “reference work” (for business research especially), but, considering the paragraph above, perhaps it is a bridge too far.
