It's Only War.
It’s Only War
The Truth About Corporate Espionage by Armand Sanchez
If you or your company have accumulated any amount of success, wealth or power, you are simultaneously respected and despised. Whether it’s been the consequence of simple hard work, bending the rules a bit, or by mere luck; someone is out to get as much as they can from your company’s knowledge of success. Every time you step onto the field of capitalism, you’re going to war; you must understand the lengths people will take to win.
I’m reminded of a book that a friend gracefully forced upon me (for which, I am eternally grateful) - The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money, & Power. The book presents a very detailed study of the inception and transformation of the oil industry. But, that’s not what really caught my attention. It was J. D. Rockefeller and his methods of doing business is what spiked my interest. A man known for his wealth, power, and complete dominance in the oil industry. There are a few things that I feel go unnoticed when people talk about his uprising, which I find most interesting; mainly his methods for completely disrupting the way of business for his competitors.
For J. D. Rockefeller, his methods of ensuring his company’s success didn’t have any limits, or rather, foreseeable limits. He gained market control and soon was deemed the monopoly. I contribute this dominance mainly to his clandestine network of corporate spies, whose objectives were to obtain details pertaining to costs, operations, and pending contracts of their competitors. They would give Rockefeller actionable intelligence to undermine them on a multitude of fronts. This network involved everything from low level employees of competitors to intermediary companies that had already been bought off or controlled by Rockefeller. He always had usable information, which in turn, gave him absolute control.
Now, the spans of corporate espionage entail more than simply controlling regional markets like in the oil boom days. Espionage currently manifests as: methods of operations (trade secrets), intellectual property (China comes to mind), military contractor intelligence (Iran & China) and sensitive market data. Companies and even nations invest millions in placing personnel in other countries; paying for their education, housing, and expenses, in order to get them hired into a competitor’s company. These individuals then advance themselves into executive positions or any other ideal role to obtain sensitive company data. They might work for you. You might give them a nice paycheck, but their loyalty is to your competitor.
It’s a dark, cutthroat, brutal word we live in today.
Are you ready for war?
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