#Pizza dunno code#

The consultant hired one of us, Marc Barry, founder of the corporate intelligence firm C3I Analytics of New York, who had gotten the job done for the consultant half a dozen times in the past.īarry, an Irish, streetwise redhead in his early 30's, had made a name for himself as an expert 'humint' (human intelligence) man. With Schwan's eagerly awaiting the information, Kite out there and let him do whatever needed doing to get the information, but if he got caught, the consultant could claim he had no idea what his subcontractor was up to. The consultant decided to subcontract the work to a 'kite' or 'go-to guy,' who, in addition to being able to get the information the job required, would provide the consultant with plausible deniability. The information Schwan's wanted, isn't, and this loophole allowed the consultant, and the 7,000 other members of SCIP, to earn a living.

#Pizza dunno code#

There is a trade secret,' says Mark Halligan, a Chicago lawyer and author of 'Trade Secrets Case Digest.' The formula for Coca-Cola and the source code for Microsoft Windows are trade secrets. But 'to prove trade secrecy theft, you first have to prove The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was passed to deal with foreign agents stealing trade secrets from American companies. This doesn't mean that breaking SCIP rules is against the law. The purpose of SCIP's spin control is to make industrial spying more palatable 'from publicly available' or 'open source' materials like published documents, public filings, patents and annual reports. SCIP stresses the 'ethical' acquisition of information Governing body, the consultant knew he was supposed to abide by rules that prohibit misrepresentation or deception when interviewing a target on behalf of a client. As a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, or SCIP, the C.I. Schwan's needed the information fast, but the consultant knew it would be nearly impossible for him to get it without resorting to subterfuge. Penenberg and Marc Barry, to be published by Perseus Publishing later this month. This article is adapted from 'Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America,'īy Adam L. Marc Barry is founder of C3I Analytics, a corporate intelligence company in New York. Types and sizes of pizzas were being produced there and, most important, how many pies were coming off the assembly line each day.Īdam L. Specifically, Schwan's needed to know the type of equipment the plant housed, the number of production lines, what To learn the production capacity of a plant it knew Kraft had constructed somewhere in Sussex, Wis. Schwan's was to have any chance against its hulking rival, however, it would have to know how fast Kraft planned to roll out DiGiorno nationwide, so that it could create a counterstrategy. Schwan's, which marketed store-bought pizza under the brand name Tony's, already knew the secret behind DiGiorno: pumping yeast into the raw crust, which Schwan's was also working on with its rising-crust pizza offering, Freschetta. It was the winter of 1997,Īnd up to then it was often hard to taste the difference between a frozen pizza and the cardboard box it came in. It already sold pizza under the brands Tombstone and Jack's and had perfected a new type of 'rising crust' pizza it had been test-marketing under the name DiGiorno. The target was Kraft, the largest packaged-food company Schwan's wanted to find out about a new product that promised to revolutionize frozen pizza. Three years ago, Schwan's Sales Enterprises, a food companyīased in Marshall, Minn., hired a consultant who runs his own firm. units, they often turn to independent consultants, most of whom received their training from the Department of Defense, the C.I.A. (Valuable, yes, but not sexy.) And instead of fancy gizmos like exploding pens and secret decoder rings, often all they need to get the For one, they are hired to find out prosaic things like a company's Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, boasts a 25-member competitive intelligence arm.Īlthough the word 'espionage' conjures images of shady characters in overcoats who are hired to steal nuclear secrets, today's corporate spies are decidedly less glamorous. Motorola hired away a star from the Central Intelligence Agency to create its corporate intelligenceĭivision. Coca-Cola, 3M,ĭow Chemical, General Electric and Intel all maintain a staff dedicated to uncovering what business rivals are up to. Lmost every Fortune 500 company these days has a 'competitive intelligence' (or C.I.) unit or farms out its spy activities. PENENBERG AND MARC BARRYĭrawing by Peter Kuper / ©2000 E.C. To do that, the company would have to be very sneaky. In order to compete, it needed to find out certain things about its rival. Schwan's knew that Kraft was going to roll out a new kind of frozen pizza.