Assignment #1 in Strategic Management

Exercise #1C
The Ethics of Spying on Competitors
Purpose
This exercise gives you an opportunity to discuss in class ethical and issues related to methods being used by many companies to spy on competing firms. Gathering and using information about competitors is an area of strategic management that Japanese firms do more proficiently than American firms.
Instructions
On a separate sheet of paper, number 1 to 18. For the eighteen spying activities listed as follows, indicate whether or not you believe the activity is ethical or unethical and legal or illegal. Place either an E for ethical or U for unethical, and either an L for legal or an I for illegal for each activity. Compare your answers to those of your classmates and discuss any differences.
1. Buying competitor’s garbage.
2. Dissecting competitor’s products.
3. Taking competitor’s plant tours anonymously.
4. Counting tractor-trailer trucks leaving competitors loading bays.
5. Studying aerial photographs of competitor’s facilities.
6. Analyzing competitors labor contracts.
7. Analyzing competitors help wanted ads.
8. Quizzing customers and buyers about the sales of competitor’s products.
9. Infiltrating customers and competitor’s business operations.
10. Quizzing suppliers about competitor’s level of manufacturing.
11. Using customers to buy out phony bids.
12. Encouraging key customers to reveal competitive information.
13. Quizzing competitor’s former employees.
14. Interviewing consultants who may have worked with competitors.
15. Hiring key managers away from competitors.
16. Conducting phony job interviews to get competitor’s employees to reveal information.
17. Sending engineers to trade meetings to quiz competitor’s technical employees.
18. Quizzing potential employees who worked for or with competitors’.