Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You've got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn't going to work.

~ Prof. Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

I seem to learn something new every day.

And, as I've grown older I've found no matter what I'm studying I only truly master a subject when I can teach it to someone else. If you have children, you know what I mean; the intellectual curiosity that drives a toddler to ask "why" a dozen times to infinitesimally more granular descriptions of the mechanics of life is the same spirit that drives organizations to grow beyond their existing limits.

It can be said, in fact, the core competence for organizations of the future is the ability to learn, quickly and collectively, from their environment, from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. The delightful thing about competitive intelligence is that it also happens to be a profession specifically attuned to exploring the industry and market issues facing a company or product by leveraging the organization's most insatiably curious minds to answer questions they didn't know they had.

It is in that spirit that Aurora WDC is starting a new series of video podcasts on bite-sized, five-to-10-minute CI-related topics that are guaranteed to teach you something new.

The first of these is hosted by Derek Johnson, Aurora's director of research, on a topic you probably didn't know you needed to learn. We hope it will interest at least a few of you in the research collection side of the CI endeavor: "Tracking Private Aircraft" and why you might want to do just that as a way to monitor your competitors' executive excursions.

Now for the part when you ask: "how much are you charging?" How does "free" sound?

Even better, we're also uploading them all to YouTube so you can share them with friends and colleagues by posting them to your blog or website. We'll be ramping up more topics throughout the rest of the year so let us know what you think of this first effort. We'd also appreciate if you'd send topic ideas to us by replying to this email or commenting on the YouTube video online.

Hopefully, we can share a few of the lessons we've learned over the years to help you and your organization learn how to share Aurora's motto as well as our expertise: "See Clearly, Think Ahead, Break Through".

Best wishes,

Arik Johnson
Founder & CEO