How Healthy is Your Organization?

What's Narrative Intelligence? Why does Narrative Intelligence matter for my business? I get asked these questions all the time. 

Narrative Intelligence is the study of how narratives start, grow, spread, and are manipulated to achieve economic, social, and political goals.

As a recovering CPA, I continue to see life and business through the lens of assets and liabilities. I suppose it is in my DNA.  Over the last 30 years, my career path has run the gamut from public accountant to founding and running an AI-driven Narrative Intelligence software company, and I've seen almost everything and have learned much about what makes a successful business. I truly believe that in order to understand and determine the overall health and value of an organization, there are three critical areas of focus:  

1.  Financial Health:  It's a simple principle that has been true since the dawn of time.  No organization can sustain itself without capital and with month-over-month losses.  There is no way this can work.

2. Cybersecurity:  Starting in the mid-1980s with the advent of the intranet and application software, the cybersecurity industry began. It has grown tremendously thanks to the internet of things. Cybersecurity is now a priority for all organizations (remember SolarWinds). It is also very costly. 

3. Narrative Intelligence:  This intelligence category rapidly grew to importance as chatrooms evolved into social media.  Before 2007 all a company had to worry about was how to handle a PR crisis such as having a bad profile on 60 Minutes. It could get picked up by another news outlet or become fodder conversations at the water cooler.  But today, online narratives are amplified every second of the day by both bad people who have an insidious endgame and good people who don't necessarily know what they are doing.  Such coordinated and/or coincidental amplification of narratives such as financial disinformation or a smear campaign can destroy a company in a matter of hours.

In 1991 as a young auditor/ business consultant at Arthur Anderson, financial health was our primary focus in determining the value of an organization. Cybersecurity was just becoming something an organization had to consider. Times have changed and so has the internet. Social media reigns supreme and one little spark can rage into a fire that's hard to contain. That means that, more than ever, Narrative Intelligence is mission-critical for any organization.  Just like with a cyber attack, a bad narrative being amplified is a huge liability that can destroy a company faster than you can say "fake news".

With the exponential explosion of negative narratives, it has never been more critical to understand and act upon the narratives that could affect your reputation or your bottom line. We built Kudzu Narrative Intelligence™️ to provide real-time analytics of online narratives to help organizations understand what is being said, who is saying it, and how it impacts their organization.  Kudzu allows organizations to track a narrative's path across the media landscape, from Twitter to Reddit to major media outlets and beyond, enabling them to analyze the intensity, amplification, recency, and intent of a narrative. Organizations have to understand the narratives that affect them right now and could alter their future. 

You can't control a threat if you're not aware of it. Let's have a conversation about how narrative intelligence is a game-changer in improving your company's overall health and value. Set up a demo here.