In: Operations Management
You are a proposal manager for a government contractor working on a huge new program. You have an interview with an former employee of your main competitor who wants you to hire him. He happens to mention that when he left his former employer, he still had the entire text of their proposal for the same program on his laptop. If you have this information, it will give you a huge advantage in the competition. What do you do? And why?
Hiring the person and making use of the exact same text to create our proposal would be against the work ethics. So I would hire him and take the content from him to know and understand what our competitors are thinking about the project. This will give me an insight and also an opportunity to improve our strategy to tackle them in the market. The person should be talented enough to get a job and only then we will get the opportunity to see what he has to offer. So the first step would be to see if he is a suitable fit for the company. If he gets hired then I will put him in the same project and ask him to use the skills and resources he has to come up with a plan that can help the company performing better than the competitors. I would strictly inform him not use the same text to create our proposal. We can see the content and understand their strategy. If we use the same text then the competitor can question our work ethics and the company might get into trouble. So we have to play safe and at the same time make use of the resources as well to gain a competitive advantage.