I became much more conscious of this while working with Gigabyte. At the time, we were operating successfully inside the European technology distribution market, but much of what we knew about product direction, supply and competitive movement arrived through familiar local channels. Those channels were useful for understanding what was happening around us, yet they rarely explained what was beginning to happen before everybody else could see it. A conversation with someone from a competing organisation unexpectedly opened a door towards Taiwan and much closer contact with the companies and people sitting nearer to the source of those decisions.
What changed was not simply the quantity of information available. The timing, context and quality of the information were different because conversations were taking place closer to where products, priorities and market moves originated. Instead of interpreting a change after it appeared in European pricing, availability or competitive behaviour, it became possible to understand some of the forces creating that change. That altered the commercial value of market intelligence because information could begin influencing decisions before it became common knowledge.
Most organisations underestimate how much strategy is shaped by the route through which information reaches them. A sales organisation naturally sees the market through current customer conversations, while Marketing often sees it through campaign response, research and competitor activity. Product teams may have another view through suppliers, technical partners or roadmap discussions. None of those perspectives is inherently wrong, but each captures a different point in the chain through which market change travels.
Problems arise when the organisation mistakes one of those perspectives for the whole market. Customer feedback is particularly powerful because it feels concrete, yet customers usually describe needs within the reality they currently know. Sales data is equally persuasive because it shows where money is moving today, but it says much less about decisions that may reshape the category tomorrow. Competitive analysis can identify what others have launched, although by definition the competitor has already acted by the time that information becomes visible.
A business relying predominantly on those signals can still make competent decisions, but it increasingly does so from a reactive position. Strategy becomes a sequence of responses to new products, price moves, customer requests or competitors entering the market. The organisation may become very good at reacting quickly while never asking why somebody else repeatedly seems to move first. The issue may not be speed of execution at all. It may be that the business enters the information chain too late.
Proximity to the source does not mean that every organisation needs direct access to manufacturers in Taiwan or executives sitting at the centre of an industry. The relevant source depends on where value is actually being shaped. For an industrial company, it may sit with engineers writing specifications years before a procurement process begins. In software, it might be a platform ecosystem or technology partner influencing future architecture decisions. In another sector, regulatory developments, capital allocation or changes in the distribution model may shape commercial opportunity long before those changes appear in current customer demand.
This creates an interesting problem for companies that are already successful. Strong customer relationships can reinforce the belief that the organisation is close to the market because customers are constantly sharing information. The company may indeed be very close to the buying decision while remaining surprisingly distant from the forces determining what customers will have available to buy, what they will eventually prioritise or which competitors will become credible. Commercial proximity and strategic proximity are not necessarily the same thing.
Organisational structure can widen that distance further. As companies grow, senior decision-makers often become more dependent on information that has already been summarised, filtered and interpreted by several layers of the business. A local observation becomes a regional update, which becomes a management report, which eventually becomes an input to a strategic discussion. Every layer can improve the information by adding context, but every layer can also remove weak signals that do not yet look important enough to survive the reporting process.
The irony is that management can receive more data while becoming less connected to the market's earliest signals. Dashboards become richer, forecasts become more sophisticated and competitor tracking becomes more systematic, yet most of the information describes things that have already happened. Data improves the precision with which the organisation understands the present without necessarily improving its ability to see what may be changing underneath it.
Direct market contact plays a different role because it exposes leaders to information before somebody else has decided what deserves attention. An unexpected comment during a supplier conversation, a competitor behaving differently from normal, or a partner asking an unusual question can be commercially valuable precisely because the significance is not yet obvious. Those signals rarely arrive with enough evidence to justify a strategic decision on their own. Their value lies in prompting better questions earlier.
That was one of the lessons I took from the Gigabyte experience. The breakthrough was not possessing secret information that nobody else could obtain. It was developing a position in the ecosystem where conversations could begin sooner and where the motives behind market movements became easier to understand. Once you know why something may be changing, you can interpret subsequent signals differently from someone who only sees the final outcome.
There is also a relationship dimension that conventional market intelligence tends to overlook. People share richer information when there is enough trust, relevance and mutual value in the relationship. A transactional supplier conversation produces one level of insight, while a relationship in which both sides regularly exchange perspectives can produce another. Companies that treat ecosystem relationships only as sources of pricing or supply can therefore miss much of their strategic value.
The same is true of competitors. Competitive intelligence is often treated as something done from a distance, through websites, analyst reports, customer comments and formal market research. Those sources are useful, but markets are also communities of people who move between organisations, attend the same events and understand many of the same structural pressures. A conversation with someone on the other side of the competitive divide can sometimes reveal more about where the market is heading than months of formal monitoring, particularly when the discussion exposes how another organisation is thinking rather than simply what it has already done.
None of this means strategy should be based on rumours, isolated conversations or privileged access. Being closer to the source creates earlier signals, not certainty. Those signals still need to be tested against customers, economics, internal capability and broader evidence before the organisation commits resources. The advantage lies in having more time to investigate the right questions before the rest of the market forces the issue.
That additional time can be commercially significant. If management begins exploring an emerging category six months before customers start asking for it explicitly, the organisation can build knowledge, relationships and capability while competitors are still deciding whether the opportunity is real. If a supply constraint becomes visible earlier, inventory or pricing choices can be reconsidered before scarcity becomes obvious. Strategic responsiveness improves because the organisation is not starting every conversation from the same information available to everybody else.
The reverse is equally important. A company can invest heavily in faster decision-making while remaining strategically reactive if all of its inputs arrive late. Shorter approval processes and more agile teams help only after the organisation has recognised that something is changing. Improving execution speed without improving market proximity can therefore create a company that responds efficiently to other people's moves.
Senior leaders should consequently be interested not only in what the organisation knows, but in where that knowledge originates. Which relationships expose the business to decisions before they become visible in the market? Where are customer needs first being shaped, and who participates in those conversations? Which partners understand technological, regulatory or supply changes earlier than the organisation does? Those questions reveal whether the company's information network reflects the structure of the market or merely the structure of its own sales process.
There is a practical difference between periodically conducting market research and deliberately building proximity into the commercial system. Research provides a snapshot, whereas proximity creates an ongoing flow of conversations and observations. The latter requires people across Product, Marketing, Sales and leadership to maintain relationships beyond the immediate transaction and to bring what they learn back into a shared commercial view. Market understanding becomes part of the operating model rather than an occasional strategic exercise.
Companies can become surprisingly insulated without realising it, particularly when current performance remains healthy. Internal meetings become richer, reporting improves and people develop increasingly sophisticated explanations of the business using information generated largely inside the organisation. Meanwhile, changes in the surrounding ecosystem are being discussed elsewhere by suppliers, partners, customers and competitors who sit closer to the decisions that will eventually affect everyone.
The strategic risk is not simply missing one opportunity. It is gradually becoming dependent on information that reaches the organisation only after the market has already begun adjusting around it. At that point, the company can still execute well, but more of its energy is spent responding to conditions that somebody else understood sooner.
Getting closer to where market decisions are made does not eliminate uncertainty, and it does not provide a permanent advantage. It does give the organisation a better chance of seeing change while it is still forming rather than once it has become obvious. In markets where timing matters, that difference can determine whether strategy shapes the next move or merely reacts to it.
