The world is getting more and more hypocritical.

Take the response of Rio Tinto to China’s arrest of four of their employees for industrial espionage...

“We believe that they acted at all times with integrity and in accordance with Rio Tinto’s strict and publicly stated code of ethical behaviour.”  

All right, they have to say that sort of nonsense in the hope that it will encourage the Chinese authorities to go easy on their people.

Yet surely the Chinese are no fools and recognise it for the hypocrisy it is.

All business depends on being better informed than the competition.

So the entrepreneur should take every possible opportunity to pick up every potentially useful scrap of information about customers, suppliers, competitors, and markets in general.

Commercial intelligence, far from being unethical, is compulsory.

There are, of course, laws against theft and trespass, and the need for business information does not excuse those caught breaking them, but it is foolish to pretend that intelligence-gathering is shocking, unusual, or immoral.

After all, as the wise man – a wise Chinese man as it happens – teaches us, “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”