Imagine that you are a car enthusiast, and you take interest in reading about the German brand of cars – Mercedes, BMW and Volks Wagen. When you want to purchase your next car, your choice of which car to buy will very likely have been narrowed down to any 2 or 3 of the cars you have frequently read of. This could be because you have sufficient information about them to enable you to make a decision. However, to take a final decision, you want more information on things such as warranty, after-sales service, financing and payment options, etcetera. So, you proceed to a car dealership to make your findings and hopefully make a decision. At the dealership, you ask questions to confirm the warranty available on the cars you have in mind (including their scope of coverage and duration). You also enquire about the after-sales services and the responsiveness of the dealership to service requests. Essentially, you make all the enquiries and if possible, request documentation to enable you to make a decision as to whether to buy a car and which car to settle for.
In the scenario above, you have gathered intelligence by periodically reading about these cars. The intelligence-enabled you to ponder over just 2 or 3 cars instead of a hundred of them. Then, by going to the dealership to make all the enquiries, you have done due diligence (DD) which enables you to make a final decision. You will agree that if you had not gathered intelligence before going to the dealership, you will be undecided on which car to purchase and
will invariably enquire about the wrong things at the dealership, which in turn may lead to a wrong buy decision.
