Benefits Beyond the Obvious: Sharpening Your Peripheral Vision

Broadly speaking, whenever you personally and actively participate with a group of any kind, your performance typically tends to improve. So, for example, when you exercise with others as a group, you personally tend to shed weight and tone up faster, as opposed to going it alone. There is an inherent dynamic within the group.

Similarly, when companies join and actively participate in their industry association, they tend to improve their performances as well. When you read the various industry rankings and lists of top security companies, as published by leading trade magazines, you routinely see a lot of members of the Security Industry Association (SIA). That’s no coincidence.

The SIA Membership portfolio is filled with tangible benefits, such as programs, products and services—from timely information to a slew of time-saving and even money-making benefits. But there also are intangible benefits beyond the obvious. One such intangible benefit of belonging to SIA is enhancing your business peripheral vision—your company’s collective ability to see things coming on the periphery—such things as emerging technologies, changing trends in consumer tastes, fresh opportunities, serious threats or competitors coming up on your side—while you focus on moving forward.

In their book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that Make or Break Your Company, authors George Day and Paul Schoemaker identified that less than 20 percent of companies have developed a peripheral vision in sufficient capacity to remain competitive. How is your company’s business peripheral vision?

Through SIA Membership, you sharpen your company’s business peripheral vision—especially within that nebulous member benefit called “networking.” You proactively build connections to help seize opportunities and avoid risks that come from the periphery. Networking with SIA Members enhances your company’s business peripheral vision.

At first glance, SIA Membership and enhancing your company’s business peripheral vision may not be obviously intertwined. Yet it is precisely this intangible quality of membership—this intrinsic value of belonging to a group—that really justifies your investment.

It’s the value of SIA Membership: Benefits Beyond the Obvious!