A revealing plant visit. I visited a manufacturer’s facility to investigate its ability to scale up our manufacturing process for widgets.We didn’t sign a confidentiality agreement before entering the plant. During the tour, we passed a production line that manufactured gadgets for a competitor.Gadgets are unrelated to widgets, but the competitor had long undersold us on gadgets, and we had been trying to reduce our manufacturing costs. The representative who was showing us around was unaware that this company was our competitor and proceeded to tell us all about the gadget product line and its performance level.

Should I have stopped him?