21 pizzas.

On the night of 1 August 1990, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas.

It was a record. Frank Meeks, who owned dozens of Domino's franchises across the Washington area, including the ones that delivered to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, noticed.

Every organisation orders pizza before it does something big. In medical devices, the pizza is the job ad.

I read job ads for a living, so here's one.

J&J's careers site lists an Area Sales Manager role for Ottava, its new soft tissue surgical robot, based in Orange County, California. Search the same title and the sister postings fill in the rest of the map: New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Miami, North Florida.

Now line them up against the public record.

The requisition numbers for those six roles sit in a tight block. All of them are lower than the number on an Ottava medical director posting that closed in May. The FDA didn't authorise Ottava until 22 July. If J&J numbers its requisitions in order (and the dates suggest it does), it opened the sales roles while the robot was still waiting for its De Novo decision.

J&J said publicly it would launch with select US customers. The ads tell you roughly where: the East Coast, plus one sunny corner of California.

Read the Orange County ad to the end, and it gets better. The role requires working in hospitals and surgery centres, so ASCs are in the plan from day one. It asks for capital sales experience, not robotics experience. And because California law makes employers publish pay, it states the base salary: $180,000.

Under preferred skills, it lists “Confidentiality”.

I'm not picking on J&J. Every job ad in our industry does this, including some I've helped write. That's the point.

So when a competitor's ad lands, read it three ways. The cities are the launch map. The procedures and settings named are the indications and the call points. The salary is the number you'd have to beat to hire their people, or to keep yours.

After the pizza story went public, the Pentagon was reportedly told to stop relying on delivery and to vary its orders.

Your next requisition will probably go live this quarter. Before it does, read it the way your competitor will.

Then decide how many pizzas you're happy to order.