Customer Reviews

Proven Strategies in Competitive Intelligence: Lessons from the Trenches

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This book is a decent one for your library shelf. It includes a fair variety of articles, quite often featuring widely known names in the CI field. The idea of "proven" and "strategies" may be a bit misleading however, as some of these so-caled proven strategies were really philosphies, tactics or concepts that worked for a short time but were shown to be difficult to sustain. Witness the recent public difficulties at Procter & Gamble or Daimler Benz for example and you'll understand this.

For those people who read or have seen the CI Review, you'll recognize that these chapters first appeared as articles in that venue. Some of the chapters are now several years old, stale, and the individuals, departments or companies involved have undergone major shifts in their approaches to CI and to the topics of these articles. I should note that this doesn't mean that the information is invalid, indeed, it is helpful more often than not. However, "proven" strategies are enduring... some of the ones highlighted here were "practiced" for sure, but "proven" may be a bit of a marketing stretch. I'd still recommend this book to those individuals new to the field, and those who haven't accessed this material before in its other forms.

As with any anthology, some of the contributions are better than others. But the best case studies in this collection are of real value. In particular, I'd point to the case studies from Shell and other companies that describe how corporate intranets can be used to both collect competitive information from within your firm (sales reps, etc.) and then to make it availalbe firmwide, so that no one gets "blindsided." Any company that's not doing this doesn't understand, as one of the chapters puts it, the overriding importance of CI/Knowledge Management convergence.

I was also amazed by how forthright some of the contributors were, expecially the description of the organizational CI structures at firms such as P&G, Xerox and IBM. I don't know why they're sharing this, but these descriptions are worth the price of the book. Not that you'd want to copy them exactly, but it's vital to know how others organize their efforts in this regard.

And even the more "philosophical" contributions, include Robert Galvin's piece on CI at Motorola, were helpful.

No, it's not a really "how to" book, but it does reveal just how important CI now is to companies in the know, and why others should get onboard.

This book contains very valuable lessons in CI, as well as in strategic and tactical design, which many businesses can certainly benefit from. Some of the cases were very intriguing and quite informative. From all the cases presented, it became apparent that success of CI operations, among other things, requires an intelligence leader at the top level, preferably executive level; strong cooperation among various organizational departments/teams; intelligence expertise; very strong ethics; spirited internal marketing of CI (as strategic and tactical intelligence must be seen as a top priority within the organization), etc. Nonetheless, I believe that a better title should have been something like "Sample Strategies in Competitive Intelligence." While the strategies presented may have worked well at the time for IBM, Xerox, Motorola, Nutrasweet, Avent, Merck, P&G, Intel and Microsoft, I wonder if other companies that take the strategies as a blueprint will experience the same level of successes reported (Nwankama Nwankama).

Rather than looking up articles piecemeal on the Internet, I found this book offers a convenient collection. By reading all the articles, I got a sense of how competitive intelligence in performed as well as some of the benefits. A lot of the efforts might not be justified by a cost-benefit analysis while others can become great investments in a business.

Competitive intelligence as presented in this collection is carried out by large organizations. It can be systematic and use long term strategies if provided a sufficient budget. I got the impression that it would be one of the first general and administrative areas downsized in an economic downturn.

Excellent presentation. We learn best from studying what others are doing best. These authors provide a collage of stories that exemplify what Competitive Intelligence is, what it does in an organization, and opens the readers eyes that CI is nothing new, as well as, CI is an absolute critical element in corporations and companies today if they wish to stay in business and grow. - I only knocked the book because the slip cover does not do the content justice.