Customer Reviews

Spooked: Espionage In Corporate America

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I don't know why this short text is in hardcover, and as mentioned in the other reviews, it is more than a bit disjointed, and suffers from some flaws in research.

On the positive side, Chapters 4 & 5 are a useful description of social engineering, that can help the reader better understand how vulnerable an organization is to simple information gathering techniques. It is difficult to find material on the subject of 'Information Brokers', so this book provides a useful source on that subject, although no specific topic is covered in depth.

I found Fialka's book, "War By Other Means," a more informative and interesting read. Fialka's book doesn't discuss the Avery case which comprises the greater part of "Spooked," so the books are somewhat complementary if you are looking for additional examples of industrial espionage.

"Spooked" is a quick read, and outside of some structural weaknesses in its organization, it is an enjoyable enough text. It is more of a 'popular' approach to this subject, aimed at the casual reader who is more interested in titillation than in substance.

If you ran into two guys in a bar and you all had had a few alcoholic beverages, you might hear war stories about how they had turned up people doing unseemly things. It would be fun.

Take the same two guys, and have them write down a few strung-together stories in a book with little substance and style. When you read the results in the sober light of day, it's not very good. That's the feeling I got here.

Mr. Penenberg is a business investigative journalist. As such, he knows how to dangle a promise. The trouble is, he doesn't seem to have the material to support his promise. The few stories about corporate intelligence gathering in this book are uninspiring in the extreme. Anyone who has worked in a company for a few months could tell better stories than these.

Mr. Barry is an intelligence gathering practitioner, and he provides one interesting, cogent account of finding out about better ways to make frozen pizza crusts. It was the only story in the book that moved smoothly from promise to fulfilling the promise. The rest just seemed to ramble.

The bulk of the book is about the case of a Taiwanese company caught in an FBI sting taking confidential Avery Dennison "trade secrets" from an Avery Dennison employee. You first learn how the employee came to steal from Avery Dennison. Then you find out how his employer caught on. Next, the book describes how the employee was hung out to dry so he could be bait for his illegal employer, the Taiwanese company. Following that you get the videotaped sting. The rest involves legal maneuverings through a criminal and civil law suit, the other suits filed by the Taiwanese company, and how the two companies competed with each other while this was going on. You are intended to end up disgusted with everyone, and you probably will be. A good editor could have reduced this material by over half and improved it a lot.

The book constantly slams individuals and firms who perform corporate intelligence gathering, accusing them of not abiding by ethical standards. In other cases, those described look silly because they or their clients don't do well in the marketplace anyway. The book ends up describing what happened to each person in the book. With one or two exceptions, being in corporate intelligence didn't seem to pay off very well.

To give you an example of the weakness about details in the book, let me describe the material about commercial spying by France. This has been alleged in the press for as long as I can remember. Magazines constantly warn you not to take laptops to France, because maids may download your files. In a book like this that makes many references to commercial spying by the French government, I expected lots of great stories that I had not heard before. I didn't find them. There were just a few allegations about who might have stolen what from whom.

One thing is clear. There are people out there who like to misrepresent themselves and try to steal intellectual property and information that doesn't belong to them. And it doesn't look like it's too hard to do. Be prepared to defend yourself. This book won't tell you how to do that, though. You'll have to look elsewhere.

My advice is to skip this book.

After you finish reading this review, I suggest that you think about what information your organization has that would be reduced in value if held in the wrong hands. How can you change the information you develop and keep so that it will become more valuable as more people touch it, either legally or illicitly? How can you learn to move so quickly and surely that it doesn't matter what competitors know?

Expand knowledge in constructive ways!

One of the poorest reference works on intelligence I have read. As a competitive intelligence professional I found Penenberg and Barry's insight irregular at best. There is little revealed here not already in the public domain. The text outside the Avery Dennison case skips around randomly from topic to topic with poor transition points. Leaping casually from intelligence to espionage and back again, with no concern for their clear separation, the book appears as a random collection of thoughts, memories, and speculations. For whatever reason, the authors go out of their way to malign several people, accusing them of any number of wrong doings. Apparently Mr. Barry can see beyond the splinter in his own eye, boasting of several ill-advised collection methods that clearly violate any reasonable business ethics, a pot taunting the kettles.

I previously worked in the research laboratory of one of the world's largest chemical companies and was conducting research on polymer-based adhesives for (our customer) Avery Dennison when the espionage occurred. I have followed the case in the press, pleased that a company of their size was not willing to simply roll over and sweep the incident under the rug. Along with some of my former colleagues I had championed their case within my firm, and upon learning of the book's pending release, had anticipated learning more about it. But the author's overstatements far exceed their output.

The book is short, less than 200 hundred pages, with no follow on references for further study. The Avery Dennison case is worthy of careful analysis, as it could have far reaching application in global business practices. But this book fails to even approach such a level. The result is some light-weight dinner conversation, an article that grew too big, by a couple of authors who perhaps are not as qualified to speak on the subject as they would like to be.

Since I have been working in the world of competitive intelligence and industrial espionage for the past two decades, I looked forward to reading this Christmas gift from my son .... I have finally finished it, but only because it was gift. If I'd gone out to buy it, and had been able to see just how bad it was, I would have asked him to buy me something else.

This book promises far more than it provides.

One promise might be that it would tell people about competitive intelligence: how it's done and by whom. This book doesn't even come close, and for one of the authors to claim that he does this for a living is ludicrous at best. Not only does he violate the kind of client confidentiality that people who do this for real normally work under, he has no idea of what he's talking about. If you really want to see what this world is all about, go to one of the several excellent books on the topic, written by those who know what they're talking about because they really walk the walk, e.g., Nolan's book CONFIDENTIAL: Uncover Your Competitor's Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly - and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, 1999).

Another promise is that it could be a journalistic inquiry into what is arguably an area of great interest for business professionals who have to learn what's going on in the world. Pennenberg, as a purported journalist, fails to meet muster by a wide margin. If you want to learn from somebody who is both a quality journalist as well as someone who knows about the topics that he's writing about, I've found Kahaner's book "Competitive Intelligence: From Black Ops to Boardrooms - How Businesses Gather, Analyze and Use Information to Succeed in The Global Marketplace" (Simon & Schuster, 1996) to be as good as it gets. ....

An unannounced promise, but one that comes through very clearly, is that this could be a work of fiction, as it tries to sit astride espionage thrillers and the business world. There are half a hundred excellent people out there - from Clancy to Flannery and everyone in between who actually announce that their efforts are fiction. Far more than this supposed "real world" thing does. If it's fiction you want, go to the pros .... The kinds of things that Barry says he does are far more easily done, with greater imagination, by neophytes in the business intelligence world.

Overall, bad business, bad journalism, and bad fiction. Now that I've wasted my time on it, my most heartfelt desire is that no one else wastes theirs.

In spite of the promises on the back cover, flyleaf, and publisher, this book consists of nothing more than the story of one corporate espionage case, and a decidedly low-tech one at that. Sprinkled between chapters filled with excruciatingly repetitive and frankly boring details of the Avery espionage case, are several mildly interesting profiles of so-called corporate spooks, whose techniques range from "oh, I can do all kinds of stuff, but it's so secret I can't tell you" to "I go to trade shows and ask people questions" Reading the book, one gets the impression that the author may indeed have heard all kinds of cool stuff during his research, but none of it found its way into the pages of this book. This would've made a killer magazine article, but the book's just not there.

What a terrible disappointment! I thought that because one of the authors was a Forbes guy, he'd be able to write. Instead, I've had my freshman business students put first-semester term papers together in a more readable form. And that was probably the best aspect of this waste of paper. I've followed the business of intelligence and corporate espionage for the past 20 years and this is little more than a re-hash of well known cases, and a poor re-counting at that.

As far as the other guy is concerned, it only gets worse. The so-called cases that this egocentric kid Barry uses to show how clever he is are nothing more than a fictionalization of approaches used by a host of others. And, without much substance at that. To see how he tries to trash the people who actually do the real work of business intelligence by excoriating their professional society (SCIP) is not only sad, but shows just how insecure he is in his own competencies.

This book should be catalogued under fantasy, narcissism, or irony/sarcasm. It certainly doesn't belong under anything to do with business.

I picked up this thin hardback as a remaindered item, and it was worth what I paid for it. The book is about corporate espionage (and the field of "competitive intelligence") by a journalist and a practitioner, respectively. The bulk of the book tells the story of Victor Lee, an employee of the Avery Dennison company, who was the first person to be prosecuted under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act for selling company secrets to First Pillars, a company in his native Taiwan. The book's account of that case seems quite balanced, with due weight given to the defense (which ultimately failed, and apparently rightly so). This story is spread throughout the nine chapters (1, 3, 6, and 8 of the book's 9), in a somewhat disjointed fashion.

The book also describes the founding of the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals and the competitive intelligence group at Motorola by former CIA analyst Jan Herring, a case where Schwann's obtained competitive intelligence via legitimate means to compete with Kraft in pizza manufacturing, another chapter on legitimate intelligence gathering by Teltech to find out about nanotechnology development of plastics for Dow, and a very different chapter on eEye "Chief Hacking Officer" Marc Maiffret.

The book seems to have two voices about the ethics standards of SCIP, with co-author Barry thinking that the standards are hypocritical and rightly ignored, while it appears that Panenberg may be more sympathetic.

There doesn't seem to be much in the book in the way of conclusions drawn in the book. It could have been more useful with a summary of methods to prevent espionage, more details on principles of legitimate intelligence gathering, or at least lessons learned from specific cases.

The author builds his premises on suppositions, but I see no proof of what they are trying to say.

Authors allude to DeGenaro, Nolan and Herring using un-ethical means to gather information while all being very active members of SCIP. Yet I see NO proof. We call that hearsay. It is not worth anything in a court of law, a business report, or even in intelligence.

This book is a slander case waiting to happen. I can't believe they named specific companies and associations and then went ahead to berate them.

The chapter on Liz Lightfoot (The Librarian) shows your inability to do basic research. There is a very specific job title known as Librarian. It requires that the person with the title have a Master in Library Science, and is not bestowed on anyone with a knack for database searching. You defamed the profession on page 111 (which seems contrary since you quote Nolan, but were slamming him earlier). While in the same chapter you obviously could have used the assistance of a librarian to help you find the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

My recommendation for a work of this nature, which is a fast read, interesting and practical, is Your Secrets are My Business by Kevin McKeown.

I don't even know where to begin. This book is so poorly written and researched, it's almost a farce. The joke is on anyone who buys this piece of trash. (Including me...) Everyone who touched this book in production--editors, copy clerks, etc.--should be embarassed to have their names associated with such a hollow piece of work. This book is nothing more than a collection of non-sequitors about corporate daring-do. But it never delivers. It's painful to read. (I mean, come on, RUN-ON SENTENCES?????? Where were Penenberg's editors on this one?)

Penenberg, supposedly a "professional reporter" practices the worst brand of "Entertainment Tonight" journalism in this book. His first aim is to tantalize and titilate with little regard for the rudiments of journalism. Apart from his abyssmal writing, Penenberg plays fast and loose with facts, making claims and mental leaps that aren't supported by his thin research.

I'm so disappointed that I threw away 20-something-dollars on this book. Don't make the mistake I did.

Mr. Tanner's review sums it up well, along with others who have negatively reviewed this book. Sloppy editing, wandering writing style. One part of a chapter gets into a review of someone's life that has nothing to do with the book or espionage! To a large extent, we hear a surface review of a courtroom trial, but this book was supposed to be about espionage.

Some mildly interesting discussions, but overall a waste of time.