Proven Strategies in Competitive Intelligence: Lessons from the Trenches

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).

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.