Introduction

Business is war. The losers are the organizations that fail to adapt to the ever-evolving marketplace, and the winners are those that continually capitalize on momentary advantages the losers don’t foresee.

Competitive intelligence (CI) can help your organization win the war. It essentially hands you a crystal ball that serves as your window into the future. With CI, you can predict where a market or sector is headed, which technologies are likely to drive changes in your industry, and how your competitors and their CEOs are likely to respond in any given situation. CI enables you to spot opportunities and threats months or even years down the road. It informs the decision makers and acts as an early-warning system to help your organization navigate the minefield that will sink your unwary competitors.

To put competitive intelligence to work for you, you need an experienced guide to tell you where to find the most illuminating and publicly available information, how to analyze that information to convert it into actionable intelligence, and how to convince your organization’s leadership to put that intel into action. Welcome to Competitive Intelligence For Dummies. In this book, I reveal the secrets of CI that took me nearly 20 years to discover and the wisdom I’ve gained by supervising more than 200 graduate consulting projects for Fortune 500 companies and through hundreds of my own private consultations. I equip you with multiple skills and tools you can put to ...

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