James D. Underwood - Competitive Intelligence for Dummies

Competitive Intelligence For Dummies

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Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937660

ISBN 978-1-118-45102-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-45097-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-45101-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-45098-7 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Introduction

B usiness 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 dont 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 organizations 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 Ive 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 practical use, including see-mean-do (SMD) analysis and observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loops. I also walk you through how to profile your competitors and their CEOs, forecast market trends, and interpret nonverbal communication so you can tell what someone is really saying and when theyre probably trying to mislead you.

About This Book

My objective in this book is threefold: to give newbies a leg up on becoming solid CI contributors and analysts, to equip seasoned CI practitioners with some fresh ideas and advanced tools, and to help convince CEOs and other executives of the value of CI and the importance of implementing CI initiatives.

You can find plenty of books on the market that explain what competitive intelligence is and why its an essential component of any organizations future success, but few, if any, of these books explain how to conduct competitive intelligence and overcome resistance to change within an organization. Thats what makes this book stand out. Here, you not only discover the four steps to conducting intelligence but you also find out how to perform those steps:

How to build a competitive intelligence function within your organization and staff it with the right people, even if youre operating without additional funding

How to collect data and which sources to scour for the most valuable information and insight

How to conduct competitive intelligence legally and ethically to stay out of trouble and protect your reputation as a fair player

How to validate the data youve collected so youre certain that its accurate and that it has the breadth, depth, and relevance to be useful

How to analyze raw data and transform it into actionable intelligence that provides insight into future opportunities or threats

How to profile competitors and their CEOs so you can accurately predict what theyre going to do in any given situation

How to overcome the barriers standing in the way of change so you can convince your organization to implement the changes that lead to growth and increased profit

One last thing: Although, Id love for you to read every word I wrote, youre welcome to skip over the sidebars. Youll still be able to understand the key how-tos and explanations without them.

Foolish Assumptions

If youre reading this book, I assume that youre the person charged with conducting CI for your organization, someone whos pursuing a career in competitive intelligence, or a business owner or executive who wants to find out what CI is all about and how it can benefit your organization.

The only other assumption I made while writing is that youre committed to improving your organization and ensuring that it survives and thrives for the foreseeable future. The only way you and others in your organization can accomplish that goal is to build a competitive intelligence function and use it to drive creativity and innovation. Otherwise, your organization is destined, like most, to devolve into a calcified bureaucracy headed for extinction.