Review: Competitor Intelligence: How to Get It; How to Use It

Competitor Intelligence: How to Get It; How to Use It by Leonard M. Fuld
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Read this book based on a recommendation/reference given in another book i was reading, that i liked and do recommend (The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing).

The real classification would be between the 1 and 2 stars, finally i decided to go with a 2 stars due to a couple of good insights and especially to show me that we should always strive to be creative when we do not have readily accessible the intelligence we would find relevant for our own analysis.

It´s a clearly a dated book (1985) and it does not provide sound and practical building blocks to approach the competitor intelligence area of study. It's more a guide where to find data to support such discipline/function, that although most probably relevant for the 1980, it is clearly outdated to a 2020 reader.

The positive, if you take a very positive attitude and try to conceptualize some chapters of the book, you can define your own framework based on the potential difficulties and problems one can find while performing such important task of producing intelligence, mainly by knowing the constraints you have in the public available information on basic sources, and how to find/leverage creative sources of information and even use the some basic sources.

You should strive "mutatis mutandi" to apply some of the tools presented to the reality of 2020 and with that extract the most value of its reading.

In nutshell, if you want to learn something on this subject, this would not be book a i would recommend,

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