Author: Christopher Murphy
ISBN No: 0 566 08537 2
Review date: 09/06/2026
No of pages: 274
Publisher: Gower
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Every business manager needs intelligence to find suppliers, mobilise capital, win customers and fend off rivals. Christopher Murphy, a director of Ravensbourne Research Limited, has written a guide to that gathering of intelligence - and denying it to rivals.
The final chapter, Intelligence Countersteps, speaks of the need to protect your own organisation from some of the practices of less scrupulous researchers and investigators.
Competitive Intelligence provides a framework, according to publishers Gower, for anyone seeking to gather and make effective use of market and company data.
Christopher Murphy’s Competitive Intelligence covers the theory of business competition; how companies try to get ahead of their rivals; methods of research and sources of information that generate the raw material for creating intelligence; and analytical techniques which transform the mass of facts and opinions thus retrieved into a platform of sound, useable knowledge to support informed business decision making.
Murphy draws on a variety of disciplines, including literary criticism (or how to read between the lines of company reports, announcements and media stories) and anthropology (understanding corporate culture), plus the more obvious ones such as financial analysis, management theory and business forecasting techniques. While focused on the British business environment, the lessons drawn are of universal application, the author claims, and examples are taken from across the globe. In addition a chapter is devoted to researching industries and companies in other countries. Although primarily concerned with commercial enterprises, many of the principles and techniques will also be of practical relevance to managers in the public sector or not-for-profit organisations. Competitive Intelligence also provides a legal and ethical framework to guide the unwary and to curb the over-enthusiastic.
