Competitive Intelligence

Every business manager needs intelligence to find suppliers, mobilize capital, win customers and fend off rivals. Drawn from the author EUR s own experiences and from a wide variety of disciplines, Competitive Intelligence provides a readable, practical and imaginative framework for anyone seeking to gather and make effective use of market and compan

Autorentext

Christopher Murphy is a director of business consultancy Ravensbourne Research Limited and been engaged in competitive intelligence assignments ranging across the whole span of the discipline for the past 15 years. Clients he has worked with encompass many public sector and not-for-profit organizations as well as businesses of every size from start-ups through to multinational giants. His sectoral experience is correspondingly diverse, embracing professional services, financial institutions, manufacturing, retailing, consumer goods, together with national and local governmental bodies and charities. He is a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, the Society of Business Economists and the World Futures Society and is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Inhalt

Introduction; I: Dress and the Social Body; 1: Competitor Intelligence is Not Enough!; 2: How is CI being Conducted and How Should it be Performed?; 3: How do Companies Compete?; 4: Key Internal Business Drivers; 5: Key External Business Drivers; 6: For Goodness' Sake! EUR" Legal and Ethical Aspects of CI; II: Collecting Data; 7: Commencing the CI Quest EUR" Planning and Initial Data Gathering; 8: Understanding Sectors; 9: Refining the Search; 10: Systematic Sources EUR" Regular Corporate Document Filings; 11: Systematic Sources EUR" EUR One-off' Corporate Filings; 12: Foreign Sources; 13: Human Source Intelligence; 14: Observing a Company; 15: Creative Sources and Methods and the Craft of Analysis; III: Turning Raw Data into Finished Intelligence; 16: Figuring Out the Numbers EUR" Structure and Content of Company Accounts; 17: Running the Numbers EUR" Understanding Financial Statements; 18: Interpreting the Non-financial Sections of Company Accounts; 19: Assessing Information Quality; 20: Describing Companies; 21: Comparing and Positioning Companies; 22: What does the Future Hold?; 23: The End Crowns All EUR" Disseminating Competitive Intelligence; 24: Intelligence Countersteps