Why is there no textbook?

Students have occasionally asked me whether there is a textbook for this class. There isn't. There's no lack of books on the subject; the Barnes & Noble website says it sells 66 books with "competitive intelligence" in the title. You could spend more than four thousand dollars on them. But I haven't found any book I actually like enough to recommend that everyone buy it.

The main failing of the books is a very pompous attitude about the importance of the field, with discussions of national survival, and comparisons with the CIA, which had a somewhat higher reputation when most of these books were written. Almost every book on competitive intelligence, for example, quotes from Sun-Tzu on the Art of War. The line they usually quote is "what enables the wise commander to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge," without telling you that this comes from the chapter recommending that you hire spies.

The books also frequently include stories about ingenious ways of getting information that are not realistic for most problems. For example, two of them admire somebody who measured the amount of rust on the railroad tracks outside a competitor's plant in order to guess the rail tonnage coming out and thus the amount of production. Even if this really happened, it's not something most of us are going to be able to do.

Many of the books are also too old. This field is entirely transformed by the Web and online searching; anything which doesn't recognize that is out of date.

Here are some notes and a sample quote from each of several books:

Steven Shaker and Mark Gembicki, The WarRoom Guide to Competitive Intelligence, McGraw-Hill, 1998. This book treats competitive intelligence as war, comparable to military intelligence. It has a lot of stories.
“The company's chief strategist camped outside the auction headquarters in a bus which had been transformed into a mobile war room. In addition to strategizing in real time, they were able to communicate with their bidders at the auction site using scrambled wireless telephones. Their major logistical problem was keeping the parking meter filled with quarters.”

Craig Fleisher and David Blenkhorn, Managing Frontiers in Competitive Intelligence, Quorum Books, 2001. They describe a four stage process: plan, collect analyze, and implement. The book is made up of scattered essays, with a lot about the defense of your company and various unethical strategies to be prepared to stop.
“for every new electronic security device that detects, scans or records, there are three more that connect and send.” (Suzanne Wilshire)

Larry Kahaner, Competitive Intelligence, Simon & Schuster, 1996. This book has a lot of puffery about the importance of the field; it also has many stories about doing the job but I found many unrealistic. It does emphasize the role of intelligence in corporations, and the importance of how people interact, saying "Most analysis is done to confirm our assertions or theories.”
“Doodles are also windows to a person's personality (fig 7.5). For example, strong logical planners often sketch geometric shapes ... those who doodle people and characters are less analytical but may be more visionary.”

George Friedman, Meredith Freeman, Colin Chapman, and John Baker, The Intelligence Edge, Crown, 1997. They recommend you rely on telephoning to gain information; networking, in the personal sense, is their best strategy. To insert my own quote from Sun Tzu, "Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men." Realistically, getting information from people is wonderful if you are able to do it, but sometimes it will be too slow, and sometimes you don't have the contacts.
“Now we could have handed in this one page and let it go at that. But clients don't like to pay five figures for one page. So we padded it out with really nice tables and charts...”

David Hussey and Per Jenster, Competitor Intelligence, Wiley 1999. Again largely about how you would organize a group to handle competitive intelligence, rather than about what the group should do.
“... when Heinz first suspected that Campbell might be planning to enter the UK market with a range of condensed soups, they frustrated the move for many years by launching a range of condensed soup which was clearly inferior to the traditional canned soups. This established that canned [sic — meant condensed] soups were an inferior product.”

Leonard M. Fuld, The New Competitor Intelligence, Wiley, 1995. Most of this book is lists and lists of possible sources. It's the most practical of the books, and again suggests reliance on making phone calls as the best strategy (despite its many pages of printed sources). The author says "less than 1% of all business information will ever find its way to print” However, this book was written before most of the sources were online, and it suffers from that.
“Any time you find yourself stumped and believe you've hit an information cul-de-sac, don't believe it. Take a breath and ask yourself, 'who else may need the same information'?”

Managing Competitive Intelligence Knowledge in a Global Economy, John Prescott and Jan Herring, subject experts; American Productivity & Quality Center, 1998. This book is actually a recipe for what to do, but the recipe is all process, not content.
“The competitive intelligence group has developed an expectation among the sales force members that their questions will be answered within 24 hours.”

Kirk Tyson, Competition in the 21st Century, St Lucie Press, 1997. Most of this book is not about competitive intelligence, but about changes in industry and society, presented in terms of the wonders of modern business leadership. It reminds me of Victorian biographies of great industrialists, with its near-worship of people like "Neutron Jack" Welch and other CEOs. It was written a little too early for Ken Lay to be included.
“Intelligence should be a balance of historical performance information, current information, and future scenarios.”

Margaret Metcalf Carr, Super Searchers on Competitive Intelligence, Information Today, 2003. Reversing the view of the previous book, this one worships at the feet of the competitive intelligence folks rather than the corporate marketing types they serve. There are 15 interviews with a resulting scattering of advice, since some of the experts rely on their paper searching skills and others on their telephone interviewing. I also got annoyed with the book because one chapter (p. 246) claims to quote Sherlock Holmes as being a "practicing consultant" and that phrase is nowhere in the Holmes canon.
“Unfortunately, the senior management didn't want to hear what we were finding out, because there were disaster warnings all over the place but they had 26 years of seniority to protect.” (George Dennis).

Richard Combs and John Moorhead, The Competitive Intelligence Handbook, Scarecrow Press, 1992. A summary with lists of other books in the field (at that time), and a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. Notes the tension between collecting information, analyzing it, and presenting the results; with most of the book about finding odd bits of information. "Information is where you find it," the authors write, and they emphasize the new and inchoate nature of the field. They even quote the movie Lawrence of Arabia saying "nothing is written," although in a context where I'm not sure whether they are complaining that the world needs more books on competitive intelligence, or recognizing that the future is uncertain (the latter is what writer Robert Bolt meant for Peter O'Toole to say in the movie; the phrase is not in T. E. Lawrence's book).
“Every discipline, no matter how ancient or recent, has schools of thought, gurus, cherished beliefs, taboos and so forth. Newer ones simply have less baggage.”