Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies

by Benjamin GILAD

Overview

With strong opinions and wry humor, world-recognized expert Benjamin Gilad reveals how to anticipate and react to early signs of trouble.

Surprise is rarely a good thing in business. Unexpected developments range in their effects from inconvenient to disastrous. To avoid being blindsided, companies must develop a Competitive Early Warning system, or CEW, which combines strategic planning, competitive intelligence, and management action.

Such systems let organizations manage risk more effectively and prevent "industry dissonance" — when market realities outpace corporate strategies. Early Warning reveals how to:

• Change strategy to meet new realities
• Learn from the mistakes of others via the book’s eye-opening stories
• Avoid common tactics like benchmarking and using consultants, which may do more harm than good
• Tell executives what they need to know — not what they want to hear

Each chapter ends with a Manager’s Checklist of key points, and the book includes numerous charts, tables, and tools.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814432068
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	09/12/2003
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.15(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	17 Years

About the Author

Ben GILAD (Kfar Saba, Israel) is president of the Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence. He has trained the majority of CI managers at Fortune 500 companies. He has been interviewed by "The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal," and others.

Table of Contents

"Part One: Companies at Risk

1. Surprise!

2. What Do You Know About Risk?

3. The Internal Dynamics of Early Warning Failure

4. The Analytical, the Tactical, the Couch Potato and the Blind

Part Two: The Competitive Early Warning Solution

5. Step 1--Identifying Risks and Opportunities

6. Step 1, Continued--War Gaming

7. Step 2--Intelligence Monitoring

8. Step 3--Management Action

Part Three: Early Warning at Work

9. Case Studies of CEW in Action

10. If You Start from Scratch"

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Poolonline.com: "This [Early Warning] is an excellent book that shows the importance of an early warning system and ways in which it can be developed in companies of different sizes and in different industries. It also serves as a warning that in today’s turbulent environment it is a highly dangerous strategy to proceed without such an early warning system in place."

Editorial Reviews

The Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship: "Gilad weaves a cautionary tale for modern managers. He is an expert storyteller whose compelling cases illustrate the follies of missing strategic risk and the benefits of embracing CEW [competitive early warning]. The book has thought-provoking ideas presented in a very readable style."

From the Publisher

As businesses operate in what seems to be a perpetual orange-alert mode, those that practice what Gilad preaches increase their odds of being the "last man standing."

Business Finance

This [Early Warning] is an excellent book that shows the importance of an early warning system and ways in which it can be developed in companies of different sizes and in different industries. It also serves as a warning that in today's turbulent environment it is a highly dangerous strategy to proceed without such an early warning system in place.

Poolonline.com

"Gilad weaves a cautionary tale for modern managers. He is an expert story teller whose compelling cases illustrate the follies of missing strategic risk and the benefits of embracing CEW [competitive early warning]. The book has thought-provoking ideas presented in a very readable style."

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship