A little market strategy can go a long way

The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence: How to See Through and Stay Ahead of Business Disruptions, Distortions, Rumors and Smoke Screens
by Leonard M. Fuld
Crown, 310 pages, $24.95

Can a goat grazing in a field guide business strategy?

It did when an analyst from Fuld & Co., a Cambridge consulting firm, snapped a photo of the grass-munching animal during a fact-finding trip to Asia for a US textile company. Its chief executive had heard that a rival was poised to produce low-cost knockoffs in Indonesia, and he planned to increase advertising and boost output in response.

But the goat, photographed at the site of the rumored new plant, made clear no such threat existed. There was no Indonesian plant. There wasn't even a foundation. Armed with that information, the American company knew to rethink its defensive strategy.

The anecdote is a simple example of competitive intelligence, or marketplace knowledge that can be used to make business decisions, which Leonard M. Fuld describes in ``The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence." It's a fourth book for Fuld, who founded his eponymous firm in 1979, and his first aimed at a popular audience.

In it, Fuld urges businesses of all kinds to do what he has long preached to his corporate clients: make competitive intelligence part of everyday strategy. That means gleaning insights from whatever information is available, be it trade show conversation or snapshot of a goat, and using them to outperform rivals.

That knowledge, he writes, can help businesses determine how a competitor has gained market share, identify likely merger or acquisition candidates, and anticipate new competition.

The book is basically a how-to guide that chronicles the consequences of using, or failing to use, competitive intelligence through narrative accounts and mini-profiles of ``intelligence greats" such as Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson ; investor Warren Buffett; Sam Walton, the late founder of Wal-Mart; and Robert Crandall, former chief executive of AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines.

It examines, for example, how Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com, the job site, siphoned classified ads away from newspapers. It recounts how Daniel Vasella, chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Novartis, visits his company's labs to chat with scientists and understand their research rather than rely on summary memos. It recalls how oil baron T. Boone Pickens counted the joints on his rivals' drills to determine how deeply they were drilling and estimate costs.

The book is folksy and not dense with corporate jargon. It occasionally seems to lose focus, skipping from case study to case study without connecting the lessons learned.

Fuld offers a caveat: Relying on competitive intelligence means making decisions based on incomplete information. As an analogy, he uses pointillism, in which whole paintings are rendered from thousands of dots. Up close, a pointillist picture is a blur. From a distance, it takes shape. How much of that painting must we see before we know what it is?

In the words of Monster.com's Taylor: ``Once you see signals of change on the horizon, it's too late."

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.