Here Are Some of the Best Market Intelligence Books We’ve Read
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Here Are Some of the Best Market Intelligence Books We’ve Read
Understanding an industry by use of competitive intelligence is increasingly important in today’s fast-paced environment. Reading relevant stories is just one way to expose yourself to the world of CI. It is very important to be sharing knowledge, especially in a community of intelligence.
Below, you will find a list of CI books that we love, and the reasons we love them. The list could provide you with inspiration, knowledge, or even entertainment. Enjoy!
Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath
The book, Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath, centers around the idea of inflection points. An inflection point occurs when there is a disruptive change in the environment, which causes change in business. McGrath hones in on ways to identify the inflection points before they occur. She calls this skill being able to “see around corners”.
Once one can see around the corners, power can be harnessed from inflection points as a company can anticipate, understand, and capitalize on disruptive changes. McGrath explains how even though the changes seem sudden, they are not random; the book explains ways to notice these patterns and react to the inflection points. Knowing how inflection points can shift the marketplace and being able to see around corners in the current business environment is essential because it gives companies a major competitive advantage.
With McGrath’s experience as a professor at the Columbia Business School, she offers a unique perspective regarding the inflection points from a scholarly point of view. The book includes lots of materials for study and gives specific tools and examples, such as case studies and illustrations, for noticing future changes. The book is enjoyable and easily read, while also being extremely knowledge bearing. McGrath’s book is a great way to reinvent thinking patterns and discover new methods for discovering shifts in an industry.
Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data (2nd Edition) by Cindi Howson
The second edition of Cindi Howson’s Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data is an updated, forward-looking guide to the business intelligence ecosystem. Howson reveals the latest technological advances in big data, cloud, visual data discovery, and in-memory computing. Her book focuses on aligning BI strategy with business goals and finding relevance with BI.
Howson is an extremely established woman in the intelligence community, and with this book, she provides a refreshing read based on knowledge from exposure and use-cases. In addition to exclusive industry data and real-world case studies, Howson also includes other secrets to success, such as the importance of proper training. By looking into big data from the business perspective, Howson seamlessly ties things into the future and outlines how to embrace innovation.
The CI-Driven CEO by David Kalinowski
In David Kalinowski’s The CI-Driven CEO, he explains the essentiality of competitive intelligence in business. Kalinowski outlines the six best practices when it comes to building a CI culture. He illustrates the importance of creating an intelligence culture and using CI to gain business insights through real-life scenarios.
The book takes the reader through the journey of a Chief Competitive Officer who needs to develop a strategy to outmanoeuvre the competition before his own company fails. This interesting storytelling method makes the book a great way to see the value of executives using CI, and the use of real scenarios is good for expanding practical knowledge. The book legitimately proves CI to be critical for decision-making and gives a greater understanding about the significance of CI culture.
With over thirty years of experience in the CI field, Kalinowski proves to be a trusted author, and his book is full of functional lessons.
Gardens of Intelligence by Gabriel Andernjörk and Jesper Martell
Gabriel Andernjörk and Jesper Martell’s Gardens of Intelligence “digs deep into the challenges and opportunities of how to succeed with technology platforms for market and competitive intelligence”. Through the presentation of real-life cases, the authors draw on their vast experiences and give insights to making strategic business decisions. The book details the foundations and reasoning for the use of intelligence in the continually changing state of the environment. It is a worthwhile read because it provides a wide variety of information about the general use of CI, and it also includes specific details about the application of it into business practices. Oftentimes, companies come to a standstill in decision making out of a fear of missing important information, which is very harmful for business. Reading this book opens the mind to thinking deeply about tending to a garden of intelligence which allows for better decision making.
Both authors, Andernjörk and Martell, are highly experienced in the field of intelligence and have a unique point of view to offer. Their combined industry experience makes the book a great source for learning new information about Market and Competitive Intelligence.
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
The book, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, is about finding uncontested, growing markets, otherwise known as: blue oceans. Finding the blue oceans in an industry is the best way for companies to grow and profit. The book advises to find the blue oceans and steer clear of the red oceans. The red oceans are overdeveloped saturated markets. In these types of markets, there is no room for growth.
The book gives insights into strategies for finding the blue oceans, in which an organization has all the room to innovate and develop. It is a strategy based on proven data from a study. This makes Blue Ocean Strategy different from other books because it is not simply based on theoretical ideas. Examples of the blue ocean strategy can be seen in companies such as Netflix, Uber, and iTunes, all of which created entirely new categories and found uncontested spaces. The theme of increasing innovation is heavily stressed, and the authors give insights on how to capitalize on innovation. Kim and Mauborgne change the common belief about a market and give advice on putting this new strategy into practice.
