Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition
By Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan

Below are reviews written about Strategic and Competitive Analysis, from the elite in the CI field to budding CI Practitioners from universities. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have!

Dr. Ben Gilad, SCIP Meritorious Award winner and Co- founder, Academy of Competitive Intelligence

"This is a monumental work. It brings to light, better and more comprehensively than any book before it; the power sophisticated intelligence analysis can have on business decisions. I believe every business analyst and every MBA student should read it, and every executive should insist they do."

Excerpts of lengthier book review by SCIP Reviewer John J. McGonagle, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, Book Reviews in Brief, 2002, 5(5).

"Professor Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan have carefully, usefully, and successfully balanced the approach of the academic with the needs of the CI practitioner... This body of work is important to all CI analysts... This is a thorough approach and, given it's highly structured format, very readable and digestible... Who should have this? Let me turn this question around. Who doesn't need it?... I cannot think of any serious CI professional or even a student of CI who could not use this book. It is a real gem and a unique contribution to the CI profession."

Robert D. Steele, Oakton, VA, USA

"Rather than outline the wonderful aspects of the book, which other reviewers have done so ably , I will just say that I rank the authors up there with Ben Gilad (Israel), Mats Bjore (Sweden), and Jan Herring, Dick Klavens/Brad Ashton, and Leonard Fuld (USA), and we have made this book "the" text for annual government all-source analysis training that centers on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). This book in combination with Ben Gilad's "Early Warning", Leonard Fuld's "New Competitor Intelligence", Dick Klavens and Brad Ashton's "Keeping Abreast of Science and Technology", and Mats Bjore forthcoming book, are the essential five books for any business intelligence professional or anyone seeking to understand best in class business intelligence."

Dr. Kathy Shelfer, Director, Competitive Intelligence Certificate Program, Drexel University

"With this book, I finally have a cost effective way to introduce a wide range of well-known competitive intelligence tools and techniques to our graduate students in the CI Certificate program. They represent a wide range of knowledge domains, so they need access to this basic information in a convenient format. I've adopted this as a text for the program. (To our former students-you know who you are-BUY THIS BOOK.)"

Aware UK Consultancy, 2003

"An excellent review of the most common techniques of competitive and strategic analysis - giving instructions on how to use the technique, when to use it, and each techniques pros and cons. This book should be on every strategic planner and competitive analysts 'must have' list, and is essential reading for business studies and MBA students. The book covers all the main analysis techniques - the Boston box, Financial analysis, Porter analysis, SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, and many more."

Say Keng-Lee, Owner, The Brain Resource, Singapore

"Superb... offers 24 analytical tools to help you examine your business, competitive data, and information."

Bernard Odendaal, Project Manager/Analyst, Competitive Business Intelligence and Analysis CC, Lyttleton, South Africa

"Strategic and Competitive analysis is an indispensable point of reference for everyone involved in competitive analysis. We use it on almost all our projects just to ensure that we stay on the right track. The scope of techniques that is described in the book opens up new opportunities to different kinds, and better quality analysis products that we can deliver."

G. Williams, Blackwood, Gwent, United Kingdom 

"For the MBA course I have been undertaking (and currently finishing off via dissertation) I have found this one book alone to be a perfect summary of all the models that were covered throughout the course. It was an excellent aid during my final exams. It has a good cross-reference between models and is therefore particularly good when tackling questions involving an organisation's strategy now and in the future. It also has an excellent bibliography. I came across it towards the end of my course and I only wish I had it at the beginning! However whatever stage you're at I would thoroughly recommend it."

REVIEWS from Amazon.com

Excellent coverage of management analysis tools, July 23, 2003 - Reviewer: A Reader  

This book fills the niche that should have been done by somebody a long time ago. It includes most of the popular analysis techniques that a management consultant would normally use, and provides a common process description for employing the method. It makes an excellent complement to Porter's series of books and can be nicely combined with more conceptual treatments in the strategy field. I have already bought several copies for my office colleagues, as it will be useful for them in their consulting work as well. I can see why it has gotten many good reviews and I'd concur with these. It is worth having this one on your bookshelf although, like me, you may find yourself pulling it off the shelf to refer to on a frequent basis.

The Secret Weapon in my MBA, April 24, 2002 - Reviewer: A reader from an Ivy League Business School

I lucked out a few weeks ago when I happened to find this book during a search I was doing in preparing for a take home case exam final I had in my MBA program. Our professor wanted us to provide solid analysis of the case, a large Harvard Business School job covering a well-known multinational business, and, as usual, hadn't given us much background as to what he meant by this. This was both good and bad for me. Fortunately, I figured he expected us to use one of the many methods we had covered during the two years I've been sweating through this program. Unfortunately, I had already sold most of my books to our bookstore during buybacks and didn't really know where to go to remind myself of the techniques I've learned, and mostly forgotten. Then I found this gem!

What luck for me as it covered many of the methods I knew, and some I honestly had never heard of. This struck me as strange since I am in a perennial top rated Ivy League MBA program. I brushed up on the old standbys like SWOT, Porters and ratio analysis, and also reviewed some other useful ones like strategic group analysis and STEEP. I ended up using about a handful of these on the exam. And it worked! I got the highest mark on the exam and the prof remarked that my solution was the best one he had seen in terms of being backed by solid analytical support.

I only wish I had this book several semesters earlier. It would also have helped me on several other courses I took. I won't be selling this book too quickly though. Instead, I'll be taking it with me to my new job as a management consultant for one of the large strategy boutiques in nearby Boston. I've also let a few of my first-year friends know about it since it will give them a leg up for their next year in our program.

The only problem now is that the word about this book is getting out and it will no longer give us a competitive advantage! Maybe my Profs were right when they said that advantages weren't really sustainable after all! Still, I'd rather know and use this stuff well. I'd recommend this book for any MBA student who needs to provide analytical support for their course or project work. Just don't tell every other student about it, okay?

Great Reference - Just in Time, April 9, 2002 - Reviewer: Heath C. Sturt (from Down Under)  

I just received this book a couple of days ago, and am very glad that I did! I had previously read another book by one of the authors and the other author is a well-known CI consultant from my home country. For those of you not already in the know, yes we have some world-class authors in addition to our world-class athletes.

As a consultant, I am always doing analytical work for my clients and have often had to search around for material to support the techniques that I frequently used. Well, my searching and scrounging days are over now that I have this handy guide! I put this book to immediate work on a couple of projects I am doing and can tell you that it has already returned the purchase price several times over in the amount of time it saved me from having to dig up information from a variety of sources about the included techniques.

The book does some things none of the other previous sources I used did by providing both the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques as well as a detailed "how to" apply them step-by-step with actual examples. This is unique to my knowledge as the sources I have used nearly always give just a few paragraphs on the technique and little if any background as to their unique characteristics. Thank you to the two authors for doing us a favour on that aspect.

I also appreciate that the book includes coverage of 24 different techniques. I have used about ten of these over the last few years, and had heard of several of the other ones but hadn't yet applied them in a project. The coverage of each technique is pretty thorough to be sure, but some (like financial ratio and statement analysis, management profiling) will obviously get used more frequently than others (like S-curve analysis). Also, the authors provide approaches that have been tested in the real world, which is better to my mind than book-length theoretical treatises that sometimes accompany applications of these methods.  

I will be buying spare copies of this book to provide for my subs so that I can be sure they will have guidance for properly utilizing these techniques. I think I may also get a few for some of my clients so that they can tell I haven't conjured up my findings on their projects, but actually based them on rigorous techniques.

Last but not least, I wonder and hope that these authors will do another text in the future that will provide coverage of additional techniques in the manner that they have accomplished with this book.

About time! A Practical and Sound Book on Analysis, June 16, 2002 - Reviewer: A Reader from London, UK

I got this book last week and have been working through it ever since. The book is not meant to be read straight through. Instead you can use it if the need arises. It covers 24 methods of analysis, probably more than I'll ever need, but it is good to know they are here just in case I do need to apply one I hadn't considered or even heard of before. Its approach is both useful from a conceptual point viewpoint, in that it describes where the technique came from and what it was designed to do. It is also helpful from a practice view in that it gives much discussion, and often figures and examples too, on how to actually apply the methods in a step-by-step fashion. I hadn't seen such a practical book on analysis methods before this one and can only say bravo to these authors!  

May 1, 2002 - Reviewer: A Reader from Dallas, TX USA

I'm using this book as support in my consultancy assignments. I agree with the other reviewers that it has many useful methods presented in a unique way. The FAROUT thing confused me at first, but it makes sense once you actually start using it. Now I refer to it before reading the chapters. This is the best book I've seen yet covering analysis methods and should most any consultant who does analysis work.

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