Kirk is also the author of nine books on strategy, competition and competitive intelligence, including the best selling Complete Guide to Competitive Intelligence (4th edition 2006, 5th edition 2010).
The Complete Guide to
Competitive Intelligence
5th Edition, 2010
Over the years, many CI professionals have asked, "How do you successfully pull the complete competitive intelligence process together". This book answers that question.
It takes the competitive intelligence professional through all the necessary steps to accomplish the task, including assessing their company's needs, developing a plan, conducting the research and finally packaging the intelligence for the decision makers. It even touches on peripheral issues such as counterintelligence and ethics.
Published by Leading Edge Publications,
1st ed. 1998, 2nd ed. 2002, SCIP ed. 2005, 4th ed. 2006, 5th ed. 2010
Kirk Tyson has also written numerous papers drawn from his experience in the research and consulting fields. Here are his most recent white papers. Feel free to request and use them, but please cite the source: Kirk Tyson, http://www.PerpetualStrategist.com.
Perpetual Strategy as an Essential 21st Century Process for all Companies
January 2010
"As we move forward from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age, success will come to those companies that build a knowledge base about their competitive environment and a perpetual strategy process to keep it continuously updated."
– Kirk W. M. Tyson
Linking CI and Strategic Management
March 2009
All things considered, the CI groups within many companies are doing a good job of gathering and analyzing intelligence these days. However, most CI professionals have encountered some difficulty in linking the intelligence with strategic and tactical decision-making processes. One reason, in fact the primary reason, for this difficulty is that intelligence coordinators assume that decision-makers know what to do with the information given.
The Ethics of Competitive Intelligence
April 2008
When 95% of everything you need to know is in the public domain,
there's no need for cloak and dagger tricks.
Someone once told me, "Anyone who claims their employees have never violated ethical guidelines is either a liar or a hypocrite." This statement is very strong but probably not too far from the truth. Close to 100 people have told me of ethics violations within their companies. Evidently, these incidences form just the tip of the iceberg. We in the competitive intelligence business often quote World War II Navy Captain Ellis Zacharias, author of Secret Mission: The Story of an Intelligence Officer: "There is very little that confidential agents can tell that is not accessible to an alert analyst who knows what he is looking for."
Reengineering Competitive Intelligence
August 2007
While presenting a recent talk to an industry conference, someone asked me the most basic question relating to our field: What is competitive intelligence (CI)? This was a surprising question at first, considering the presentation was fairly sophisticated and the audience — mostly seasoned CI professionals-well up to the task of understanding it. After some thought, I realized it was actually an excellent question because CI has changed so much over its brief history. What is CI now, was not CI 10 years ago. In fact, CI now is not the same CI as two years ago. We need to ask ourselves on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis: What IS CI? What should it accomplish? What is its overall objective? We need to adjust our mindset to one of continuous reengineering. We cannot design the CI process just once and think that it will work smoothly forever.