Spooked
Espionage In Corporate America
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Imagine your main business competitor building a world-class, satellite-equipped "war room" to secretly scope out and monitor your progress developing international ventures. Incredible? Imagine your classified product prototype mysteriously landing on the market under a brand name belonging to your archrival. Astounding? This isn't the story line from the latest John le Carre novel; this is modern-day corporate America -- and it's full of secret agents and operatives, stealing and selling your intellectual property for profit. Peopled by riveting characters displaced from now defunct post-Cold War agencies, Spooked exposes a fascinating tapestry of real-life corporate spying occurring within publicly traded companies such as Dow Chemical, Avery Dennison, 3M, Sony, Motorola, and dozens of others. Adam Penenberg, top investigative journalist for Forbes, and Marc Barry, founder of a Manhattan-based corporate-intelligence agency, uncover and describe in thrilling detail some of the greatest corporate-espionage capers of all time. A brilliant expose, Spooked unravels the truth and hypocrisy behind the multi-billion-dollar corporate-intelligence industry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paranoia levels will shoot through the ceiling among those who read this riveting report on the growing number of companies that spy on their competition in the U.S. Penenberg, an investigative journalist for Forbes, and Barry, founder of a corporate intelligence agency, argue that, in an environment of blistering competition, the edge belongs to the company with the best information on its rivals. In-house spy units, Penenberg and Barry claim, are cloaked behind doors with division titles like external development, market research and strategic marketing and, therefore, can't be accurately counted. Nevertheless, they contend, a clear indicator of growth in the new corporate-spy industry is the emergence of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, which sets ethical guidelines and standards of conduct for the industry and reportedly has 7,000 members. In the tradition of John le Carr , the industry has already developed its own colorful lingo for its various types of snoops, ranging from "the librarian"Dwho only searches publicly available sources of informationDto the "trade-show cowboy," who assumes a false identity to skulk around conventions. Penenberg and Barry report hair-raising tales of corporate skulduggery in loving detail, including how companies like Motorola and Avery Dennison have reaped huge benefits from their corporate-intelligence investments.
