The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age

The premise of this book is that this is an information age, and the authors will show ways to prosper from that information. It's a worthwhile idea: if you know more than the competition does and know it more quickly, you're destined to win on the corporate battlefield. Unfortunately, though, the Friedmans (The Future of War), Baker, a law professor at Louisiana State Univ., and Chapman, founder and CEO of Financial Times Television in London, fail to deliver what they promise in the subtitle. They are correct that finding information is ""less a matter of sleuthing than of sorting. We live in a world of too much information rather than too little."" But they don't provide a systematic way to do that sorting. While their stories about the CIA's history and their own projects are interesting, what most managers need is a step-by-step, ""how to"" approach to turning raw data into useful knowledge. The appendix provides specific sources to draw on to facilitate the search for information. The text should have done more of that. (Nov.)