Confidential: Business Secrets - Getting Theirs, Keeping Yours
People say the darnedest things. They tell you how much money  they make, how well their company did in the last quarter, what it'll  take to undercut their latest bid on a government project or to  undermine their marketing efforts. All you have to do is ask.John Nolan, a 22-year veteran of international espionage who is  currently involved in corporate intelligence-gathering, shows you how  to ask, what to ask, when to ask, and whom to ask. The methods can be  as simple as deliberately making a misstatement--"The toothpaste  division sure missed its projections this quarter"--and getting  someone who knows better to correct you, in the process supplying you  with the information you want about his company's inner workings. Or  they can be as complicated as patiently and doggedly piecing together  tiny scraps of information from a number of sources. Whichever you  resort to, Nolan shows a conversational method for ensuring that the  person dispensing the information doesn't even remember he or she gave  it out. No, it's not hypnotism; it's starting and ending a  conversation with generalities, and discussing specifics only in the  middle, the part of a chat that most people won't recall.Confidentialcould be useful to anyone who needs information  about a rival, or who needs to protect his or her own company's  secrets. Nolan illustrates his points with examples from business (how  Johnson & Johnson gathered intelligence that protected its Tylenol  franchise from a rival product) as well as fiction (Appendix A is  dedicated to the techniques used by Sherlock Holmes to elicit  information). The result is an entertaining book that may take your  business to a more intelligent level.--Lou Schuler--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.