Ben Gilad, arguably one of the top five practitioner-scholars in the competitive intelligence arena (the others, in my opinion, are Jan Herring and Leonard Fuld, his partners; Babette Bensoussan in Australia, and Mats Bjore in Sweden), makes a very important contribution with this book. It is for business leaders what Kristan Wheaton's book, "The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload" was and is for government leaders.
The author's earlier book, "Business Blindspots: replacing myths, beliefs and assumptions with market realities", remains one of the single best references for business intelligence professionals, together with Babette Bensoussan and Craig Fleisher's "Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition." Although not available from Amazon because of its UK origin, it is easily purchased by going to infonortics.com, where a free chapter can also be viewed.
I regard this book as being primarily for the manager of the business enterprise rather than the business intelligence professional, primarily because it is very helpful in breaking through old mind-sets and suggesting that very specific attitudes and activities must characterize those endeavors that wish to avoid costly surprises. I would say that this book, together with Yale business author Jeffrey Gerten's book, "The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda for Business Leaders", are "must reads" for the senior executive who desires to not just survive but to excel in the 21st Century.
The author, who has a solid understanding of the history of surprise in military or national security circles, makes the point that surprise does not occur for lack of signs that can be detected, but for lack of a culture and mind-set open to seeing and understanding those signals.
The book combines survey results from professionals attending the Academy of Competitive Intelligence (the single best offering in the world) with real-world accounts, "gray box" supplementals, and "manager's checklists" at the end of each chapter that are in essence an executive summary of the chapter.
This is a 2-3 hour read, and well-worth anyone's time, but especially well-worth the time of the executive who is willing to consider the possibility that they are grossly unaware of real-world external threats to their future bonuses, and that there might be some relatively simple low-cost solutions to dealing with the threat that require, rather than vast sums of money, a change in mind-set.