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Module 1 of 13
Orientation · the battlefield
Competitive intelligence is the discipline of reading a competitor from the outside — from what can be seen, inside the law, early enough to act. It is not espionage, and the difference is not a matter of degree: espionage takes what is hidden; intelligence reads what is public and sees more in it than the competitor meant to show. This course is built the way the rest of the academy is built: a small periodic table of what an outsider can observe, provably complete; a hierarchy in which each rung is composed from the one below; a fixed template for every atom; and a thesis the whole course argues for. The thesis is that competitors reveal strategy through observable moves, and by the end you will be able to take a firm you cannot see inside, place it on a map, read its intent from what it does rather than what it says, and warn of its next move before it is announced — with the provenance of every fact on file.
The news-clipper
Sets alerts on every competitor's name and reads whatever arrives. Files press releases, analyst notes and conference talks as "intelligence". Reports what competitors say — the new vision, the strategic priority, the market they are "doubling down on" — and is surprised by every launch, every price cut and every hire, because none of them was announced. Under pressure to know more, drifts toward the grey zone: the friendly call to a competitor's employee, the customer asked to forward a proposal, the "survey" that is really a pretext. Cannot say, for any fact in the file, where it came from or how sure it is.
The battlefield-reader
Starts from a question the business needs answered — will they enter our segment, can they hold their price, who will they buy — and collects only what bears on it. Reads six classes of public signal and knows which class answers which question. Places the competitor on a map and reads its moves — hiring, pricing, filings, footprint — as the revealed strategy, and treats what it says as one signal among six, to be tested against the rest. Keeps a short list of indicators with thresholds and knows, before the launch, that it is coming. Refuses the grey zone not from timidity but because a fact whose provenance cannot be shown is worth nothing in the room where decisions are made.
The difference between the two is not access; the battlefield-reader has exactly the same sources. It is vocabulary and discipline: a fixed alphabet of what can be seen, a map to put it on, a way of reading intent from behaviour, and a rule for where to stop. This course is that vocabulary, taught to the letter.
Everything an outsider can legitimately learn about a firm belongs to one of six classes, defined by what kind of thing the signal is rather than by where it was found. A public fact is either something the firm has recorded with an authority, something it offers for sale, a person it employs in a role, a customer or channel relation it has, something it has said, or an asset it has built. There is no seventh kind: anything else is either inside the firm — which is the boundary, and not the business of this course — or an inference assembled from these six.
What the firm has filed with an authority: company registrations and accounts, funding rounds and shareholdings, patents and trademarks, litigation, regulatory approvals, property. Slow, sparse, and the only class that is attested — someone was liable for its accuracy.
What the firm sells and on what terms: products and features, prices and packaging, contracts and SLAs, documentation, release notes, trial mechanics. The most direct expression of strategy, because an offer is a bet the firm has already placed.
Whom the firm employs, in what roles, and how that changes: job advertisements, org shape, leadership appointments and departures, skills sought. Read in aggregate and in professional capacity only — the flow of roles, never the private lives of the people in them.
Who buys, through whom, and what they say: reference customers, case studies, partner and reseller lists, marketplace listings, reviews, wins and losses against you. The class that tells you whether the offer is working.
What the firm says about itself: marketing, press releases, executive statements, investor presentations, conference talks, the wording of its job advertisements. The loudest class and the least reliable alone; its value is in being tested against the other five.
What the firm has built: locations and leases, domains and infrastructure, technology stack, supply chain and logistics, capacity and headcount by site. Capital committed is intent revealed; footprint moves before the announcement does.
The completeness argument, stated once. A firm exists in public through six kinds of act: it registers and reports (records), it sells (offers), it employs (people), it transacts and partners (customers and channels), it speaks (communications), and it builds (footprint). Every public fact is the trace of one of these acts. Facts that are none of them — the plan in the drawer, the number before the filing, the conversation in the room — are inside the firm, and the boundary rules of Module 2 say they stay there. What the discipline adds is not a seventh source but inference: a hiring pattern (S3) plus a domain registration (S6) plus a trademark (S1) is a product launch read six months early. The rest of this course is those inferences, in order.
The persistent visual of this course is a map. Two axes — whom a competitor serves and what it trades off between price and capability — and on them the competitors as tokens, including your own firm. Every module adds a layer: the signals appear as dots; the profile turns dots into a token; the moves read from six months of hiring, pricing and filings become arrows; the indicators become tripwires; the warned move becomes a dashed arrow pointing where the competitor has not yet gone. Reading a competitor is reading the arrows. What the competitor says is a label on the map; what it does is the arrow, and where the two disagree, the arrow is the strategy.
The load-bearing idea
Moves reveal strategy; statements describe it. A firm can say anything; it can only do what it has paid for — the hire, the lease, the price, the filing. Read the arrows, test the labels against them, and treat disagreement between what a competitor says and what it does as the most valuable signal on the map.
This course puts the law and ethics of collection on the bottom rung, before any technique, for a practical reason rather than a pious one: a fact obtained by misrepresentation, by inducing a breach of confidence, or from a person who did not know they were being collected from, is not merely wrong — it is unusable. It cannot be shown to a board, cannot survive a discovery request, and cannot be repeated by the next analyst. Module 2 sets out the six rules; every atom after it carries the same three-part test in its Technique: public source, no misrepresentation, provenance recorded. Practices in the grey zone are named in this course so that they can be recognised and refused, never so that they can be used.
Each module from the second onward dissects one rung into its atoms and treats every atom with the same six fields:
| Field | What it must contain |
|---|---|
| What | The definition, stated once and exactly, with what it is not, and one traced instance |
| Structure | The mechanism — always with a diagram: the signal or structure on the left, the reading or the curve it produces on the right |
| Technique | A numbered procedure you can run on a real competitor: where to look, how to read, how to record — with the legitimacy test built in |
| Properties | Its reliability, its lag, its characteristic errors and trade-offs |
| When / When not | The questions it answers and the questions it will mislead on |
| Where it fits | Its place in the hierarchy — what it is composed from, and what composes it |
Modules end with a side-by-side comparison of their atoms, the key insights, two exercises with answer keys, and a worksheet you copy into your own case. Module 12 assembles the function; Module 13 runs the whole ladder on one competitor and closes with the master equation and a self-assessment.
A competitor, in one month: (a) registers a trademark for a product name you have not heard of; (b) advertises for four engineers with skills in a data format your customers use; (c) is described in a trade article as "focused on the mid-market"; (d) signs a lease on a warehouse in a region where it has no customers; (e) is listed as a new partner on a large platform's marketplace; (f) removes a pricing tier from its website. Assign each to a signal class, say which one is attested rather than merely observed, and say which one you would trust least on its own.
Hint: filed, sold, employed, transacted, said, built — and only one of the six has someone liable for its accuracy.
Module 2 draws the boundary before any technique: the six rules that separate intelligence from espionage — the public-domain test, no misrepresentation, trade-secret law, competition-law limits on what rivals may exchange, personal-data limits, and the provenance record — with the procedure for deciding, on a real case, whether a source may be used.
The six classes around the thing they describe. The competitor's interior — its plans, its numbers before they are filed, its meetings — is not observable and not sought; every arrow points inward from something the firm has had to make public in order to exist as a firm. Every fact in this course is one of these six kinds, and every question about a competitor is answered by knowing which kinds to read.
The ladder the sidebar follows. The boundary is the bottom rung, not an appendix: every signal is read inside it. Signals compose into a profile and a position; the position is where decoding starts; decoding produces the indicators that anticipation runs on; the function is what makes all of it repeatable; the case runs the whole ladder on one competitor. Nothing on a higher rung is explained by anything but the rungs below it.
The battlefield map, empty and full. Left: the frame — two axes chosen for the question, nothing on them yet. Right: the same frame at the end of the course, with one competitor read all the way through: signal dots collected, a profile token placed, the observed move drawn from what it did, and the warned move drawn from indicators that tripped before the announcement. The map is the course's argument in one picture.