John Nolan · HarperBusiness, 1999 · 359 pages
Uncover Your Competitors' Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly — and Protect Your Own
Intelligence training rewritten for people who sell things. Three roughly equal parts: how to draw information out, how to run that as an operation, and how to stop it being done to you.
This book is still in copyright and I do not have its text. So unlike a digest of a public-domain book, nothing here is checked against the book itself. It is built from five sources I opened and read: the publisher's authorised excerpt, a long interview with the author, a training deck that teaches his method by name, contemporary reporting on his firm, and the verified contents page.
Every quoted claim carries a tag naming its source. The linking prose, the summary and the judgements about what aged well are mine and are not tagged — treat those as my reading, not as the book. If you already own a copy, point me at it and I will rebuild this against the real text.
Three parts. The third is the first two turned around and pointed at you.
His publisher bio says 22 years in intelligence collection and counterintelligence special operations. He then sold those methods to companies. The argument: most of what you want is already in someone's head.
We do it legally and ethically. We don't steal information, bribe people, bug their conference rooms and executive suites, or hack into their computers.
HIS WORDS, FROM THE BOOK
This is the line he says separates his trade from spying. You may keep a client's name confidential. You may not pretend to be someone you are not.
we follow a standard that requires us to identify ourselves by our true names, and by our company.
HIS WORDS, FROM THE BOOK
A question tells the other person exactly what you want, and people remember being questioned. A conversation that drifts does not feel like collection, so nothing closes up.
a process which… avoids direct questions and employs a conversational style to help reduce concerns and suspicions… in the interest of maximizing the flow of information
TAUGHT AS HIS METHOD
People remember the start and the end of a conversation clearly and the middle vaguely. So the small talk goes at both ends, and the one thing you came for goes where memory is weakest. A 2022 training deck teaches this under the heading “Nolan’s elicitation methodology”.
confine CI topics to the middle of
TAUGHT AS HIS METHOD
A boaster gets drawn into one-upmanship. A precise, introverted specialist gets told something slightly wrong, because he cannot leave an error alone. Same goal, opposite move.
if it's someone who is boastful, I'm going to want to get him involved in one-upsmanship
HIS WORDS, ELSEWHERE
He keeps a running file on people and updates it after every contact, so that two years later he can pick up where the last conversation ended. That is the work most people will not do.
The best collector is a connector. As soon as he meets somebody, he starts filling in the boxes on his Rolodex about that particular guy.
HIS WORDS, ELSEWHERE
The talkative person fills every silence and guesses wrong. The quiet person can sit in a pause until the other person fills it. He says 'often' — the article warns against turning it into a stereotype.
An introvert is often going to be a magnificent elicitor because he knows he has to be thinking before he says anything.
HIS WORDS, ELSEWHERE
Trade shows get their own chapter. The person a company puts on its booth is picked for being outgoing and competitive — exactly the personality that talks too much.
The booth maven is going to be a competitive, aggressive guy. That's who you want there, but he's got a push-to-talk button painted on his chest, as far as I'm concerned.
HIS WORDS, ELSEWHERE
Chapters 6 and 7 are titled 'Your First Six-Pack of Elicitation Techniques' and 'Your Second Six-Pack'. Twelve primary named techniques; variants may push the count higher depending on how you slice them.
Ch. 6 — Your First Six-Pack of Elicitation Techniques (p. 54) · Ch. 7 — Your Second Six-Pack of Elicitation Techniques (p. 80)
THE BOOK'S CONTENTS PAGE
Part III asks who wants your information, what routes they would use, and how long it stays valuable — then tells you to attack yourself and find out.
Ch. 16 — Just How Vulnerable Are You to Your Rival's Collection Activities? Test Yourself, Attack Yourself (p. 221)
THE BOOK'S CONTENTS PAGE
The authorised excerpt is unambiguous. He rejects ruses outright: “We don't misrepresent ourselves, conduct ruse interviews, or have specially molded masks to impersonate others.” The standard is your true name and your true company.
A July 1999 report on his firm — the reporter's paraphrase, not Nolan quoted — describes analysts approaching targets under pretexts, posing as customers or prospective employers. Critics quoted there called false identities unethical even where legal.
Both are sources I read myself. I cannot reconcile them without the book. Quietly picking the flattering one is the failure this format exists to prevent.
The rest, one line each, tagged the same way.
1999 is pre-LinkedIn, pre-everyone-posting-their-job. Its central move — assemble harmless fragments into something valuable — got far easier after it was written.
Getting something by talking is not automatically lawful. US law counts misrepresentation and inducing someone to break a confidentiality duty as improper means. The 1996 appendix is out of date and the 2016 Defend Trade Secrets Act changed the civil picture. Take current advice.
Rapport, preparation, listening, matching the approach to the person — human behaviour, not technology. Trainers were still teaching his methods by name in 2022.
Trade-secret protection still turns on taking reasonable steps to keep a secret. Stamping everything confidential is not one. His “attack yourself” chapter is the practical version.
Transcribed from the library catalogue record. Chapter titles are shortened where they run long; appendices D–F are listed without page numbers because the record does not give them. This is the one piece of the book's own structure I can show you.
| Ch. | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Front | ||
| Pref | What Do Intelligence Professionals and Sharks Have in Common? | p. xi |
| Intro | All History Is Merely Prologue on the Business Battlefield | p. xv |
| I · Eliciting the information you want | ||
| 1 | Transfer Intelligence Community Techniques to the Commercial Sector | p. 7 |
| 2 | What Good Does It Do to Ask Questions? | p. 15 |
| 3 | Exploding Old Myths and Succeeding at Elicitation | p. 22 |
| 4 | Human Characteristics in Elicitation | p. 34 |
| 5 | Who Is Most Susceptible to Elicitation — And Who Is Supposedly Most Immune | p. 44 |
| 6 | Your First Six-Pack of Elicitation Techniques | p. 54 |
| 7 | Your Second Six-Pack of Elicitation Techniques | p. 80 |
| II · Business intelligence collection | ||
| 8 | Intelligence for Decision Makers | p. 101 |
| 9 | Operational Business Intelligence — Actually Doing It | p. 109 |
| 10 | Intelligence Begins at Home: Internal Sources | p. 118 |
| 11 | The World Can Be Your Oyster: External Sources | p. 131 |
| 12 | Trade Show / Conference Intelligence Operations | p. 145 |
| 13 | Developing Personality and Psychological Profiles of Business Rivals | p. 172 |
| III · Protection | ||
| 14 | Operational Counterintelligence: Keeping Score and Keeping Them Out | p. 190 |
| 15 | Who Are Those Guys and Why Are They Doing Such Terrible Things to Us? | p. 205 |
| 16 | Just How Vulnerable Are You? Test Yourself, Attack Yourself | p. 221 |
| 17 | Developing Countermeasures for Your Dining and Dancing Pleasure | p. 240 |
| 18 | Misinformation, Disinformation, and Deception | p. 260 |
| 19 | Putting It All Together | p. 271 |
| Appendices | ||
| A | The Elicitation Techniques of Sherlock Holmes | p. 277 |
| B | Legal and Ethical Aspects of Competitive Intelligence | p. 286 |
| C | Sample Competitive Intelligence Guidelines | p. 302 |
| D | The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 | p. — |
| E | Cases and scenarios | p. — |
| F | Forms and documentation | p. — |
Eleven quotations matched word-for-word against documents on disk, and checked that Nolan is the nearest named speaker — a red team caught one line I had credited to him that belongs to Joe Navarro. It is gone.
Nine claims rest on pages I read but cannot re-match — and nothing at all against the book itself.
A research finding claimed his firm was named in a corporate-spying scandal. Independent sources did not confirm it, so it is not here.
Point me at a copy you already own. The pipeline that built the Machiavelli digest checks every quote against the real text and prints its chapter.
The bottom line: 20 claims, 11 quotations machine-checked against documents on disk, 9 attested to pages read this run, and 0 checked against the book itself — because it is in copyright and I do not have it. 3 quotes were cut for not matching, 1 was cut for being said by someone else, and 1 research claim was dropped for failing verification.