This work is an account of intrigue and espionage in the offices and boardrooms of today's corporations. Imagine your main business competitor building a world-class, satellite-equipped "war room" to secretly scope out and monitor your progress developing international ventures. Incredible? Imagine your classified product prototype mysteriously landing on the market under a brand name belonging to your archrival. Astounding? This isn't the story line from the latest John le Carr novel; this is modern-day corporate America - and it's full of secret agents and operatives, stealing and selling your intellectual property for profit. Peopled by characters displaced from now defunct post-Cold War agencies, "Spooked" exposes a tapestry of real-life corporate spying occurring within publicly traded companies such as Dow Chemical, Avery Dennison, 3M, Sony, Motorola, and dozens of others.;Adam Penenberg, top investigative journalist for Forbes, and Marc Barry, founder of a Manhattan-based corporate-intelligence agency, uncover and describe in detail some of the greatest corporate-espionage capers of all time. "Spooked" unravels the truth and hypocrisy behind the multi-billion-dollar corporate-intelligence industry.

You read a book, you recommend it to a friend. That friend tells another friend. And another... until the book becomes this year's word-of-mouth sensation. This is the first to analyze the power of the 'pass-it-on' phenomenon, introducing us to the architects of the mightily efficient, money-spinning model known as the Viral Loop - the secret behind some of the most successful businesses in recent history. Outfits such as Google, eBay, Flickr and Facebook all employ the model at their core; all have seen their stock valuations skyrocket within years of forming. The genius lies in the model's reliance on replication: what's the point of using Facebook if none of your friends can see your profile, or using Flickr if you can't share your photos? Where's the joy in posting a video on YouTube if no one watches it? In creating a viral product that people want, need and desire, growth can, and will, take care of itself. Find out why the Loop will catch us all up, sooner rather than later...

Imagine your main business competitor building a satellite-equipped "war room" to secretly monitor your new ventures. Imagine your classified product prototype mysteriously landing on the market under the brand name belonging to your archrival. Impossible? This isn't a story line from the latest spy thriller, it's modern-day corporate America. Spooked thrusts readers into a clandestine world-where business means war and information is worth stealing.Through narrative accounts of corporate spies within companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Motorola, Spooked dramatically brings to life one of America's fastest-growing industries: Corporate Intelligence. In this page-burning expose, Adam Penenberg and Marc Barry uncover and describe in thrilling detail the alarming regularity of espionage in industry. They offer an unsettling portrait of America's publicly traded companies, and unravel the truth and hypocrisy behind the multi-billion dollar corporate intelligence industry.