Picasso and Van Gogh can now be seen in the best museums in the world. Yet in his whole life Van Gogh only every succeeded in selling one painting. Picasso, on the other hand, sold everything he produced, which was a lot, grew immensely wealthy and no one ever dared say that his painting was commercial. What was commercial was his intelligence.
This is one of the many examples Luís Bassat uses in this book to explain the nature of commercial intelligence, why it is necessary and how we can develop it if we have not had the luck to be born with it.
He also calls on statements by great present day exponents of commercial intelligence, such as Isak Andic (Mango), Emilio Botín (Santander), Peter Brabeck (Nestlé), Paco Daurella (Cobega-DABA), Shelly Lazarus (Ogilvy), Ingvar Sviggum (Ford) and Kees van der Graaf (Unilever).