On October 4, 2011, Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It, will be published by Crown Business. Written by Adrian Slywotzky with Karl Weber. In my opinion, it is one of the most valuable and will, over time, become one of the most I influential business books ever written.
It takes full advantage of the breakthrough revelations generated by dozens of major research projects that seek answers to questions such as these questions:
• During the decision-making process (e.g. making a purchase), what role does reason play?
• What role do the emotions play?
• By what process can it be determined what people want even if they don’t know it?
• Which companies have most effectively created demand for what they offer? How?
• Precisely how and why is demand “a modern alchemy”?
• What is the “Achilles heel” of creating or increasing demand? Why?
• What is Netflix’s “two-hundred-year-old secret”?
• How to “get smarter faster” about what consumers do and do not want?
Slywotzky and Weber provide a brilliant analysis of what the research reveals, citing dozens of real-world examples of what the demand principles offer and how to develop mastery of them.
To read my first interview of Slywotzky, please click here.
To read Curt Finch’s interview of him, featured in the June (2011) issue of Inc., please click here.
Adrian Slywotzky is a Partner of Oliver Wyman, a leading global management consulting firm. Since 1979, he has consulted to Fortune 500 companies from a broad cross-section of industries, working extensively at the CEO and senior executive level for major corporations on issues related to new business development and creating new areas of value growth. Adrian has written several books on strategy and growth, including Value Migration, The Profit Zone, and The Upside. BusinessWeek named The Profit Zone one of its Top 10 Business Books of 1998. The Upside was on the Financial Times list of Best Business Books of 2007. Adrian has been a keynote speaker at a number of senior executive conferences, including the Microsoft CEO Summit, the Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek CEO Conferences, and CFO Magazine and Conference Board conferences. The Times of London has named Adrian one of the top 50 business thinkers, and Industry Week has named him one of the six most influential management thinkers. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School.
Karl Weber is a writer specializing in business, politics, and social issues. He has collaborated with Adrian Slywotzky on four previous books, including The Upside and How Digital Is Your Business? Karl has also collaborated with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and author of Creating a World Without Poverty, and he edited the best-selling movie companion books Food Inc. and Waiting for “Superman.” He lives with his wife Mary-Jo Weber in Irvington, N.Y.