Adrian J. Slywotzky

“If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realised . . . we were too slow . . . our design was flawed . . . we were operating from faulty assumptions . . . the market changed . . . we had the wrong people . . . our technology didn’t work . . . our strategy was unclear . . . our costs were too high . . . our organisation sabotaged us . . . the competition was tougher than we thought . . . we reorganised ourselves to death . . . we fought among ourselves . . . our strategy was flawed . . . our strategy was good but our execution was lousy . . . we ran into unexpected bottlenecks . . . we misunderstood our customers . . . we were short on resources . . . the economics didn’t work . . . we got killed by internal politics . . .”
― Adrian J. Slywotzky, Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It

“It’s a completely different business model!” he exclaimed. “You need different skills, different people, different systems, different databases. There’s also less psychic satisfaction, less glamor, and less visibility compared to the glamor of the original equipment business. As in ‘I sold ten auto insurance policies today.’ Big deal! Or ‘I sold ten elevator maintenance contracts today.’ Big deal! You don’t get great press notices or win trips to Hawaii for that.” “No,”
― Adrian J. Slywotzky, The Art of Profitability