Adrian Slywotzky
Partner, Oliver Wyman
Boston, MA
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. The Times of London has named Mr. Slywotzky one of the top 50 business thinkers and Industry Week has named him one of the six most influential management thinkers.
Mr. Slywotzky’s latest book, Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It (Crown Business, 2011) will be released October 4. He is also the author The Upside (2007), The Art of Profitability (2002), and Value Migration (1996). He is the co-author of The Profit Zone (1998), Profit Patterns (1999), How Digital Is Your Business? (2000), and How to Grow When Markets Don’t (2003). Business Week 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.
A frequent speaker on the changing face of business strategy and business design, Mr. Slywotzky has been featured at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and has been a keynote speaker at a number of senior executive conferences, including the Microsoft CEO Summit, the Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week CEO Conferences, and CFO Magazine and Conference Board conferences. He has written for numerous leading publications including Harvard Business Review, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company, Business 2.0, the Boston Globe, Sloan Management Review, the Journal of Business Strategy, Harvard Management Update, Investor’s Business Daily, and Sales & Marketing Management.
Mr. Slywotzky holds degrees from Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School.
Adrian's News Feed
How Symphonies Grew Strong Audiences By Killing The Myth Of The Average Consumer Marketing managers for major orchestras had always assumed that convincing people to give the symphony a try was the key to gaining subscribers. But it turns out the secret to unlocking demand for classical music--as for most products--is discarding the Myth of the Average Customer.
Updated Thu Oct 13, 2011
Building A Steep Trajectory Of Improvement: The Pret A Manger Case If you hope to attract enduring demand, you need to begin improving the same day your product goes on sale. Pret a Manger, the worldwide chain of fresh-food, urban sandwich stores, shows how it’s done.
Updated Mon Oct 10, 2011
The Ultimate Lessons From Steve Jobs, Teacher The well-deserved attention paid to the design of Apple products has tended to obscure the creative energy Steve Jobs invested in designing other elements of Apple. So what can we learn from Steve Jobs, Teacher? He was a great designer, all right. But his talent only began with the design of the product.
Updated Fri Oct 7, 2011
Triggering Demand: How Coffee-Maker Nespresso Turned Drips Into Gushers Nespresso, the product that lets you brew the perfect cup of espresso at home, has made parent company Nestle the leading seller of coffee in Europe. But that success was a long time brewing.
Updated Mon Oct 3, 2011
The Real Secret Of Kindle's Success Most attribute the runaway success of Amazon's Kindle to its super-readable E Ink technology. But if that were true, why didn't Sony's Librie succeed? The true explanation of the Kindle's triumph is something far less obvious--the behind-the-screen elements that make up a product's backstory. The same pattern pops up in one demand story after another: It's what you don't see that counts.
Updated Mon Sep 26, 2011
Hassle Maps: The Genesis Of Demand Successful executives all share an ability to experience the world through the eyes and emotions of customers, asking "What do I hate about this product or process?" They catalog every frustration, complication, and source of uncertainty. Then they work ruthlessly to eliminate or minimize each point on the "hassle map." The end result? Products that people love and competitors can't copy.
Updated Wed Sep 21, 2011
The Zipcar Case: Zipping From Very Good To Magnetic There's a fine line between very good and magnetic--a product that's irresistible to customers of many stripes, and preferred many times more than its closest competitors--and often the only way to cross it is to experiment and iterate.
Updated Fri Sep 9, 2011
The Six Secrets Of Demand Creation "Demand creators," a special breed who design truly exciting products, recognize the huge gaps between what people buy and what they really want--and use those gaps as a springboard to see differently. Here's how they do it.
Updated Tue Sep 6, 2011
Share on StumbleUpon
Share on LinkedIn