ADRIAN SLYWOTZKY

ADRIAN SLYWOTZKY

Adrian Slywotzky is a partner at Oliver Wyman, a global corporate strategy and operations consulting firm. Since 1979, he has consulted to Fortune 500 companies in a broad cross-section of industries, working extensively at the CEO and senior executive level for major corporations on issues relating to new business development and creating new areas of value growth.

His most recent book is Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It. He is also the author of  The Upside, about managing and profiting from strategic risk, and the co-author of The Profit Zone, Profit Patterns, and How Digital Is Your Business?, as well as The Art of Profitability and Value Migration. Business Week named The Profit Zone one of its Top 10 Business Books of 1998.

As 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 the Microsoft CEO Summit; the Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week CEO Conferences, and CFO Magazine and Conference Board conferences. He has written for numerous publications including Harvard Business Review, 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. 

Speech topics

Turning Strategic Risk into Growth Opportunities

Adrian Slywotzky shows how it is possible to achieve standout returns and growth while reducing the level of risk your business assumes. Adrian brings strategy from 50,000 feet down to the trenches, moving from broad, eye-opening ideas about risk to specifics about how to win in any industry by employing the full repertoire of countermeasures for managing strategic risk and transforming it into opportunity.

Creating the Upside

Adrian Slywotzky takes the worst possible business risks - your customers change their preferences and leave you for competitors, the margins compress in your industry, a technology shift makes your product obsolete, your brand erodes - and shows that through astute anticipation and management of those risks, you can turn the threats on their head and create enormous upside potential.

What We Want, What We Get, And How the Connection Drives the World Economy

Adrian presents an analysis of the business, economic, social, psychological and sociological reasons that cause demand for a product or service to rise, fall or never happen. Adrian uses a wide variety of stories about companies and individuals and how they understand markets, customers, and consumers in many dimensions in order to meet one of the great challenges of the new economic order.

Books

Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It

In Demand, Adrian Slywotzky provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications—not just for people in business but also for social activists, government leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators.

The Upside: The 7 Strategies for Turning Big Threats into Growth Breakthroughs

In The Upside, Adrian Slywotzky provides bold and original ideas for growth breakthroughs as well as the practical tools to use Monday morning.

How to Grow When Markets Don't

Outlines the challenges faced by most companies to sustain growth, offering advice on how to meet specific customer needs, retain investor loyalty, make effective acquisitions and partnerships, and achieve independence from a CEO.

The Art of Profitability

Describes the various patterns of business operation that lead to profitability through a series of conversations in which an expert on profits teaches a student.

Profit Zone: How Strategic Business Design Will Lead You to Tomorrow's Profits

The book that answers the most fundamental question in business: Where Will I Make a Profit Tomorrow?

Value Migration: How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition

According to Slywotzky, "value migration" is the flow of economic and shareholder value away from an increasingly outmoded business design toward others that are better equipped to create utility for customers and profit for the company.

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