Acknowledgments

We take the approach that nobody is as smart as everybody, and, fortunately, we have a lot of smart friends and colleagues. We imposed shamelessly on them all in the service of this book, and they responded like champs. This book wouldn’t be nearly as good without their ideas and support. We thank and acknowledge them.

The place to start is with our former partners at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants—in particular, Adam Gutstein, the CEO; Mel Bergstein, the chairman; and John Sviokla, the vice chairman. They didn’t just offer freely of their thoughts and relationships. They also employ many, many smart folks and made nearly twenty of them available to us over the course of more than a year, to pound our data into submission and make it yield up its secrets. The members of the research team were: Teji Abraham, Ken Archer, Anitha Chalam, Michael Czyz, Devin Henkel, Vivek Khati, Prakash Natarajan, Ritesh Patel, Chris Rzymski, Paul Singh, Andrew Sofield, Ariel Soiffer, Lance Thomas, Sarah Warning, and Sara Xi. We hope they learned half as much from the collaboration as we did.

A great many phenomenally bright and experienced people also helped to make this book better. They didn’t have the time to spare, but they spared it anyway. They read the manuscript in detail. They offered stories. They helped sand the rough edges off our ideas. They offered insights into how to make our ideas more practical and useful. So, we’d like to heartily thank: Bill Abbott, George Anders, Dan Ariely, Aamer Baig, Les Ball, Vince Barabba, Gordon Bell, Mel Bergstein, Paul Blase, Dan Bricklin, Caroline Calkins, Marie Carr, Charlie Carroll, Kim Carroll, Tim Carroll, George Churchill, Doug Collom, Morgan Davis, Paul Demuro, Bill Dentino, Craig Forman, Jon Friedman, John Erik Garr, Bob Gilbert, Jack Greenberg, Kevin Grieve, Bernie Hengesbaugh, Pegeen Hopkins, Beth Jenkins, Alan Kay, Andy Kessler, Lisa Laing, Rick Leander, Janet Long, Andy Lippman, Don Listwin, Mark Maltais, Roger McNamee, John G. Morgan, Dean Nicolacakis, Frank Orzell, Tony Paoni, Rachel Parker, Karen Patton, Toby Redshaw, Anand S. Rao, Wes Richards, Dan Roesch, Tim Rohner, Kevin Salwen, Scott Shaull, Alan Siegel, John Sviokla, Jennifer Thatcher, Barbara Ullman, Chris Veit, Tom Waite, Tom Weakland, Eric Wilson, Darin Yug, and Marvin Zonis.

We also acknowledge the fine folks at Reuters, Thomson Financial, and Bankruptcy.com, who provided the raw financial data that fed our analysis.

Special thanks go to our agent, Kris “Tough Love” Dahl, at ICM. She worked us through a couple of iterations of our initial proposal, turning a vague idea into the book you have in front of you. Thanks, too, to Adrian Zackheim, our editor at Portfolio, and to his assistant, Courtney Young. Courtney’s insight and enthusiasm helped keep us going in those dark days when we had seemingly been at the book forever but weren’t yet in sight of the finish line. Thanks, as well, to the rest of the group at Portfolio and Penguin, especially Allison McLean and Will Weisser. They have helped us get out the word about what we hope will turn out to be an important book.

Finally, thanks to our wives and children, who put up with us during this lengthy project, much more than we deserved.