In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert beautifully personifies ideas. She describes them as dormant beings that exist in the spaces between us, searching for nothing more than a human host to bring them to life. An idea may tap you on the shoulder, and you may ignore it, only to see it brought to life by a competitor in another country. The idea you ignored simply kept looking for a willing human host.
Elements of what you have read in this book had their inception points while I ran product teams at Tiny and Scrunch and worked on projects with WordPress and IBM. These early idea seedlings were further grown during my PhD sabbatical, which allowed me the intellectual luxury of learning more deeply about behavioral economics, psychology, design, and experience. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues and friends from this time for the hundreds of conversations and experiments that helped me to shape tomorrow’s ideas. More recently, I have had the privilege of working with over 80 of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s best export customers. This singular opportunity, overlaid with the challenges of remote work imposed on us all by COVID-19, helped to accelerate and refine 20 years of thinking into what is now the patent-pending ADORE processTM. Thank you, Alan, Glen, Gabrielle, Greg, Pam, Katie, Hamish, Stuart, Christine, Vanessa, and Ben, for your support and for the unique privilege of working with your progressive customers and team.
Sincere thanks to Prof. Naresh Malhotra, Senior Fellow, Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education and Research and Regents’ Professor Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) for his feedback and direction during the course of preparing this manuscript, and to Scott Isenberg, Business Expert Press, for your guidance and support. No doubt this is only the first of our work together. A big thank you to Karina Harrison and Greg Harrison for their insightful comments and review of the early manuscript, and to Prof. Alexander Manu for perfectly pointed feedback at critical junctures as the book was evolving.
On a personal note, a huge thanks to my parents, Basia and Michal Andrusiewicz, who showed me that there is value in learning, exploring, traveling, dreaming, and doing, even in the face of unknowns; and a heart full of gratitude to my partner in work and in life, Steve White, for listening with patience, cooking with love, and making all of the ideas brighter with his boundless optimism and creative energy.