Acknowledgments
By all accounts, this book came together in record time. That was possible only by the heroic efforts of our contributors, reviewers, friends, and family.
A huge shout out to Todd Green, our publisher at Morgan Kaufmann, for his tenacity and perseverance in getting our proposal the air time it needed. This book doesn’t fit into neat categories and we credit Todd’s possibility thinking in finding a place for it in MK’s catalog.
To Nancy Frishberg, for her ongoing backboarding, immense optimism, and unparalleled social networks. Nancy has both witnessed the emergence of PrD from its very beginnings as well as nurtured many of the ideas we formalize in this book.
To our contributors of the case studies: Steve Sato, Steve Portigal, Evan Hanover, Anne Schorr, Janna Kimmel, David McKenzie, Chris Stapleton, Alisa Weinstein, Maggee Bond, Diego Bernardo, Amanda Geppert, Helen Wills, Janice Wong and Jaime Rivera. The time spent with us capturing their use of PrD and the subsequent reviews of our interpretation has been invaluable. These contributors have added color, dimension, and depth to what might have been just another dreary process book.
To our reviewers, Steve Sato and Tim Piwonka-Corle; your willingness to dive in when our concepts were still primordial showed great courage. That our sentences were incomprehensible couldn’t have made your jobs any easier. We want to acknowledge several other individuals who offered us important feedback and willingly volunteered to read this book in advance: Lynn Boyden, Steve Portigal, Dave Gray, Leah Buley and Jim Kalbach. In particular we want to recognize Joy Mountford for her enthusiastic support and her gracious contributions. Joy was the keynote speaker at Nancy and Leo’s 2004 conference in which PrD made its first public appearance.
To the production staff at MK, specifically Punithavathy “Punitha” Govindaradjane and Lindsay Lawrence, working with a group of professionals made our job so much easier. Your patience with two newbies to the publishing business was much appreciated.
This book’s graphic treatments were curated and influenced by our esteemed associate, Kimberly Buckley Hill, an artist, designer, and enormously talented professional we are honored to call our friend.
Last, and certainly not least, thank you to our families who at minimum tolerated our absence from movie nights, chores, and the acts of daily living. From Leo: Sue, I love you. Your support for my obsession is a true definition of love. To Ariella and Melina—I love you both. Hopefully it won’t take years before you crack this thing open. And lastly to brother Michael—you helped introduce me to customer-focused research over 20 years ago. With your enthusiastic embrace of Haiku poetry, I hope you will appreciate this one:
From Charles: Candace, I love you! Tatum, Henry and Jack, I love you! You guys are my world.
Naturally, none of these people are responsible for the errors, misstatements, wild assertions, and indefensible positions we promote in the pages that follow. All such egregious violations are ours and ours alone. We let this book go fearlessly into the world, knowing we are wrong.