ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book like this one involves contributions from many people.

First and foremost, we would like to thank our partners and colleagues at Bain & Company, who have helped us develop the ideas expressed in these pages. One of the joys of working at Bain is that we all continue to learn so much from each other. In particular, we’re grateful to the members of the firm’s editorial board—Wendy Miller, Paul Cichocki, Rob Markey, Patrick Litre, Phil Schefter, James Root, and Alan Bird. This group read early drafts of the manuscript on planes and over long weekends and helped us shape and refine our message. We valued this input enormously.

Our research team—Ludovica Mottura, Shih-Yu Wang, Bart van den Akker, Elizabeth Schlossberg, and Joanna Zhou—contributed in countless ways to the preparation of this book. They kept us honest, and they kept the trains running on time—no small feat with a project of this magnitude. Without their commitment and focus, we might still be debating early drafts.

Our editor, Melinda Adams Merino, and the entire team at Harvard Business Review Press encouraged us to take on this project and have guided us along the way. They constructively challenged our insights and pushed us at all the right times. The book is much stronger as a result. HBRP has been a beacon of integrity and innovation in business publishing over the years, and we’re proud to be associated with it.

The dedicated team at the Economist Intelligence Unit was instrumental in helping us prepare and execute the survey research at the heart of this book. We appreciated their professionalism and ability to translate our ideas into a practical and informative questionnaire.

Our in-house editors, Paul Judge and John Case, took our occasionally cumbersome prose and turned it into something worth reading. If you find our presentation clear, concise, and interesting, much of the credit should go to them.

Our families—Bob Camp, Karen Salmon, and Aidan, Chloe, Celeste, and Marcus Garton—were endlessly patient, tolerating and even encouraging our obsessions and our nights-and-weekends hours over the many months that it took to complete the manuscript.

Finally, no acknowledgments would be complete without a hearty thank-you to the many clients that we have been privileged to serve over the years. If we have anything to offer them in this book, it is only fitting, because we have learned so much from all of them.