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

In his latest, business writer and consulting firm director Slywotzsky (The Profit Zone) seeks a formula for managing risk as neat as a calculator equation and as powerful as, say, Steve Jobs turning an iMac design flaw (no CD burner) into perhaps the biggest consumer success of the digital age-the iPod. To do this, Slywotzky partitions the uncertainty of doing business into seven risk categories: project failure, customer drift, transition failure, competition, brand errosion, industry slippage and corporate stagnation. Using timely real-world examples (Toyota's Prius turnaround, Samsung's refurbished image), Slywotzky shows how confronting threats directly-from market competition to personal fear-can turn them into stepping stones to success. Slywotzky's project autopsies can prove enlightening, but the author muddies his case with spurious attempts at mathematic precision, assigning an entirely hypothetical probability of success to each stage of a project (i.e., Toyota's cautious moves reduced the Prius's probability of failure from 95% to 20%). Though largely useful as a guide to common business threats, Slywotsky's attempts to quantify the unknowable parameters of risk may lead readers to conclude, paradoxically, that success depends on irrational factors like chance and paranoia just as much as any other.