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INTRODUCTIONxx

G Swift-Lite Charcoal, a UK company originally established to sell
charcoal to tandoori restaurants, which discovered a burgeoning
market in the Middle East with a product for smoking hookah pipes.

G Charles Dunstone, founder of Carphone Warehouse, who realised
that his company was not just about providing economical mobile
phones, it was also about demystifying the massively complex and
opaque charging structures operated by the telephone networks.

G Katharine Hamnett, fashion designer, who overturned conventional
marketing by barring some buyers and distributors from visiting her
exhibition stand in order to generate interest and provoke ‘scarcity
value’.

G Scott Cook, developer of Quicken personal finance software, who
acted on his insight that the product’s greatest competitor was the
pencil, not another software package.

G Best Friends Pet Resorts and Salons, whose introduction of
hospitality-industry-level customer service, including state-of-the-art
customer relationship management software to track the pet-guests’
every trait, need and preference, transcended the boundaries of the
conventional boarding kennel and vindicated the research finding
that 90 per cent of pet-owners view their pets as family members.

G IDEO, the American ideas factory which has picked up Thomas
Edison’s baton and has made brainstorming practically a religion.

G Hewlett-Packard, which used the analogy of the food service
industry to reconfigure its global supply chain for the HP DeskJet
Printer.

G Sarah Tremellen, founder of mail-order lingerie company
Bravissimo, who had to establish a dummy geographical presence to
circumvent a supplier boycott engineered by a local competitor.

G Stelios Haji-Ioannou, famous for extending the easyFormula to other
markets which were similar, but different, to the airline market and
whose easyCinema concept was almost strangled at birth by
competitive suppliers.

G Karan Bilimoria, who developed the Cobra brand of beer to become
so powerful that its production could be moved successfully from
Bangalore to Bedford.

G Howard Schultz, who founded Il Giornale, a string of speciality
coffee stores in Seattle modelled on the typical Italian espresso bar.