Unleash Different

Book excerpt: If you discovered a new market comprising 53% of the world’s population, would you act to invest in it? There are 1.3 billion people around the world who identify as having a disability. When you include friends and family, the disability market touches 53% of all consumers. It is the world’s largest emerging market. Unleash Different illustrates how companies like Google, PepsiCo, and Nordstrom are attracting people with disabilities as customers and as employees. Replacing “nice to do” with “return on investment” allows market forces to take over and the world’s leading brands to do what they do best: serve a market segment — in this case, the disability market. Business managers will come to understand how taking a charity-oriented approach to people with disabilities has failed, what action is required to capitalize on the world’s biggest emerging market, and how their organizations can grow revenue and cut costs by attracting people with disabilities as customers and talent. Rich gives the reader a peek into how he rose from a Canadian school for “crippled children” to manage $6 billion for one of Wall Street’s leading firms. He makes it easy to relate to the business goal of serving disability — because he has actually done it.