Fred Rogers
President & CEO, Audio-Tech

Dear Fellow Executive:

So what do FedEx, Sanka, Disneyland, the telephone, Pokemon, Southwest Airlines, PalmPilots, and Jell-O have in common?

For that matter, what do all of those things have in common with TV dinners, AOL, bras, galvanized nails, MS-DOS, shrink-wrapping, Starbucks, pantyhose, Prozac, Jiffy-Pop, Kinko's, and endoscopy? What unites them all?

Answer: They all represent innovation at work.

And most made their authors or investors millions, even billions, in profits.

When they emerged, they embodied radically new products, services, inventions, business methods, or value propositions. They represented novel technologies, distribution models, business processes, manufacturing techniques, applications, or consumer crazes. Often, they completely changed the rules of the game.

And helping you and your company do what their owners did - in today's ferociously competitive markets - is what our revolutionary new program Innovation@Work is all about. I'm writing today to you, as an Audio-Tech subscriber, to make sure you don't miss a stunning, fleeting and totally risk-free opportunity to learn from world-class experts exactly what it takes to amass the kind of wealth and profits that only come to great commercial innovators.

The people behind the innovations above somehow saw something that wasn't there before. They came to it through a "flash of genius," a lightning bolt of corporate brainstorming, a triumph of trial-and-error experimenting, or a vindication of methodical R&D… but they saw the future before it existed.

These winners recognized an unmet need - and met it with something totally new:

• Fred Smith saw that the glacial U.S. Postal Service moved too slowly for business, and in 1971 answered with Federal Express. By pioneering a new process of sorting and delivering letters and freight, FedEx offered guaranteed next-morning delivery - and revolutionized an industry that had been run like a monopoly for centuries.
• In 1954, Gerry Thomas had 520,000 pounds of excess turkey on his hands. He also recognized that American mealtimes suddenly were centering around the television, although he couldn't afford one. Then he saw some airline food trays being tested. The inventive result: Swanson TV Dinners.
• New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob sought a more appealing alternative to her unflattering whalebone corsets, and in 1913 patented the brassiere. The rest is commercial history.

With Innovation@Work you can do it, too.

Innovation@Work will show you how fortune-making innovation happened then, how it's happening in start-ups and corporate teams today - and how you can make it happen in your own firm right now!

Here at Audio-Tech, we've always prided ourselves on creating great products to sharpen executive minds.

Well, Innovation@Work is by far the very best value as well as the most career-transforming product we've ever offered - a complete video, software, print and especially, audio learning program that quickly teaches executives and their teams how to generate more creative ideas, implement them as business innovations, and convert those innovations into bottom-line profits!

It's based, in part, on an analysis of more than 2,000 new product/service launches over the last 25 years. One inescapable conclusion: Companies can no longer coast on yesterday's innovations. In fact, the average corporation today earns one-third of its revenues and 60% of its profits from products and services it did not sell as recently as five years ago! But innovation is not simply about new products. It's also about new business processes, management techniques and marketing methods.

The diverse fortunes of the innovators we've studied reveal how companies can drive an idea quickly and successfully through each step of the innovation process - as well as how you can easily avoid the costly, sometimes fatal, mistakes most companies have made. Failure to innovate, as well as wrong-headed innovation (like Motorola's Iridium wireless phone debacle) destroys companies. Forty percent of the major corporations that dominated American business in 1975 no longer exist today!

You don't have to be an Edison, Bell or Jobs to win at innovation.

As we'll clearly show you through Innovation@Work, you and your team don't need to be the progenitors of an idea in order to grow your company's wealth. In fact, the big money often eludes the prime movers! But every winning firm must learn and understand how innovative implementation works - how to capitalize on and exploit an idea, original or borrowed, for maximum gain.

• Visicalc's inventors couldn't effectively market their breakthrough technology. It was Lotus that figured out how to improve and exploit Visicalc's concept to reach the vast spreadsheet market with its 1-2-3 product - grossing billions along the way (until Microsoft's platform dominance displaced Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel).
• A tired old commodity like coffee suddenly became big news in the Roaring '20s when Postum (now General Foods) acquired Sanka and its then-new decaffeination process - and once again in the 1980s when Howard Schultz showed an affluent country how to enjoy gourmet brews at Starbuck's.
• Southwest Airlines didn't invent the 737, but Herb Kelleher built a powerhouse company by rethinking air travel - cutting overhead and frills while delivering the lowest fares, fine service for budget-conscious flyers, and the fastest turnaround times in the industry.
• Pierre Omidyar invented neither the auction nor the Internet, but he seized the opportunity to combine them into eBay, one of the only profitable B2C Internet businesses out there.

No, it doesn't take the genius of Tom Edison, Alexander Bell, or Steve Jobs to make enormous amounts of money through innovation - just the understanding and mental discipline to identify the opportunities and exploit them effectively! Innovation@Work will show you how.

But maybe you're not really reaching for the brass ring. Maybe you're just not interested in exerting the energy it takes to hit a commercial grand slam, the way Howard Schultz, Fred Smith, Mary Jacobs, Ray Kroc, Steve Case, Michael Dell, Debbie Fields, and countless others have. Maybe you're cozy and comfortable in your existing market. Maybe you think innovation is something you can afford to ignore.

Well, think again:

Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company's name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can't dodge the bullet. You're going to have to shoot first. You're going to have to out-innovate the innovators.

- Dr. Gary Hamel, the world's leading innovation expert.

Whether you're reaching for the brass ring, looking to hold a steady course, or playing defense right now - you must focus like a laser on innovation, or your business will die.

A one-of-a-kind response to the #1 threat and opportunity facing your business

To meet the challenge, you can buy and pore over books, search for articles, hire pricey consultants, and spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours out of the office in seminars. But I assure you, you'll find absolutely nothing out there that brings together everything you and your business need for innovation, like Innovation@Work does. I know - I've seen and studied it all.

This unique executive learning program delivers the crucial content your whole team needs right now, in a time-efficient, economical, educational and entertaining way you and your managers can absorb outside the office, during your downtime.

You'll spend an extraordinary hour face-to-face with the top innovation strategy guru I quoted above, Gary Hamel, via a terrific VHS video called Creating the Future. (This video alone retails for $95 - but save your money by reading on!)

After Gary sets the tone for you on innovation strategy, you'll move to Winning at Innovation, our unprecedented, comprehensive 14-hour audio course you can efficiently absorb on your commutes each day - and apply every time you step back into the office! This one-of-a-kind audio course and its accompanying study guide, packed with research, insights, and practical guidance from some of the world's most respected experts on the nuts and bolts of real-world innovation will teach you:

• The 6 surefire ways to tell whether an idea is a real-world money maker or a money burner;
• The 5 guidelines for selecting the right idea-generation method for specific situations, every time;
• The 4 distinct categories of innovation - and the secrets of effectively managing each;
• The 6 biggest reasons new products fail - and why almost every company is blind to them;
• How to kill weak ideas early, before they sap money and energy from your business;
• The 15 key success factors for new products;
• Turbo-charged "Best Practices" that can cut your launch time in half;
• Thomas Edison's amazing secret for innovation that can be applied in just about any company;
• The 5 secrets of selecting the right people to be members of your high-performance innovation team;
• Little-known secrets of how Wal-Mart, Intel, Southwest Airlines, and other "best of breed" innovators manage innovation - and how to apply their secrets to your own situation;
• Six proven methods for minimizing launch risk;
• The 3 most valuable sources of innovative ideas - and why most companies never use them;
• How to design every aspect of your group's "innovation sessions" to maximize value delivery;
• 5 foods to eat (and 5 to avoid) to maximize your own creativity;
• A little-known innovation technique so powerful that, uncontrolled, it can overwhelm your firm with a glut of great and disruptive ideas!
• And much, much more!

Even if business schools offered this kind of power-packed content and cutting-edge information in a post-MBA executive course, it would cost you over $2,000! But you simply won't find anything as thorough as Winning at Innovation at any university or seminar - and you just wouldn't want to go that route anyway unless you had money and classroom time to burn!

With this pathbreaking course, you can absorb all 14 hours sequentially as you drive, or access any key innovation topics you'd like, whenever you like, from the start. It's the best, most efficient way to learn everything you need to know to excel at innovation.

A multi-faceted, multi-media answer to what you need, NOW!

To supplement the Winning at Innovation audio course and study guide, you'll also receive The Innovator's Audio Library, our top 14 business book summaries on innovation. Like no one else can, we have distilled the essential ideas from top minds like those of Hamel, Clayton Christensen, Michael Schrage, John Kao, and others into 10 hours of stimulating audio you can process in your car, on the plane, or on the StairMaster.

This brilliant collection of pre-eminent titles and thought on capitalistic creativity, invention, and exploitation of winning ideas will change your thinking - and very likely, your firm's fortunes - forever. In book form, the Library would cost you over $350 - and scores of hours of high-concentration reading. You can get it all here in digestible, memorable form, plus much more, for less!

Next, we'll help you sprint with Innovation@Work's Digital Power Tools, CDs jammed with the 16 most potent Windows-based software applications available for stimulating and guiding business creativity, decision making, and managing the innovation process. These are fully-working, amazingly useful trial versions of the 16 applications real businesses find most useful for imagining, incubating, and implementing their commercial innovations. Potentially priceless help for your business!

Then, to ensure you grasp the power of ideation software and techniques like Lateral Thinking, you'll join other executives for an eye-opening VHS video session on Creative Thinking. This presentation features Lynda Curtin, an expert on the creativity strategies of Edward DeBono, the world leader in the field.

Oh, and there's one other thing. If you order today, you'll also receive, absolutely free, a Deluxe Innovation@Work Portfolio Binder! This handsome binder stores, organizes and protects all of your Program components. Day after day, week after week, you'll turn to it for quick access to ideas, techniques, case studies, and guidelines to help remake your products, your company and your markets! (The binder bonus offer is good for a limited time.)

If you've been adding things up, you know you'd need to spend about $3,000 elsewhere just to approximate all the benefits you'll receive with Innovation@Work.

What would you pay to have the world's top innovation experts in-house, and on-call, 24/7?

But now, permit me to do some real boasting about this incredible program: Before founding Audio-Tech, I was a highly-compensated consultant to Fortune 500 firms, focusing my energy and effort on innovation. For most people innovation is just one aspect of their job and their career. For a select few, it's a full-time job: helping people generate breakthrough ideas, building and evaluating the business cases for those ideas, and coaching them though implementation of market rollout. For 15 years, I've had the pleasure of being one of those people.

I started with Andersen and Booz Allen before branching out on my own. My teams and I worked with General Electric, IBM, Wal-Mart, AOL Time Warner, S.C. Johnson Wax, Armco Steel, Goodyear, Cargil, Glaxo Smith Kline, Phillips N. V., Medtronic Corp, American Express, American Airlines, and dozens of smaller firms.

After working with clients on hundreds of innovations that reshaped entire industries, I've learned what works - and perhaps more importantly, what doesn't work. Now you can learn everything I know.

You've heard the old saw,

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

Typically, my team charged between $200,000 and $1.5 million in fees for a project. Back then, I charged $300 just to start talking with a CEO. We'd take everything we got at Harvard, Stanford and Chicago, plus a wealth of practical experience, and apply our considerable innovation expertise to each challenge at hand. We'd investigate, brainstorm, analyze, formulate a sound strategy, get our clients going… and then we'd "walk out the door" with all the basic innovation skills we'd brought in, awaiting our clients' next phone calls and fees.

With regard to innovation, we were definitely "giving our clients fish" - good fish, mind you, but just what they could use then and there.

With Innovation@Work, however, we're going to teach you to fish, eat and profit for a lifetime! In creating it, I've brought together my findings with those of some of the world's greatest innovation experts in an easy, enlightening and entertaining form that can be used in any business, regardless of whether you're trying to reinvent a process, produce a blockbuster new product, or realize a breakthrough marketing campaign for repositioning an existing product. Yes, you could easily save $200,000 in consulting fees on the first innovation success you achieve with help from me, Gary Hamel, Bob Cooper, John Kao, Mike Schrage, Clay Christensen and the rest of the great minds we've brought together.

However, this one-of-a-kind program will enable you and your team to grasp and retain the ideation techniques, best practices, and general innovation principles that top business consultants bring to the job when their clients call. And unlike what happened so often with my old Fortune 500 clients, the powerful, practical innovation skills you'll gain inside your company won't be "walking out the door" after your first new achievement!

Instead, your Innovation@Work reference materials and the in-house "Brain Trust" you'll develop with our help, will equip your firm to mark victory upon victory as you generate, implement and profit from the ideas that will dominate your markets. It's like having the world's top innovation consultants in-house and on-call, 24/7!

And now, here's how much it's going to cost you!

What's all that worth? As they say in those TV commercials, that kind of success is priceless. But Innovation@Work won't cost you $1.5 million, or even $200,000. It won't even cost you $3,000. How much then?

Answer: Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

That's right. Yes, we're a business. No, we're not a charity. Yes, the price tag for Innovation@Work is just $299 through 3/31/2004 to current Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries subscribers - less than half the normal $699 rate to the general public!

(And you have to admit, this $299 rate would be a microscopically small, trivial price to pay for even one big, innovative idea that sets your career on fire, sends profits soaring at your firm, or gives you the courage to make an entrepreneurial leap into a new venture that secures your personal future. If Innovation@Work helps you avoid just one little misstep in the innovation process - and believe me, there are plenty of swamps and pitfalls along the way - you'll recoup this modest price many times over. Why, $299 is a dollar less than my old hourly consulting rate, and far less than I'd be getting now - if I were still content to pass on the secrets I know to only one client at a time, rather than truly "give something back" by helping many businesses and personal careers at once through this unique program.)

But even that incredibly low price of $299 is not a cost you'll ever really bear - because Innovation@Work is essentially free to you as an Audio-Tech customer! What do I mean?

For a limited time only, we're making an amazing guarantee to you and all our other Audio-Tech customers: Just click here to order Innovation@Work today. Or call us at 1-800-776-1910. If this program doesn't pay for itself many times over - with more ideas, better innovations, and bigger profits for your company - simply return the package at any time in the next year for a 100% refund!

That's right. I'm so confident in this terrific new program, I'm guaranteeing it will pay for itself many times over, or your money back!

(And don't worry about normal wear and tear, scratches, dents, etc. I want you to get absolutely everything you can out of this program. If Innovation@Work doesn't make your firm money, simply send it all back, dog-eared, coffee stains and all, for a full, no-hassles refund.)

Don't dream about innovation...do it!

So don't waste another precious minute letting your competitors gain ground faster than you. "Time and tide," not to mention your markets, "wait for no man."

Don't imagine innovation will "just happen" inside your unit - unless you make it happen (with our help!). Everyday you sit there, waiting for the economy to turn around, or for a new opportunity to jump into your lap, some direct or indirect competitor is innovating.

Sooner or later that bullet with your company's name on it will find you …unless you shoot first. Don't let time run out on your fleeting opportunity, as an Audio-Tech customer, to order Innovation@Work right now, at less than half price, with absolutely no downside at all. Order Now!

Your marketplace is full of risks, with bullets flying everywhere, but my offer is 100% risk-free. Today, right now, start creating a future for yourself more rewarding, more wildly successful, than anything you've ever imagined before!

Sincerely,


Fred Rogers
President & CEO, Audio-Tech
Founder, Innovation@Work

P.S. Remember, a competitor's bullet is speeding toward your company at this very minute. Innovation is your only sustainable advantage, and Innovation@Work gives you everything you need to make it happen. It is the easiest, quickest, most entertaining and most affordable way to bullet-proof your business with the help and expertise of the world's greatest innovators. Order now online, or call us at 1-800-776-1910. New or current subscribers to Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries can get Innovation@Work for just $299 - less than half the normal $699 rate to the general public! And you have my personal, iron-clad, bullet-proof guarantee as president of Audio-Tech that Innovation@Work will boost your company's profits and pay for itself many, many times over. If it doesn't, simply return the program complete to us at any time in the next year, and we'll return every cent, no questions asked.