Jim Gilmore
Jim believes you can ascertain much
about someone’s makeup by knowing that person’s favorite childhood
book – the one recollected as having been read over and over, again
and again, as a kid. What is that temperament-telling book for Jim? A little
something called Stop. Look. Listen. It’s no wonder that Sally
Harrison-Pepper, author of the definitive book on street theatre, Drawing
a Circle in the Square, calls Jim “a professional observer.”
Jim’s appetite for understanding the structural underpinnings to day-to-day
patterns of human behavior is insatiable. The result? Non-stop. Inquiry. Ingenuity.
His creative thinking is rooted in extraordinary business instruction and
work experience. Jim is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania and an alumnus of Procter & Gamble. Prior to co-founding
Strategic Horizons LLP with Joe
Pine, Jim was head of CSC Consulting’s Process Innovation
Practice. In that capacity he became a certified trainer in the Six
Thinking Hats and Lateral
Thinking techniques of Dr. Edward de Bono; at one point, Jim had trained
more people in the United States in the latter coursework than any other instructor
(a function of Jim integrating creativity skill-building into the process
redesign methodologies of his consulting practice).
Jim treats nearly everything as (what de Bono calls) an arising provocation.
A visit to Build-A-Bear Workshop® with his two young children leads to
Jim see experiential possibilities for “paying labor” (in lieu
of paradigms of paid labor and unpaid volunteer). Encountering a coin-spiraling
funnel experience at The Forum Shops in Las Vegas, with proceeds going to
a charitable cause, prompts Jim to coin the term “narcithropy”
(as opposed to philanthropy). Daily reads of The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and Cleveland Plain Dealer, serve
as fodder for uncovering underlying economic and societal trends at play today.
A magazine stand is his intellectual candy store.
Interestingly, Jim files his clipping in pure chronological order, not by
preconceived subject titles, so new news storylines can be ever reconstructed
as research. Jim uses such sifting and sorting as a means to simulate serendipity
as a deliberate creativity device. He employs many other self-developed techniques,
including occasional sleep deprivation as a means of intentionally fostering
“fuzzy thought” (an idea hatched when reading David Gelernter’s
The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought).
Jim’s passion for lateral thinking and unrelenting energy are touchstones
for helping companies uncover the next truly big idea. His longest-standing
client, Whirlpool, has engaged Jim since the late 1980’s. Go google
“Whirlpool Insperience,” “Whirlpool Real Whirled,”
“Whirlpool Quality Express,” and “KitchenAid Experience
Greenville” for a sampling of the string of big ideas that Jim instigated
there.
Today
Jim labors to help numerous industries and companies add value to their economic
offerings. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows sponsored
by professional associations, industry councils, and magazine publishers,
as well as at internal company events and executive education programs. To
no one’s surprise, some meeting planners have also retained Jim to help
design the overall conference or seminar experience at which he is engaged
to speak. Jim’s consulting for clients includes ongoing advice, episodic
workshops, company-specific Learning ExcursionsEM
, or emergency interventions.
Jim’s thinking has been published in many of the world’s leading
business publications, including the Harvard Business Review, The
Wall Street Journal, and Investor's Business Daily, among others.
With Joe Pine, he is of co-editor of Markets
of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization,
a compilation of ten HBR articles accompanied by a Pine & Gilmore introduction
(Joe and Jim contributed four-elevenths of the volume’s contents) and
co-author of The
Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage,
both published by Harvard Business School Press.
The latter has now been released in eleven languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian, German, Dutch, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian – but not French. (Jim says, “Phooey on the French.”) An updated edition was released in July 2011 with new content and exemplars.
Jim has also turned his attention to the next phase in the maturing Experience Economy -- how in a world filled with ever more mediated and staged experiences, an increasingly unreal world, consumers are now making decisions based on how real they perceive various offerings to be. The outflow of those ideas are found in his latest book penned with co-author Joe Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, published by Harvard Business School Press in late 2007.
The book was honored as one of the Top 10 business books of the year by Amazon.com editors. And of note, TIME magazine soon after featured Authenticity among its "10 Ideas That Are Changing The World" cover story, for which Jim and Joe were extensively featured.
Jim is an Adjunct Lecturer at The Graduate School of Business Administration
at the University of Virginia. As is his custom, Jim treats every new client
engagement (or in this case, university appointment) as impetus to select
some new book to read: consulting for Batesville Casket yielded the delightful
discovery of essayist Thomas Lynch; retention by the Professional Audio Retailers
Association (PARA) to craft a conference talk entitled “What If Your
High-end Customer Is a She” prompted a read of Faith Popcorn’s EVEolution; a year-long experience design project for a major software
firm uncovered Robert Riefstahl’s Demonstrating to Win! And
what book landed in his lap as a result of Jim’s fellowship at UVa?
Why, Gary Wills’ Mr.
Jefferson’s University. (Jefferson, of course, fancied the
French.)
Jim previously served as the 2002-2003 Dean Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Co-chair
at the College of Family & Consumer Sciences at Iowa State University.
He has also lectured at Case Western’s Weatherhead School of Management,
Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, and Rochester Institute of
Technology’s College of Applied Science and Technology.
On a more personal note, Jim’s musical tastes tilt toward what partner
Pine calls “singers who don’t sing,” namely the likes of
Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, David Gray, and Wayne “The Train” Hancock.
Jim enjoys Coke over Pepsi, Vans over Nike, and anybody over the New York
Yankees. For over fifteen years, Jim has been a Cleveland Indians season-ticket
holder; his favorite admission-fed experience occurs each summer on Saturdays
at Jacobs Field in Section 140, Row R, Seat 10. A few years ago, Jim’s
wife bought him an “Authentic” 100th Anniversary Tribe jersey.
Jim thought (laterally, of course) about what name and number to have sewn
on the back and decided to affix his own: it reads “140-R” atop
a larger number “10”!
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