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.
 
As process-consultant-extraordinaire-cum-Experience-Economy-provocateur, 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 Excursions, 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.”)
 

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