James Gilmore

As co-author of The Experience Economy: Updated Edition (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), Jim Gilmore literally wrote the book that spawned worldwide interest in experience design, customer experience management, and experiential marketing. Tom Peters has called The Experience Economy “a brilliant, absolutely original book,” and 800-CEO-READ named it one of “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.” The volume is now published in 19 languages.

Gilmore’s book, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), contends that businesses must learn to manage authenticity as a distinct business discipline. In March 2008, Time magazine featured the core of this thinking on authenticity in its cover story on “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World.”

Gilmore’s most recent book is Look: A Practical Guide for Improving Your Observational Skills (Greenleaf Book Group, 2016). A prequel to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, the book describes a similar metaphorical tool using “Six Looking Glasses” to foster greater innovation through improved observation.

Gilmore is co-editor of Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). The book’s selection of ten HBR articles serves as a primer on the subject of “efficiently serving customers uniquely” via mass customization capabilities.

Gilmore’s ideas have been featured in numerous articles on business strategy and innovation for such publications as Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Investors Business Daily, among others.

Gilmore is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career with Procter & Gamble and then spent over ten years consulting with Cleveland Consulting Associates and Computer Sciences Corporation, heading CSC Consulting''s process innovation practice. He is a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, where he teaches a one-week course on the Experience Economy. He is also a Visiting Lecturer in Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, where he teaches an intensive course on cultural hermeneutics. He previously served as the 2002-2003 Dean Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Co-chair at the College of Family & Consumer Sciences at Iowa State University.