• Home
• Request a Speaker
• About Us
• Contact Us

Joseph Pine

• Internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies

Programs

Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage

Markets of One: Creating Customer-unique Value Through Mass Customization

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition

Speaker Information

Once upon a time in a career far, far away, Joe Pine worked for IBM in the frozen tundra of Rochester, Minnesota. For the launch of the AS/400 computer system he created a group that brought customers and business partners into the actual development process. Because of this innovative activity, customer needs were met more exactly and quality was significantly enhanced - factors that contributed greatly to IBM winning the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 1990.

One of the lessons that Joe learned during this time was that every one of these customers was unique. After moving into strategic planning, this insight led him to read Stan Davis' seminal book Future Perfect. When Joe read the chapter on mass customizing, he had an epiphany - he says "The skies opened up and the angels sang!" - that led to placing the idea of efficiently serving customers uniquely into the vision and strategy of IBM Rochester. Shortly thereafter, he struck up a friendship with a guy named Jim Gilmore and in January 1996 their firm, Strategic horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. Pine & Gilmore's raison d'etre is to discover what is going on in the business world, make sense of it, and then develop frameworks so that companies can respond intelligently to the fundamental changes happening in the competitive environment.

Simply put, Joe specializes in helping people see the world of business differently. He did that first by promulgating the concept of Mass Customization in his first book, which detailed how organizations didn't have to provide the same thing to everybody, but could give individual customers exactly what they want, at a price they're willing to pay. The Financial Times chose the book as one of the seven best business books of 1993, and in 1995 it won the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing and Research. He and Jim followed this up by editing a collection of Harvard Business Review articles entitled Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization, published (naturally) by HBSP in 2000.

More recently, Joe is once again helping people see the world of business differently as he and his partner Jim discovered that in the Experience Economy, people increasingly question what is real and what is not. And more and more, they want the real from the genuine, not the fake from the phony. Authenticity, therefore, is becoming the new consumer sensibility - the primary buying criterion by which people choose what to buy, and who to buy from. This resulted in their most recent path-breaking book, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, and was chosen one of the top ten business books of the year by Amazon.com and featured in a cover story in TIME Magazine on "10 Ideas that are changing the world", provides a way of thinking about authenticity in business plus a set of tools and techniques for rendering authenticity in any company.

When he's not writing, that is. Joe describes that as his first (vocational) love, taking fingers to keyboard in order to vigorously wrestle with the ideas, first, and only then to describe them to others. He further sharpens these ideas and frameworks in the speeches, workshops, executive education, and ongoing consulting he performs with Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. While a terrific stand-up speaker who knows both how to keep an audience entertained and how to impart actionable ideas and frameworks that listeners can use to change their companies, Joe loves nothing better than small, intimate gatherings where other people become full participants in coming to grips with the ideas, corralling the frameworks to their own use, and committing to a course of action that benefits their customers, and therefore their businesses.

Products