At last

April 18, 2012 in Berkman, Books, Cluetrain, Future, Harvard, Places | 8 comments

Amazon is now shipping my new book, The Intention Economy. Yes, the Kindle version too. They even have the first chapter available for free. You can “look inside” as well.

Thanks to Amazon’s search, you can even find stuff that’s not in the index, such as the acknowledgements. Those include a lot of people, including everybody who has ever been active on the ProjectVRM list.

The book isn’t for me. It’s for customers. All customers, that is. Not just the ones buying the book. The first paragraph of the Introduction explains,

This book stands with the customer. This is out of necessity, not sympathy. Over the coming years customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where and when—even how much they’d like to pay—outside of any vendor’s system of customer control. Customers will be able to form and break relationships with vendors, on customers’ own terms, and not just on the take-it-or-leave-it terms that have been pro forma since Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

That’s what the VRM development community has been working toward since I launched ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center in 2006. Now that community is getting kinda large. Here at the European Identity and Cloud Conference (#EIC12) in Munich, I have met or learned about a bunch of VRM developers I hadn’t known  before. Pretty soon I won’t be able to keep up, and that’s a good thing.

The book has four main parts:

  1. Customer Captivity
  2. The Networked Marketplace
  3. The Liberated Customer
  4. The Liberated Vendor

In a way it follows up on work begun with The Cluetrain Manifesto. The subtitle there was The End of Business as Usual. The subhead for The Intention Economy is When Customers Take Charge. Hey, when one thing ends, another must begin. This is it.

We’re not there yet. If The Intention Economy speeds things up, it will do its job.

 

 

 

8 comments

  1. Ben Werdmuller’s avatar

    Ben Werdmuller on April 18, 2012 at 9:08 pm

    Congratulations! I’m looking forward to reading it – the piece on the liberated vendor is particularly interesting to me. I’m in love with your statement, “free markets need free customers”.

  2. Howard Greenstein’s avatar

    Howard Greenstein on April 18, 2012 at 9:24 pm

    Can’t wait to have you autograph it, but it might mark up my kindle screen 🙂 Congrats, Doc! Excited to read this.

  5. Bret Tobey’s avatar

    Bret Tobey on April 19, 2012 at 11:32 am

    Outstanding, just in time for me to prep an IIW session, building a VRM-driven startup!

  6. Dave Taht’s avatar

    Dave Taht on April 21, 2012 at 1:47 am

    Bought it. Read it. When’s the next one due out?

    /me ducks

  7. Michael Stern’s avatar

    Michael Stern on April 21, 2012 at 9:09 pm

    Congrats, Doc. I’ll pick up a copy.

  8. Andrew Leyden’s avatar

    Andrew Leyden on April 24, 2012 at 9:21 pm

    Congratulations on this. Will grab a paper version because I’m still old school about that sort of thing.

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