James Kalbach has an interesting review of Subject to Change, the new book by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, Todd Wilkens and David Verba, which all work at Adaptive Path.
It opens with a reference to Cluetrain, then explains how the Subject to Change’s authors advise companies to focus on empathy with the user, “deep customer understanding” and stuff like that. Looks good.
I like the closing pull-quote, which points in a VRM direction:
As markets, people’s lives, and the world are becoming more complex, many of the old, easy answers to business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.
The problem is, you can perfect all approaches and practices on the sell side; but if all the responsibility for the relationship with the customer is on the seller’s side, we still have a one-sided system. The customer needs to be equipped too. That’s what VRM is about.
Well put and I would go further and say that when the demand side gets equally equipped, we will see the supply side fragment into a peer production creation market.