Matching Services to Markets

This book begins an adventure wherein the author outlines for us the particular shape our minds impose on that journey; he takes as his analytic, the human sensorium: the panoply of sensory channels (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) we use to grasp our world. His primary insight is that our sensorium does not, beyond immediate social groups, present smooth, mirror-like vistas of our socially networked world. Contrariwise, he shows that this uniquely human array of channels presents a mosaic of disparate inputs with subtle fissures and sutures between and among them. That more sophisticated view of our sensory apparatus allows him to describe with great practicality, the fissured, segmented architectures we inject into our enterprises and, above all, our markets. These insights particularly illuminate the revolution reshaping our understanding of the basic couplet of value exchange driving markets: Buying and selling. In this revolution a more telling focus on services as catalysts of value exchange is supplanting the traditional terms: goods and product, as the architecture of that very human sensorium broached above modulates value exchange across the chain of institutional need in markets. Armed with this novel set of insights, we come away with a far better sense of what is happening Òoverhead,Ó as we work out our missions and careers amid our socially constructed edifices: enterprises, institutions, and their battlegrounds, our markets.