LEGO? building bricks and toys. Intricate treasure maps with color markers. Creative imagination run riot. Play. Not your usual bag of tools for puzzling through the serious management challenges, demanding client values and the growing complex of technologies, which make up the new consumer experience. In this groundbreaking new book, Lewis Pinault -- author of the infamous expose Consulting Demons -- again draws back the curtain on the professional services industry. This time he reveals the latest cutting-edge findings set to revolutionize the consumer experience: the amazing relationship between innocent play and complex technologies and how the growing importance of our creative power as consumers is redefining the multitrillion-dollar consumer industry. Pinault turns from exposing the pitfalls of the "old-guard" consulting industry to highlighting the best professional services and technology firms and exploring the emerging developments and intriguing personalities defining the Play Zone: Johan Roos, Cliff Dennett and the team developing and supporting LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY trade; use LEGO bricks to express and advance the revolutionary language of 3-D metaphor to instigate new patterns of thinking through the intuitive power of play.

John Caswell's Contextual Frameworks trade; resets and aligns entire enterprises and industries against a unique understanding of consumer wants and needs, rendered in captivating works of business art. The immersive environment of the Play Zone, where biometric, radio-frequency and adaptive computing technologies converge to bring us to the "Internet of Everything." By integrating the latest findings from the fields of complexity science and customer service and management, and rendering them simply and logically, Pinault has created a system of six principles that offers a whole new means of cutting through complexity -- principles that can be successfully applied to any management and social setting to unleash the power of play in all aspects of the consumer experience. Filled with entertaining stories, larger-than-life characters and eye-opening revelations, The Play Zone will guide readers through a boisterous crowd of important new ideas so that they can connect with consumers like never before.