There is so much good to say about this book. This is the rare book that you'll end up highlighting, sticky noting and filling notebooks with your ideas after reading it and then you'll promptly read it again. This is a hands on, get dirty kind of book, if you use it for more than intellectual entertainment you'll be busy for quite a while building a model that works. But, if you take the time to actually do the work, implement the findings and look at the feedback, you'll take your business to the next level. X is the one book I'll give to all my clients this year and that will be part of their required work with me. So if it is so great, what only four stars? I'll get to that. What I think X does best is connect experience and brand. We've all known for a long time that a brand is simply a collection of experiences that people have with a product or service that they can bring to mind but few are able to adequately make that connection intentional. This book is the roadmap to becoming the brand of choice, the brand of conversation, the brand of sharing, the brand people buy. It doesn't matter if you are a service company, a product company, brick and mortar or online, the principles all apply. Throughout the book you'll find many roadmaps that require you to actually do some work to come to the right conclusions for your business but you will if you do the work. The book is also full of well articulated case studies that show the outcome of the work for other companies, you'll find many you can relate to. The book also does a great job of showing you how to anticipate your customers wants and needs and get ahead of the curve in delivering experiences they desire but also experiences they don't even know they want yet and that is the competitive advantage this book gives. The book is composed of 25 sections. It begins with What Is X and continues through Design, Persona, Storytelling and finishes with section 9.0, This is water - You'll have experienced the journey fully to finally understanding what is meant by the idea of customer experience but more importantly you'll know how to create them for your clients. The section called The Grid will be of particular importance and may be one of the most profitable pieces of the book. In this section you'll develop a customer map where every ever leads to excellence at every connection. This is where designing your experience starts. The next very important segment of the book is journey mapping, it outlines the journey that your client takes throughout their lifetime with your company. We've often explored the idea of lifetime value of a customer but rarely do we explore what the journey looks like for the customer and where along the journey we can delight and surpass their expectations with experience. Now here is the hard part and where the book fails and I'm not blaming the author for this at all, but it is the experience of reading the book itself. The book is full color, printed on heavy stock and that is the problem. As you are reading the book you'll come across pages that have a very dark background making them very hard to read in all but the best of light. And, if you want to use this as an actual working book, you'll have to add sticky notes to the book because on many pages you can't make notes in the margin because of the page color. This seems to be an emerging trend with a lot of books but if I can't easily read it and easily highlight it, it loses a star. For a book all about experience, the experience this one delivers is not quite there but that is completely trumped by the information inside. It is worth the aggravation to get the good stuff. This book has the possibility of helping you create dramatic change in your business, change that will lead to raving fans and profitability. It isn't a fast read and it will take work but it is your roadmap to exceptional customer experiences. This is a must read for every business owner, customer service team and CEO.