Pricing is a people business. What a company charges, whom it charges, when it holds firm and when it walks away: these are human decisions, shaped by judgment, incentives, conflict, and culture long before any model runs. And yet pricing rarely has a seat at the top table. It affects everyone but is owned by no one. Too often it is reduced to a technical exercise, or in the worst cases, guesswork.

Most pricing books teach you how to set prices. This book asks the harder question: whether your organization can actually execute the prices it sets. The literature is rich on method and remarkably thin on the human system that surrounds it, the ownership, structure, governance, and cross-functional collaboration across strategy, marketing, sales, product, finance, and operations that decide whether good pricing ever survives contact with the real business. This book positions the human system as its primary focus and treats pricing technique as contextual elements, not the other way around.

That argument matters more, not less, in the age of AI. Algorithms can optimize prices at remarkable speed, and propagate a mistake at the same speed with far less visibility. Correct a sales rep's mispriced deal and you have fixed one deal; a mispriced algorithm reaches thousands before anyone notices. Technology raises the analytical ceiling, but human judgment, alignment, and leadership still decide who wins. Drawing on real-world cases from B2B and consumer markets, this book gives pricing professionals, commercial leaders, and general managers the frameworks to rethink and build the people-centric systems that turn pricing into durable, profitable growth.

Provides a comprehensive framework for building peoplecentric price management systems Guides humanAI collaboration in pricing with practical frameworks for realworld application Reveals the human side of pricing, covering capabilities, organization, and processes

Autorentext

Dr. Jan Y. Yang is a globally recognized expert in pricing strategy and AI enabled monetization, with over 18 years of international experience advising B2B and B2C companies across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on China. He is the founder of PricingGoat, an independent advisory practice specializing in pricing transformation and commercial excellence. Dr. Yang holds a Ph.D. from WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management and is the author of multiple titles published by Springer.

Inhalt

Introduction: Why People Matter in Pricing.- The Many Faces of Pricing.- Who Owns Pricing? Ownership, Culture, and Governance.- Who Owns Pricing? Ownership, Culture, and Governance.- Who Owns Pricing? Ownership, Culture, and Governance.- Embedding Pricing in the Organization: Where It Sits and How It Lead.- Designing a Scalable Pricing Process.- Governance and Accountability in Pricing Decisions.- AI-Augmented Pricing: Capabilities, People, and Ethics.- Designing Human-AI Collaboration in Pricing Workflows.- Stewards of Pricing in a New Era.- Epilogue: What Monday Looks Like.- Appendix.