Mr. Pine’s latest book, The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations, will be published by Harvard Business Review Press on February 3, 2026. It marks a major evolution in his groundbreaking work, presenting transformations as the highest form of economic value – guiding customers to become who they want to become. With transformations inputs don’t matter, only the outcomes that customers achieve. It shows businesses how to take advantage of this opportunity by getting into the business of guiding transformations.
In 2020 Mr. Pine and his partner James H. Gilmore re-released in hardcover The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money featuring an all-new Preview to their best-selling 1999 book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. The book demonstrates how goods and services are no longer enough; what companies must offer today are experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way. It further shows that in today’s Experience Economy companies now compete against the world for the time, attention, and money of individual customers. The Experience Economy has been published in fifteen languages and was named one of the 100 best business books of all time by 800ceoread (now Porchlight).
Mr. Pine also co-wrote Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier with Kim Korn, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want with Mr. Gilmore in 2007, and in 1993 published his first book, the award-winning Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. Each book details Mr. Pine’s breakthrough thinking as he has accurately charted many structural shifts — from individualizing goods to today’s focus on customer experiences and many other changes in the economy and consumer sensibility.
The economic competitive reality of the future is fast-paced change. Mr. Pine helps clients design strategies to leverage these new economic opportunities and create experiences that drive revenue.
Since revolutionizing the way we should approach and think about business with The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine has continued to be at the forefront as a thought leader. He wrote his second op-ed page article for The Wall Street Journal, “Inflation and the Experience Economy“, in the January 6, 2022 newspaper, and his co-authored piece, “The ‘New You’ Business“, in the January-February 2022 Harvard Business Review was his fifth for the journal. In his speaking and teaching activities, Mr. Pine has addressed the World Economic Forum, the original TED conference, and the Consumer Electronics Show. A former Visiting Scholar with the MIT Design Lab, he is currently a Lecturer with the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and has also taught at Penn State, Duke Corporate Education, the University of Minnesota, UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, and the Harvard Design School. He serves on the editorial boards of Strategy & Leadership and Strategic Direction and is a Senior Fellow with both the Design Futures Council and the European Centre for the Experience Economy, which he co-founded.
Mr. Pine’s experiences prior to co-founding Strategic Horizons include holding a variety of technical and managerial positions with IBM.
