BY Joe Pine

The Transformation Economy & You

Attention! Attention!! I have an official announcement to make!!!

In the last two chapters of The Experience Economy, Jim Gilmore and I declared and discussed that there was one more offering in the Progression of Economic Value, where businesses would use experiences as the raw material to guide people (or business customers) to change, to help them achieve their aspirations. In some ways, the first eight chapters were just a Trojan Horse to get readers to understand that the greatest economic value lies in helping customers become who they want to become.

So people have been asking me for over 20 years when I was going to write a full book on the Transformation Economy.

My response was always twofold: I don’t know enough about transformations, and the world isn’t ready for it.

Those statements are no longer true.

All along I’ve paid attention to the possibility of when the economy based on transformations would supplant the Experience Economy, and have studied companies that were in fact guiding their customers to transform. My knowledge has increased greatly, particularly over the past few years. You may have seen one result: the Harvard Business Review article from January/February 2022, “The ‘New You’ Business” which I wrote with Jim, Dave Norton, founder of insights consultancy Stone Mantel, and lead author Lance Bettencourt, professor at Texas Christian University.

Dave has been particularly helpful in this thinking thanks to The Collaboratives on which I’ve worked with Dave and his colleagues for a number of years. These are yearlong multi-client studies that gather people together from many different companies to research various topics around experience innovations (Stone Mantel’s specialty), with each participating business walking away with a new experience strategy. And the past few years the Transformation Economy has been one of the key objects of study, with qualitative and quantitative insights. (One framework on types of transformative experiences came directly from this research.)

So, I definitely know enough about the Transformation Economy. And the world’s definitely ready for it! This is true both for customers, who increasingly recognize they need help in achieving their aspirations, and for companies, who increasingly recognize the economic value they can create by getting into the transformation business. As we said in the HBR article:

Even though we’re all filled with hopes, aims, and ambitions, significant change is incredibly hard to accomplish on our own. Enterprises should recognize the economic opportunity offered by the transformation business, in which they partner with consumers to improve some fundamental aspect of their lives – to achieve a “new you”.

Writing the Transformation Economy: Official Announcement

Therefore it…. is…. time. I have started a new book, a book on the Transformation Economy, a book that I am very, very excited about!

But that’s not the Official Announcement.

This post is not just about the what of writing the book. It is about the how. And how I am writing it is through a subscription offering.

Thanks to the efforts of our Managing Partner Doug Parker, we have started a Substack subscription on the Transformation Economy. I will be writing the book through Substack, posting my initial frameworks, for example, and – here’s the important part – asking for your feedback on them. I want you to validate whether (or not) they work, in particular whether (or not) they first describe well what’s happening as we shift into the Transformation Economy, and most importantly prescribe effectively what you and your company can do about it.

After you provide feedback, I’ll then work on writing up the framework more fully, adding in some examples, and then share it with you once more. You can again let me know what works and what doesn’t (if anything. . . . :-), and then I’ll write the full chapter to share with you yet again.

And that means that you will have access to all my ideas, principles, and frameworks that go into the Transformation Economy book long before anyone else does. You will learn from them, you can apply them, and you can start transforming your own company to thrive in the forthcoming Transformation Economy.

For that we will be charging $20 per month, or $200 per year. (We do plan on keeping the subscription open after this book is complete for further working on the subject as well as other topics I’m already planning to write articles and books on, but of course you can cancel at any time.)

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But there’s more!

On my initial posts on any idea, principle, or framework I will be writing not just for you, but to you. You will get a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to see how I think, how I develop ideas and turn them into frameworks, how I apply those frameworks through many examples that make them clear. I certainly hope you gain great value from that. (Or you may just find it scary. . . .)

I’ll also share via the subscription offering articles on the Transformation Economy, with commentary; some book reviews that cover territory you may find of value; examples I find very telling; early access to articles I might write on this and other subjects; tools that you can immediately apply in your business; and some things we haven’t thought of yet. (Suggestions welcome!)

Moreover, I’ll also periodically get on Zoom and invite you and your fellow subscribers to a session where you will get direct access to me, where I’ll talk about some aspects of what I am seeing, thinking, and writing, and give you the opportunity to share your thoughts and ask questions as well.