I came across a recent article by Stuart Winchester, the founder, editor & host of The Storm Skiing Journal & Podcast, where he compared the price of a TV vs. a lift ticket at Steamboat Resort over the past four decades:

So in 40 years, the price of televisions has plummeted while the quality of the product and the content available via that medium have improved exponentially, while the price of one day of skiing has skyrocketed as the quality has improved only marginally.

Why? Because the value of the skiing experience has increased, particularly relative to things. (But not relative to other experiences who “quality” – ie, engagement, meaningfulness, transportability, and transformative potential – has increased.)

Growth in Experiences

I made much the same point in an op-ed to The Wall Street Journal a few years ago. My thesis: how most people think about inflation is well, not wrong, but incomplete. As I wrote:

Inflation tends to be understood as higher prices resulting either from increased costs—global supply-chain issues and hard-to-find workers—or from increased demand, such as pent-up purchases, as well as easy monetary policy from the Federal Reserve and blowout spending from Congress. But there’s another significant factor at play: Price increases also arise from growth in the perceived value of economic offerings.

I lamented that

the Bureau of Labor Statistics has yet to catch up to this shift in the economy. The standard market basket it uses to measure the consumer-price index is still weighted too much toward goods and traditional services. The result: The CPI for decades has been measured as lower than the actual rate. Shouldn’t we be more precise in measuring how people actually spend money?

I then showed this trend not with ski lift prices but with an icon of the Experience Economy: Walt Disney World. I gathered data, also over 40 years, from AllEars.net, a website dedicated to covering The Walt Disney Company, as its cheeky name implies. And then ran the numbers beginning in 1981, the year Walt Disney World no longer required separate tickets for individual rides, where (if you can imagine it) the admission fee was $9.50 ($8.89 excluding the 4% sales tax). Fast forward to 2021, and a one-day standard ticket price was $109 before taxes. Comparing these changes in pricing against the Consumer Price Index over the same period, I concluded:

That’s a compound growth rate of 6.39%. Meanwhile, the CPI increased by 2.76% a year over that same period. So for 40 years the price to go to Walt Disney World has gone up 2.3 times as fast as the CPI. Is that because its costs—cast-member wages, ride-building supplies—have gone up so much more than in other businesses? Hardly. It’s because of more engaging and immersive rides, greatly expanded areas, shorter wait times and more personal attention.

That’s why Walt Disney World outpaced measured inflation by so great a rate—because consumers value its experience more than the average market-basket good and are willing to pay much more for it relative to other offerings. This same effect is true for the myriad experiences that make up today’s “Experience Economy.” [Those quote marks were added by the WSJ editor, much to my chagrin.]

And since COVID prices to Disney theme parks have increased even more! Time well spent is simply worth more to people than time well saved.

Growth in Transformations

People value time well invested beyond even that.

The fifth and final economic offering – transformations, built atop experiences – have increased even more than experiences over the past few decades. Expenditures on healthcare, for example, have grown astronomically around the world (albeit at a higher rate in the US) for at least five decades, far outpacing increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) across the rest of the economy. In the same way, US college tuition has grown around three times the rate of inflation over the past five decades.

As I wrote in the chapter 1 box “The Economic Value of Time” in The Transformation Economy (p. 18):

Yes, in higher education and health care such factors have increased costs—most notably the increase in the ratio of administrators to instructors in education and the growth of technology in health care. [I should have added also that another big factor is government intervention in both these transformation sectors.] But primarily it’s valueflation, an increase in price because of the higher value customers place on transformations (and to a lesser degree experiences), relative to the lower-level offerings in the Progression of Economic Value.

There isn’t as good a premier exemplar of transformations (yet!) as The Walt Disney Company represents for experiences, but in The Experience Economy Jim Gilmore and I offered statistics on the five economic offerings – with the yeoman’s work on the data here done by Lee Kaplan of Lee3 Consultants LLC. It involved looking at some proxies as well as some guestimation as to what counted as experiences and transformations since, again, governments do not (yet!) track these separately from services, but here are the results for the fifty years from 1959 to 2009 (when we last updated it):

There’s the valueflation of experiences & transformations!

I’ll also throw in the other data we collected on the growth in employment and gross domestic product across the five economic offerings:

As you can see, transformations have grown far more in both employment and GDP than the other economic offerings.

We included the same data (through 1997) in the original edition of The Experience Economy in 1999 and updated it to what you see here with the Updated Edition in 2011, but did not update it for the re-release in 2020. Why? Frankly, I never have to make the case via economic statistics anymore! I used to have to argue with people that the economy was shifting from services to experiences and experiences to transformations, but now I just have to say and explain it, and everybody gets it.

Nonetheless, Dave Norton, founder of consumer insights consultancy Stone Mantel, did further work as part of the transformation track of The Collaboratives to look at the size the Transformation Economy (with the data work again being done by Lee Kaplan). Take a look at The Transformation Economy Is $3.6 Trillion, and You Need to Pay Attention: A Stone Mantel Summary Report to delve into this more deeply.

For it doesn’t hurt to understand the value of transformations in this way. They reside at the top of the Progression of Economic Value for a reason. There is no more economic value you can create than to help people achieve their aspirations, become who they want to be, and flourish.

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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I recently recorded a podcast with Hector Garcia, a professional Certified Public Accountant who also runs, with his brother, a conference for CPAs called Reframe. And that’s exactly what Hector wants to do: get the accounting profession to reframe their business from services to experiences to transformations.

That may sound difficult for them to accomplish, but I find it greatly interesting that this was the second podcast I’ve done since the book came out specifically for CPAs, with two additional ones geared to CPAs and other financial advisors.

Something is afoot in the industry! And the way to think about this shift, which I started talking about just before the 5-minute mark of the podcast, applies to any company in the services or experiences business. And those already offering economic transformations for good measure.

From Services to Experiences

I often joke that the easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service, for then your customers remember it.

But the easiest way to turn a service into a positive experience is to intentionally design how you do what you do. In fact, that’s pretty much the only thing services providers must do (assuming they do it well).

The reason? Work IS theatre.

That’s not a metaphor – work as theatre – but a model: work is theatre. In any dealing between a worker and a customer that worker is onstage and needs to act in a way that engages the audience. Doing so can turn any mundane interaction into an engaging encounter.

Jim Gilmore and I endeavored to make this clear in perhaps my favorite long paragraph The Experience Economy, in chapter 6 entitled, naturally, “Work Is Theatre” (p. 143):

In the emerging Experience Economy, any work observed directly by a customer must be recognized within the dramatic structure of the performance as an act of theatre. Indeed, flight attendants and hotel staff routinely perform acts of theatre when they direct patrons to the nearest exit or hotel room. The work of retail store associates is theatre when they straighten merchandise on a shelf. Bank tellers, insurance agents, and real estate brokers engage in theatre when they explain terms and conditions. So do cabbies when they converse with taxi riders. Your costumed UPS route driver performs an act of theatre with every package he delivers, and FedEx’s overnighting is absolutely, positively theatre. Watch your food server the next time you dine out: the taking of orders, the placing of dishes, the busing of tables—it’s all theatre. Selling, whether the salesperson pitches automobiles or bottles of perfume, is theatre. A presentation by an ad agency to a client’s marketing manager, after all, is an act of theatre. Doctors who perform surgical operations in an amphitheater also perform theatrical operations by the side of every patient’s bed. But how differently (and more memorably) would all these activities be performed if those executing them understood that their work is theatre and acted accordingly?

[It surprised me to see “emerging Experience Economy” at the beginning of that paragraph. I thought we expunged all uses of “emerging”, “forthcoming”, “nascent”, and other such terms in the 2011 Updated Edition when we declared that the Experience Economy had arrived. Ah well.]

Mindset matters. A service mindset focuses solely on what work is performed; an experience mindset focuses on how that work is performed. Therefore, how you do what you do enables workers to stage experiences purely through their performance.

We wrote about this later in that same chapter in a section entitled “Acting with Intention” (p. 156):

Focusing not only on the what but also on the how serves as the core distinction between mundane service interactions and memorable experience encounters. Economic activity truly engages customers when each worker fills activities consciously and thoroughly with intention. Every movement becomes a meaningful action when richly designed with intention in mind. Without it, work is dull, monotonous, a cliché. (How many processes are as thoroughly unimpressive from start to finish as those that end with “Have a nice day”?) Because many people perform acts without deliberate intention, [famed Russian theatre practitioner and instructor] Stanislavski could comfortably and universally demand that actors cut 95 percent of what they do. The same admonition applies to business acts. Process excellence—at least in the sense of truly engaging customers—surfaces only when workers decide to enrich how they perform each activity. As acting instructor Kearns relates, “Deciding what you want is critical to your success . . . If you haven’t decided what it is you want, you’re likely to be un-focused . . . and the result will be a vague, meaningless encounter. When you’ve conscientiously spelled out your intent beforehand, you are more likely to be specific and clear, and the result will be an energized connection.” Any offering increases in value when every worker on stage—in farmyards, on shop floors, at service counters, within themed attractions—fills work with intention.

All it takes to direct your workers to act is help them develop intention statements for their tasks:

Perform _______________ in order to _______________

The first empty space to fill in is the what; the second space is for the how.

We gave this simple example:

Imagine that you’re standing outside the closed door of your boss’s office. Your very next task is to knock on that door. How would you do it differently if you were to knock in order to announce you had just arrived? In order to apologize for being late? In order to let him know you were there, but without disturbing his work? In order to state that the time for a meeting was at hand? Each intention calls for a decidedly different knock.

So to shift from services to experiences go from what to how.

[We owe our development of the intention statement above – plus much other learning about theatre – to Michael Kearns wonderful book Acting = Life: An Actor’s Life Lessons (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996). In addition to reading chapter 6 of The Experience Economy, if you want to dive deeper that’s the book I recommend.]

From Experiences to Transformations

And to shift from experiences to transformation go from how to why.

It’s not the “why” of the worker, however; it’s the “why” of the customer (as I’m sure longtime subscribers and readers of the book have already figured out). Why do customers buy your offerings? What is their aspiration for which your offerings are the means to their ends? What is their intention for your offering?

So flip around the way you apply the intention statement:

Perform _______________ in order to _______________

This time read it as you (as a business, or worker) perform your experience in order to move your customers – aspirants – along the path to achieve their aspirations. Such work is the essence of guiding.

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I have done a lot of executive education over the years for Duke Corporate Education. Part of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke CE orchestrates a lot of custom exec ed for companies and has occasionally included me (and my partner Jim Gilmore) to teach on Mass Customization and the Experience Economy, sometimes including authenticity and the Transformation Economy as well.

Recently we’ve published a number of articles in Duke CE’s official leadership and management journal, Dialogue, all of them ably edited by Patrick Woodman (and I would also like to praise the artists who make the illustrations, which are universally good).

The most recent piece just came out, “The Transformation Opportunity”, where I go through a number of ideas, principles, and frameworks of The Transformation Economy. I love the subtitle Patrick came up with: “Businesses unlock vast value when they help customers realize their true aims”. #Exactly. There is so much opportunity on the table for companies to shift up to guiding transformations, helping customers achieve their aspirations.

The article offers a good summary of the ideas it covers, beginning with noting how transformations are a distinct economic offering, the fifth and final one in the Progression of Economic Value and what those aims are that people want realized:

To be healthier, wealthier and wiser. To have meaning in their lives and purpose in their businesses. To flourish as human beings and thrive as enterprises. To become who they want to be.

It then describes how to go from experiences to transformations, noting the four levels of experiences: the merely memorable, the highly meaningful, the deeply transporting, and the truly transformative. And of course what enables companies to best shift from experiences to transformations? Encapsulation: preparation beforehand, reflection afterward, and integration on an ongoing basis.

The rest of the article introduces the Delta Model and describes how to harness it, including by asking 5 whys to get at those true aims for individual aspirants.

Then here’s how I end the piece:

The transformation economy speaks to customers’ greatest desires and their dreams for the future. To remain relevant in this new economy, businesses must think more deeply about how they foster human flourishing; about how they can help customers achieve better health, greater prosperity, new learning and meaning in life; about how they help their customers become who they want to be.

So let me recommend that if you want to share something with others to help them get the idea of the Transformation Economy short of buying the buying and reading the whole book (something I also highly recommend!), then this is perhaps the best article to share that gives some of the core ideas of the whole book. Here again is a link to it:

https://dialoguereview.com/the-transformation-opportunity/

Other Article Resources

While I’m on the subject, here are a few other articles published since the book came out in February that either excerpt or extend the ideas therein:

• “Do You Know What Your Customers’ Aspirations Are?”, in the Harvard Business Review (requiring a subscription), discusses the Types of Aspirations framework in chapter 3, “Understanding Aspirants and Aspirations”, which is geared for people needing to understand how to ascertain what their customers aspire to become.

• “The Transformation Journey”, an excerpt on Porchlight Book Company’s website from chapter 5, “Staging Transformative Experiences”. It discusses and shows this framework, modeled off the famous Hero’s Journey, that shows how to design a complete transformation offering with 12 steps. The Transformation Journey incorporates encapsulation within it.

• B. Joseph Pine II, “In 250 years, the economy has gone from agrarian to industrial to service to experience. Now the transformation economy is here”, Fortune, which is a long title for a short article describing the Progression of Economic Value.

• “These 3 growth sectors are helping people flourish – and long-term investors are buying in”, MarketWatch, is bit of a different article, written for investors about the three growth sectors of becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise. It gives a number of examples of what I called “transformation stocks” that in particular offer time well invested. And there’s a bit of surprise here: two stocks that prosper by saving people time so they can invest it elsewhere.

Other Dialogue Articles

The Transformation Economy of course did not emerge from nothing but from a rich milieu of ideas that I have been writing, teaching, presenting, and facilitating for decades. The six other articles I’ve written for Dialogue can also give you a good taste of some of these ideas with some interesting extensions that might be of value to you or others with whom you can share them, including a couple specifically on transformations with ideas and frameworks that are not in the book.

In order of least to most recent:

• “Competing for Customer Time”, from Q4 2021, was written with Jim and is a much longer take on the Time Progression from chapter 1 of the book. It more extensively talks about time wasted, time well saved, and time well spent, finishing with the level that corresponds to transformations, time well invested. If you are an experience stager, do read the section “The money value of time” based on the Preview to the 2020 re-release of The Experience Economy. It’s a formula that shows how you can compare the value of your experience to others based on expenditures per minute.

• “Employment as Transformation”, from Q1 2022 with Jim as lead author, which provides some unique ways of looking at, well, employment as transformation! Anyone responsible for employees should give it a read.

• “Customization for All”, from Q2 2022, a great introduction to Mass Customization and how to by truly customer-centric. It segues to talk about the core framework from Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier (which I wrote with Kim Korn), which I call the Multiverse. This model shows you all the ways to fuse the real with the virtual, important for anyone involved in digital technology.

• “Vitalizing Ecosystems”, from Q2 2024, that introduces a new framework on four types of ecosystems. It is based on research work I did with appliance manufacturer (and owner of GE appliances), Haier, in Qingdao, China. Haier is the most customer-centric company that I know of, and its high competitive advantage can be traced to how it vitalizes (a term I learned from Kim) how it brings not only its partners but its customers into its ecosystems. It includes two more frameworks, one Haier’s on how it manages “micro-enterprises” and another that I developed to explain how the company’s famous model for managing, RenDanHeYi, enables it to create so much economic value by vitalizing its ecosystems.

• Finally, “The consumer evolution”, published in February of this year, includes a new framework, primarily developed by my coauthor, Marco Robledo, a professor of management at the University of the Balearic Islands on Mallorca in Spain. This Consumer Evolution Model looks at how the Progression of Economic Value intersects with “integral theory”, developed by philosopher Ken Wilber. I wrote about this in a post earlier this year and recommend it in particular for marketers and others who need to understand the fast-changing needs of consumers today.

I trust you will find many of these articles of value to you and your business.

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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In March I posted about xchange, a terrific exemplar of the Transformation Economy, where “meetings become platforms for genuine change rather than containers for content delivery”. In the post I wrote about how this coaching company (network, really) guides transformations at four levels:

• Meetings,

• Participants,

• Those on stage (hosts, leaders, planners, experts, and anyone else up front), and

• Transformation guiders themselves.

If you missed it, I encourage you to check it out, especially if you have anything to do with meetings, conferences, or other similar events. Or if you are any kind of guide – not just coach, but expert, counselor, advisor, curator, wizard, facilitator, navigator, advocate, mentor, genius, guru, sherpa, or alchemist. Since that pretty much covers everyone in the transformation business (with additional titles appreciated!), I do recommend reading it, even rereading it.

See Our Discussion

I also announced in that post that Jon and I would be doing an online discussion to the xchange community – over 200 Certified xchange Guides joined, with about that same number of views afterward – and invited my subscribers here to come online as well.

If you missed it, please feel welcome to watch it here. You will see me in action, but this was not the usual Q&A. Jon and I had a real discussion – which he wonderfully illustrated by writing on slides of my frameworks. You will not only learn more on my thinking on transformations, but understand a lot about xchange and how it guides such transformations (plus a terrific technique Jon uses in coaching kids in baseball).

One more thing

Something I learned from our discussion is that xchange charges for outcomes in its certifications! (See us talking about charging for outcomes at the end, around the 54-minute mark.) I certainly wasn’t surprised given how great a transformation guider the company is, but it’s wonderful to see that it embraced this step, a core step, by aligning its offerings with what its coach aspirants truly sought. Not the tick-mark of a certification, but what that certification merely represents: a transformed individual.

You can see its transformation guarantee on xchange’s website, which I’ve reproduced here:

Note that this guarantee is for 100% of the fees, and is entirely qualitative, not quantitative. Anyone could simply say “Thank you very much” for all the knowledge, principles, tools, materials, and everything else they gained from it and ask for a complete refund. So how many do? Jon told me that out of the 450 or so people certified in the past two years, only one person ever evoked the guarantee. That’s 99.8% that paid it in full.

Too many companies remain afraid of charging for outcomes, but it is the catalytic mechanism for ensuring that transformations take hold. Done right, it doesn’t lower your margins; it increases your revenue and profits.

I’ve encouraged you to do several things in this post, but I cannot encourage you enough to take this step in your own transformation offerings. You won’t regret it.

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

We’ll have our next Zoom session with paid subscribers on Friday the 26^th of June.

You’ll learn more about my trip to Vatican City, my latest writing, and what I’m thinking about now. And if you’re at…

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As you read this, I am on my way back from Rome with my wife! I went to keynote the World UnPlugNPlay Day conference last Wednesday in Vatican City.

Included with the conference were tours of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Gardens, the Vatican Museum, and the Sistine Chapel, which were all amazing. Rome is one of the few major capitals I had not been to before, so we stayed after to see and experience the city – but I will not bore you with all the sights and sounds, restaurants and gelaterias. (Contact me personally if you would like to see my vacation slide show.)

The conference is the brainchild of Robert Blackwell Jr., a self-described “unemployable math misfit” and the founder and head quant of Quant16, a PhD-laden financial analysis company that (surprise, surprise!) charges for demonstrated outcomes. As its website attests:

Quant16 is compensated only when outcomes are validated. If there is no value, there is no cost. Our economics are fully aligned with yours. We succeed only when you do.

Robert also founded Killerspin, a table tennis equipment company, that being a primary way he personally unplugs and plays, and long a love of mine as well. (In my basement I have a ping pong robot from the Ping Pong Paddle Palace of Portland!) In fact, last year at this event Robert gifted Pope Leo XIV a table tennis table in papal white, which I really was hoping to play on this year, but alas it was not part of the agenda.

Seeing the Pope

But seeing Pope Leo XIV was on the agenda! And for this evangelical Christian, it was quite the experience.

Our group, with my wife Julie included, gathered on Wednesday morning in a special section near the top of St. Peter’s Square as the Pope was driven up in the Popemobile and eventually gave a speech to the gathered throng, which was capture by the Vatican in this video. If you go the very end – and I mean the very end, the 1:09:10 mark of the 1:09:34 video – the camera pans out and to the left where our group is gathering on steps to meet the Pope and have our picture taken with him.

I’m the tall one in the back with the straw hat on, appearing at 1:09:22. Whenever a group photo happens, I head to the back because of my height, and when the Pope took time to greet a number of people I decided not to try to muscle my way up front to give him a copy of The Transformation Economy. Each gift the Pope received was given to someone, who gave it to someone else, and I imagined them ending up in some place like the warehouse at the end of The Raiders of the Lost Ark. The most interesting gift: the State Treasurer of Illinois (most of the conference participants were from the Chicago area) gave Pope Leo XIV (born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago and famously a White Sox fan), a check for unclaimed property he had left behind in the state!

Talking Transformations

That evening, after some touring, I gave my talk in Casina di Pio IV, built in 1561 and the home of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The Papal table tennis table, signed by Pope Leo XIV, was there in the middle of the room while I spoke (but unfortunately playing it was still not part of the festivities).

Given the focus of the event on unplugging and playing, I talked about how all experiences are at least potentially transformative with encapsulation the key to shifting memorable, meaningful, and transporting experiences to the level of transformative. That was just preamble to talking about human flourishing, of which unplugging and playing can be a great contributor.

And given the setting and the subject, I closed by noting that the ultimate transformation is accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, quoting I Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

Exploring the Pope’s Thinking

And all the above is preamble to exploring Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It has received a lot of press since its publication last month, sometimes said to be anti-AI. It is not a screed against artificial intelligence, however, but a defense of what it means to be human.

I don’t agree with everything, but the Pope correctly recognizes AI as an innovative and valuable tool, but that the ends to which businesses must apply it is (surprise, surprise!) the flourishing of human beings, not to our detriment through the single-minded pursuit of profits and efficiency. The encyclical title, it seems to me, refers not just to the magnificence of humanity as made in God’s image but the ways in which we on this earth can help humans become magnificent.

In chapter 2 of The Transformation Economy I of course wrote about how fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business, it’s raison d’être. The Pope, too, recognizes the centrality of humanity to economic development in paragraph 83 of the Magnifica Humanitas:

For individuals as well as for nations, development is both a duty and a right. Minimum conditions are required for enabling every person and people to flourish in accord with their dignity, without being kept in a state of dependence or excluded from access to necessary goods. Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals. Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential. Development is integral when it is not limited to the economic sphere, but promotes quality of life in its spiritual, cultural, moral and relational dimensions, while respecting our common home, the diversity of peoples and their ways of life. [emphasis added]

I won’t go into all he wrote about AI, but he is particularly concerned about the potential for great unemployment, writing in paragraph 151 that “Today, amid the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ this concern is even more acute, as innovation is often pursued solely for reducing costs and increasing profits.” And that “solely” indicates treating employees as utilitarian means; as I wrote in chapter 2, “Fostering Human Flourishing” (p. 30):

Part and parcel of helping people better themselves as an enterprise is working to help your employees do so, from frontline workers to professionals, managers, executives, and the C-suite. Employees should never be treated as mere means to an end; as human beings, they are always ends in and of themselves. Employment with you is a means to the end of their own betterment, as they simultaneously help you foster the betterment of your customers.

Always remember: profits should never be the goal of enterprises; they are the measure of how well they fulfill their raison d’être of fostering human flourishing.

Profits should never be the goal of enterprises!

And while my focus is primarily economics and business, the Pope rightly argues that “building a world in which everyone can flourish requires shared responsibility and courage”. As paragraph 13 says:

No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part, for “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). All are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities. This is the logic of subsidiarity, which values the cooperation between generations, peoples, disciplines and cultures as the best way for fostering stability, prosperity and peace. We should not be intimidated by tensions or differences because they can become creative forces when guided by shared responsibility.

So it is not just business that needs to put magnificent humanity at the center of its existence, but government and civic life as well. The Pope recognizes (paragraph 58) that business, governments, and other aspects of communal living “are worthless unless they lead to the flourishing of persons — men and women — with their inalienable rights”.

Think of how much better off the world would be if this were so. And then act to make it happen.

Joe

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© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

If you’ve read The Transformation Economy (or posts such as The Book as Transformation) you know that as much as possible I wrote it so the reading experience would be transformational in and of itself. That’s why it starts with a Preparation and ends with a Reflection, exemplifying encapsulation as THE model for creating transformative experiences.

But what I can’t do in the book is the fourth step of encapsulation: integration. So I’ve already announced a page on our website for exactly this:

www.StrategicHorizons.com/integration

It delineates how I can help you integrate what you learned into your business and into your life. Beyond my usual offerings of speeches, workshops, and management advice, it discusses two offerings I added specifically for the new book. First, The Transformation Toolkit with, as I’ve mentioned before, eight different tools that you can use to embrace the ideas, principles, and frameworks in the book. And second, a cost-effective, hourlong one-on-one consulting offering that you can use for me to guide you through your own transformation (including each one of the Toolkit tools).

Today’s Announcement

Now I’ve added a third offering that I’m inviting Substack subscribers (along with select others) to take advantage of: the Transformation Economy Expert Certification course!

This August 17–21 in Minneapolis, I’ll be holding the inaugural course, which follows on to the and I would very much like you to consider joining us. As with our Experience Economy Expert Certification course that Jim Gilmore and I have been facilitating for twenty years (with over 340 Certified Experts around the world), this will not simply be a seminar or executive education program. It is an immersive, applied, developmental experience designed to help participants learn how to intentionally guide transformations – while actively engaging in transformational work themselves throughout the week. A course flyer with details is available below:

Certification Flyer

355KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Across 4.5 intensive days, participants will engage in individual exercises, collaborative design work, reflection sessions, transformation challenges, facilitated discussions, and applied frameworks intended to help internalize the capabilities required to create transformational offerings – whether inside their own organizations or as advisors, consultants, coaches, strategists, and leaders serving others.

Participants who complete the course will become Certified Transformation Economy Experts and will receive:

• Comprehensive course materials, including The Transformation Toolkit

• A post-course integration session (integration can sometimes require its own integration!)

• An individual follow-up session with me after the course concludes

• Official certification credentials and emblem

The tuition for the inaugural course is $16,000. (Our Experience Economy Expert Certification has remained $14K since our first class in 2006!) I know that’s a big investment, but it’s because of the high value this course will bring you. We structured the tuition differently than most executive education offerings – even our own! – because we want to practice the principles that I preach:

• $4,000 is due upfront to reserve your place

• 50% is due by August 1

• The final 25% is subject to a Transformation Guarantee

In short, if after fully participating you do not believe the course meaningfully expanded your ability to think about, design, and guide transformational offerings, you may choose to pay whatever portion of the final balance you feel is appropriate – all, some, or none.

If you decide you’d like to join us in Minneapolis the week of August 17, just send me an email and I’ll ask our Managing Partner Doug Parker to forward our Conditions of Certification document and initial invoice to reserve your place and begin the onboarding process. From there, we’ll start the preparation phase of the course, including a set of questions to reflect on before we ever gather together in person.

I hope you’ll consider being part of this inaugural cohort. I’m incredibly excited about what this course can become – and about the kind of practitioners you can become because of it!

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

Natasha Dangoor, a London-based editor at The Wall Street Journal, opened her article in last Wednesday’s paper with a story:

Chanel Robinson achieved exactly what the gold rush of blockbuster weight-loss drugs promised: She lost nearly 100 pounds, lowered her cholesterol to normal levels and reined in her polycystic ovary syndrome.

So far so good. It sounds very much like the story of Frances Turner that I’ve been using to begin speeches ever since doing it at London Experience Week, as I described a month ago in this post.

But this story did not end well (at least not so far):

Yet, nearly three years into her journey on Mounjaro, the 30-year-old from Atlanta, Ga., is discovering the hidden costs of the slimmed-down life.

Robinson experiences muscle fatigue daily, feeling physically weak, frail and often cold. Robinson said she experiences bursts of sluggishness sporadically during the day, and has trouble with basic tasks like opening a jar. “It shouldn’t be this difficult,” she said.

Thus the title of Dangoor’s piece: “Frailty Is a Hidden Cost Of Weight-Loss Drugs”. [Or online: “Is the Weight-Loss Drug Revolution Causing a Frailty Epidemic?”. Why they are always different is beyond me, but there must be some space/SEO/clickbait reason….]

The Problem

It turns out this is a known, researched-verified problem with GLP-1 drugs, as Dangoor continues:

But for at least some of the 13 million Americans taking them, losing muscle along with fat is an unexpected downside that isn’t broadly discussed or immediately apparent. The drugs can cause rapid and significant loss of lean muscle mass, up to 10%, comparable to a decade or more of aging, according to an analysis published by the American Diabetes Association.

The loss of lean tissue is similar to weight loss from dieting, but the magnitude over a short period can lead to frailty, instability and lack of coordination, doctors and researchers say. Another concern is that losing muscle could slow down patients’ metabolism, leading to weight regain.

One of the authors of the above research paper, Daniel J. Green of the University of Western Australia, says “We are curing obesity by encouraging frailty”. Dangoor amplifies:

Green’s research showed that the rate of muscle loss could be slowed significantly by regular strength workouts. “It should say ‘must be taken with resistance training’ on the box,” he said.

So why doesn’t it? Then maybe people wouldn’t have to figure it out for themselves:

The nurse practitioner who prescribed Robinson the medication didn’t warn her that resistance training is essential to maintaining muscle mass, Robinson said. She said she regrets not exercising and now does Pilates once a week.

Or turn to decidedly non-professional help because the professionals offer bupkis:

Rayna Kingston, 30, from Denver, said her injections of Zepbound left her feeling so tired the following day that she struggled to complete anything other than basic tasks. She said she shifted her dose to a Sunday because Mondays were her least busy day. Her partner would bring her meals in bed because she felt so weak.

She stopped exercising, and said her doctor didn’t give her any guidance on strength training or muscle maintenance. “I was relying on Reddit forums to understand what was happening to my body,” she said. She got so frustrated with the fatigue she came off the medication just under two months later.

Seriously, people need to go to Reddit to figure out what the drugmakers and doctors should be telling them? And actually helping them with, rather than get to the point that people give up on their aspirations because the personal costs are too high.

The pharmaceutical response:

Drugmakers say weight-loss drugs should be taken only on the advice of a physician and as part of a long-term plan that includes diet and exercise. A spokesperson for Eli Lilly, maker of Zepbound, said Food and Drug Administration guidelines say it should be used “with increased physical activity.” The spokesperson added: “Sustainable weight loss is about more than a number on a scale.”

Then why don’t drugmakers offer such long-term plans (ie, transformations)? Or medical professionals prescribe them? Too few even get close to offering transformations, remaining (if you pardon the colloquialism) fat, dumb, and happy to do what they’ve always done:

In response to some of the side effects, drug companies are hoping to develop weight-loss treatments aimed at preserving or even building lean muscle mass.

Oh good, let’s just pile on more drugs!

In summary, because the drugmakers, doctors, and other medical personnel aren’t offering all the jobs to be done (see p. 176-178 of The Transformation Economy) people are forced to become their own general contractors of the weight-loss transformation they desire. That’s the way we’ve long had to do it to achieve our own aspirations (see p. 41), but falls short in today’s Transformation Economy, especially when people do not have anywhere near the expertise it takes, as with this issue but oh-so-many others.

The Solution

This is exactly why people need a transformation guider such as Calibrate, which subsumes the GLP-1 Wegovy into its offerings. This is the company my friend Frances hired to not just lose weight but also to treat her as a whole person with desires, needs, and aspirations beyond a weight goal. I talked about this in the earlier post and more fully on pp. 188-189 of the book. Calibrate specifically addresses not only weight goals but the elements of food (as separate from weight), sleep, emotions, and exercise. Note that last one: the exercise that can overcome the tendency of GLP-1s to increase frailty.

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No, that double word in the subtitle isn’t an error; as opposed to reviewing a full book as I have in the past, I’m reviewing a review of a book!

And that book is Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams by Elizabeth Margulis, Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Music at Princeton University.

Levels of Experiences

The review, by Sarah Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal, immediately caught my eye because of the book title. As I wrote about in chapter 4 of The Transformation Economy (pp. 83-92), there are four levels of experiences, here in order of greatest value:

• Transformative

• Transporting

• Meaningful

• Memorable

In short, memorable experiences engage you; meaningful experiences connect with who you are; transporting experiences take you out of who you are; and transformative experiences change who you are. (Always remember: all transformation is identity change.) I introduced the third level of transporting experiences with this paragraph:

When you create memorable and meaningful experiences, you have the further opportunity to make them transporting. Transporting experiences instill wonderment, shift you beyond the present moment, and move you metaphorically to another realm, to a transcendent and liminal space and time. They do not by themselves change who you are, but can greatly change your state of heart, mind, body, and spirit while more easily leading to the truly transformative.

The Transporting Experience of Daydreaming

So daydreams are transporting experiences. As journalist Kaufman summarizes the book:

Researchers have begun poking around in our musical daydreams. According to Elizabeth Margulis’s fascinating “Transported,” these dreams are wilder, more autobiographical and more communal than ordinary moments of mind-wandering. In many cases, you and I and complete strangers daydream alike to the same songs. Just as musical reveries reveal our secret selves, they also point to what we share with others.

Ms. Margulis, a former classical pianist who directs the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, defines a musical daydream as any kind of imagining you have while listening to music, “fueled in some way—whether you know it or not—by what you’re hearing.”

Have you ever had a musical daydream? My first thought was how I sometimes get an earworm – a song I can’t get out of my head – but I don’t recall any specific daydreams that accompanied it. But Margulis is talking about daydreaming while listening to music, and I constantly listen to music while working (mostly contemporary jazz, some classical, with new age on the weekend). I know I’ve had musical daydreams, getting lost in the reverie and letting my subconscious go where it will. It is transporting, and often productively so.

And not just for individuals, but they can also be for multiple people in the same space and time. They may imagine the same things in response to particular musical passages, or “shared plot points”. As the book reviewer continues,

Musical daydreams, Ms. Margulis writes, are “among the most profound confirmations that radical interconnectedness lies at the heart of human cognition.”

To examine that interconnectedness, she introduces such concepts as “pervasive sensory entanglement”—the state in which our brains exist, with all our senses chattering away at one another. Smell mingles with sight and taste. Sound, we learn, connects to sight—imagined sight. When you hear a series of crisp, reverberating smacks outside your window, you visualize your neighbor’s child bouncing a basketball down the street. And if you hear trembling violins and thrumming cellos, you might lapse into a vision of storm-whipped waves.

The book author also “sees practical uses for musical daydreams”:

She urges the medical profession to study music’s ability to “kickstart new patterns of thought” through daydreams as an alternative to drugs. One of her most moving chapters describes how people with Alzheimer’s gain temporary access to memories of who they are when they hear songs from their own reminiscence bumps.

I believe this is an element used by The Hogeweyk, a “dementia village” that I discuss in chapter 1.

Daydreaming as Virtuality

The issue of how much time we spend daydreaming, or listening to music for that matter, arises out of concern for today’s media-saturated, attention-blasted environment:

It won’t surprise you that nowadays our daydreaming time is shrinking, one more thing squashed by social media. Studies conducted 20 years ago showed that we spent between 30% and 50% of our time in creatively fruitful “mental drift.” Now that digital habits take up so much of our down time, who knows how much space we have left to fill with daydreams? But Ms. Margulis finds that our music-listening habits have stayed the same, at around 15% of our waking hours. This is where “thoughts can still flow spontaneously.” And that’s important because, the author tells us, for our naturally “phantasmagoric” minds, the meandering state feeds our imaginations and stokes creativity.

This passage made me think of what my coauthor Kim Korn and I wrote about in Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier on “Virtuality”. The book is all about how to fuse the real and the virtual to create more remarkable experiences at all levels, but especially transporting ones (even though I didn’t have that terminology then). I won’t go into the details of the core framework there, but it describes how digital technologies can expand the three dimensions of all experiences – time, space, and matter – to open up new possibility via their antitheses: no-time (autonomous events), no-space (virtual places), and no-matter (digital bits). Virtuality is the state of being fully immersed in no-time, no-space, and no-matter.

But in the writing I realized that Virtuality did not require the use of digital technology! Allow me to offer this extended excerpt from the section “Virtuality Unbound” (pp. 94-96):

Of course, in reality, if you think about it, all we can ever live in is an ever-on, always accessible here and now. That is the nature of real life. What digital technology does (for good and ill, it must be said) is intensify that life, increase its reach, and, yes, telescope what is accessible to make nearly everything within reach, virtually.

There is, however, an older way of moving beyond what lies physically at our fingertips, a way that predates digital technology: our imagination.

Long before the Internet made all information accessible—every book that has ever been published, every paper that has ever been written, seemingly every thought that has ever been thunk—we could read books and imagine. In our mind’s eye we could escape the humdrum of everyday life and see vistas unknown, travel to places unexplored, encounter dramas untold, and, with Plato, contemplate ideals unappreciated. Before the telephone, we could listen to the stories of others—true stories as well as made- up ones— and picture them in our mind, maybe dream of being the protagonist, the hero saving the day. Before radio and TV and movies—all varieties of Virtuality themselves, with the primary experience happening on a screen—kids could break free of the boundaries of parental expectations and communal constraints through play, unadulterated fun where anything can happen and often does. Before the personal computer and the PlayStation, before Nintendo DS and the iPhone, we all could compete in games defined by rules of our own making, or join in with others on well- worn pastimes with rich histories.

In each case you can see Virtuality at work. No, not Virtuality enabled by digital technology, but Virtuality still conceived in imagination and birthed in immateriality, enabling experiences otherwise impossible in Reality.

And so it is with daydreams as well.

The Core Message

I’ll close with this quote from the journalist on Margulis’ work:

Her book is the message in a bottle, urging us to connect more deeply with our inattention.

That, too, was at least an element of what Kim and I encouraged in Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier . So I recommend Elizabeth Margulis’ book Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams as well.

Or at the very least, read the book review!

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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Sorry, I lied! I decided to do a follow-on to last week’s post, which was supposedly the final one arising from London Experience Week, particularly since I’ve received some nice feedback from people that found last week’s post on Varieties of Visitors of benefit.

So one of the things the World Experience Organization sets up as part of its summit week every year is an “experience safari” where participants can experience some of the best or newest or most intriguing or outré experiences in London. I went to a few of these, although many people took advantage of the opportunity to experience eight, ten, or more. (Most of them are much younger with far more energy and less need of sleep than I have!)

A Gallery Experience

One of the experiences I went to: My Lady Nicotine, “An exhibition exploring nicotine as ritual, vice and cultural symbol through contemporary art and historical objects” as the show’s rundown puts it.

Not having read that first, I didn’t go into the experience with any expectations other than it being from the creative and somewhat subversive minds of Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, founders of (naturally) Bompas & Parr, “a creative studio made up of artists, architects, chefs, designers, marketeers, strategists and technologists”. With an emphasis on the creative, for I can’t think of anyone who better exemplifies that word in experiences. Do click on that link above and scroll through the seemingly never-ending amazing projects they’ve done! (And notice how much of their work involves food and drinks, hence the need for chefs on the payroll.)

I’ve met Sam personally – I once saw him get thrown out of an event (not by the organizers, but by the event space) for, shall I say, the overexuberant use of pyrotechnics – and the best part of this experience safari event at the company’s own gallery was the surprise appearance of Sam himself, who talked us through the exhibition and then took us on a tour of the studio, including the basement area with artifacts of past and future experiences. My fellow participants and I also got to pick his brain on all they do.

As for the experience for which we came, it was the opening exhibition for the new gallery space, called Woodward Henry, in a portion of the main floor of the studio and primarily by Harry Parr. As the exhibition’s webpage describes it:

Taking its title from J. M. Barrie’s 1890 book My Lady Nicotine, the exhibition frames nicotine not simply as a substance but as a powerful cultural symbol. Barrie famously personified tobacco as a seductive companion to writers and thinkers, and the exhibition extends this idea into the present day, examining why nicotine imagery continues to appear across contemporary culture, from art and fashion to nightlife and online communities.

Do take a look at that website link to get a flavor for what is there. As you will see, the show is, as Sam put it to me, “pretty unequivocally critical of smoking – half of the 1.2bn smokers on the planet will be killed by the habit”, but is also “curious about the future creative possibilities of nicotine” (as Bompas & Parr always exude creativeness). He elaborated:

The more recent science indicates [there] are many benefits although it is also unbelievably addictive. Novel delivery mediums can potentially allow for pleasure whilst minimising risk. So there’s scope for innovation. At the same time it is good to give space and understanding to the history, ritual and culture.

Ultimately, as with all our work, bodily pleasure is important and legitimate.
With the studio’s ethos being drawn from Blake. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

Analyzing an Experience through the New Lens

Now let’s analyze My Lady Nicotine through the lens of the new 2x2, Varieties of Visitors, which I’ll put here for ease of reference:

It seems to me a beautiful way of looking at the individuals coming to see the exhibition.

First, some visitors are smokers and have an intention of quitting the habit. They may even have come to seek help from My Lady Nicotine to help push them along in that intention. Or maybe for some smokers there’s some hesitation, some less-than-certainty, and they seek to firm up their commitment to quit. Either way, there’s plenty to see that portrays smoking as vice, including art objects that display many negative effects of the habit, books with all the statistics, and numerous stories that put cigarette smoking in a negative light (pun intended).

Second, some people, also smokers, are already on a journey to, say, be more fit. Many smokers know that quitting smoking often causes people to gain weight, and so haven’t taken the step. Here they may find enough negativity to make that step, and recommit to greater work in fitness elsewhere to make up for any weight gain that may arise. (Even non-smokers on a fitness journey may get some psychic benefit of thinking themselves “not like those smokers”.)

Third, there may be other smokers who are perfectly fine with smoking, who may discover here enough to get them to reconsider the habit. They may enjoy the ritual, the sub-culture of smokers who meet outside of offices and bars to partake in a communal activity, and may ignore the negative aspects as something whose effects, if any (not all smokers get lung cancer, and not all those with lung cancer smoke), are far down the road. Out of sight, out of mind, but My Lady Nicotine may bring it front of mind and thereby create the impetus to at least think about the consequences, and perhaps even make the commitment to quit.

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OK, last post on London Experience Week! (At least for 2026.)

There was one new idea I gained that week that turned into a framework. And it actually revealed itself before the official start of LXW on Sunday evening in the historic Blackfriars Pub over drinks with Torunn Tronsvang, Founder & Chief Experience Officer of Up Norway, a travel design company up in Norway.

And while I’ll mostly talk about travel & tourism here, this new frameworks has wide applicability, especially to invitational transformations but other kinds of this fifth and final genre of economic offering as well.

Thinking about Visitors

After buying drinks, Torunn peppered me with questions (in a very nice, very Norwegian way, of course!) on transformations and transformational travel in particular. One issue we discussed was the frame of mind of visitors to a destination, and this caused me to stop and think for a bit.

An idea formed in my mind about how different visitors approached their travel experiences. So after a pause I said I thought there were three different varieties.

One, there are those who come with the intention of going through a transformative experience. They have an aspiration and they are looking for the travel experience to change them, often in relationship to the ones with whom they travel. You can work with such guests directly and explicitly to help them achieve their aspirations.

Two, some are already on a transformation journey and may seek to continue that journey through the travel experience. Without a diagnosis and design process for customizing the travel experience (or, really, the set of experiences at a destination or on a trek), you may never uncover this aspiration, and so can be of little direct help. Unless, that is, you make preparation and especially reflection a vital part of your offering, in which case you may well be very helpful to such guests.

Three, many visitors will be open to discovering an aspiration while traveling, for as I write in the first endnote to chapter 4 (which opens with a discussion of travel through the lens of the Progression of Economic Value):

Psychologist Jeffrey Kottler has a simple but profound premise in Travel That Can Change Your Life: How to Create a Transformative Experience (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997): we are most open to change when we travel. [emphasis added; see the post Travel That Can Change Your Life for a review of this book.]

When we travel and visit new places, open ourselves up to new vistas, and meet new people, we become more aware of our selves, more attune to the possibilities, and more inclined to transform.

That’s why the manifesto of the Transformational Travel Council (which I advise) begins with the line “Travel is ripe with the POSSIBILITY of transformation.” It’s worth reading in its entirety:

Travel is ripe with the POSSIBILITY of transformation. If you want something you have never HAD before, you must be willing to DO something you have never done before. Spending time in NATURE is one of the most powerful forms of physical, emotional, and spiritual HEALING. DISCONNECTING from the craziness of everyday life helps us RECONNECT with ourselves, others, and our world. Any adventure is as much about the INNER JOURNEY as it is about the outer one. Traveling with H.E.A.R.T. means having the COURAGE to go within yourself and truly being. Following your P.A.T.H. empowers you to fully engage your journey. Ready to embrace CHALLENGE that comes in many forms: Physical, cultural, emotional, social, and spiritual. Pushing our COMFORT ZONES opens our minds and hearts to new ideas and possibilities. A supportive, regenerative group environment nurtures vulnerable, honest, and powerful CONVERSATIONS that allow us to see everything and everyone through NEW EYES and new perspectives. These ENLIGHTENED PERSPECTIVES bring CLARITY and CONFIDENCE that empower us to take PURPOSEFUL ACTION as we create the life that we want. This inspired action allows us to realize our individual and collective POTENTIAL. Only YOU have the power to transform your life. TOGETHER, WE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.

I’m spending so much space here on this third one because it’s the most interesting and probably the most prevalent. Consider the example of travel design company Explorer X, run by Michael Bennett (from pp. 95-96 of the book):

Never merely memorable, the highly customized travel experiences that Explorer X designs, books, and encapsulates for its clients—called “explorers”—are meaningful at a minimum, almost always transporting, and frequently transformative. As Bennett, who essentially designed the company as his doctoral dissertation, told me, “What we’ve found over the years is that, in terms of desired outcomes, most people don’t have specific goals or intentions in mind for their travel experiences before they embark. What they do know is that when they approach travel with a curious heart and open mind, something inevitably will happen along the way that invites them to consider new ideas, perspectives, and ways of living.” The catalyst for the transformation, in other words, is usually not instigated in advance, but comes via some discovery made along the way.

The word catalyst here refers to the Categories of Change framework from chapter 3 of the book. Here’s the appropriate discussion from p. 65:

The final category, discovery catalysts, happen during some planned experience you sought—all experiences contain within them the possibility of transformation—with its instigation usually immediate but not nearly as major as a disruption. Such discoveries can happen in areas as varied as attending a thought-provoking play, hearing an enlightening message, traveling to a stunning destination, or visiting an inspiring museum—each one a potential spark of aspiration. Professionally, discovery catalysts can come into play when you encounter something you have not seen or thought of before, such as a new technology unveiled by your R&D organization or another company.

As a transformation guider, you can often prompt people to make a discovery that instigates a transformation that you can then lead them in. Trade shows, conferences, and other events prove great vehicles for discovery, as do travel, conventions, and retail outlets—especially flagship experiences—for consumers.

You can see the wide applicability of discovery catalysts, and in fact it is right here where I inserted the box on invitational transformations, which has the same sets of guests:

• Come with an intention

• Journey on a transformation already

• Are open to discovering an aspiration

Note too that the second paragraph above refers to B2B experiences – invitational transformations themselves – and discovery catalysts also include, as I introduced earlier this year, sales calls (posted in parts one and two).

So you can see the wide applicability of these varieties of visitors. You should consider how they might pertain to your business, and think about how you react and treat guests from each set differently.

And I did end up talking to these possibilities in my London Experience Week speech.

[As an aside, I asked my illustrator Kevin Dulle to make a slide for the event to make the point in the p. 65 quote – also an aside within the “dashethetical” as I like to call them – that “all experiences contain within them the possibility of transformation”. Until I grabbed that quote for this post, I had forgotten it was in the book!]

One More Possibility

Now, if you know anything about me and my frameworks-based thinking, you’ll know that anytime I come up with three items I always think there’s a fourth – specifically one that fills out a 2x2 matrix. And that is the case here.

It came to me later in my conversation with Torunn, that there may be others that come to a place – travel, invitational transformation, or other potentially transformative experience – resistant to change. There could be many reasons for this, from emotional to psychological to mundane. One of the things I learned from Bob Rogers, the legendary experience designer who gave me the term “invitational transformation” and spoke after me at LXW, is that at the Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience (discussed on pp. 67-8) over 50% of the visitors paying their £25 admission fee are not even whisky drinkers. Bob said they just are looking for a good experience in Edinburgh, or are accompanying a whisky drinker (perhaps begrudgingly). I assume many of these may be resistant to becoming such a person, perhaps intentionally so, and probably are the 18% who are not “likely” or “more likely” to consumer the brand’s whisky.

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We’ll have our next Zoom session for paid subscribers on Tuesday, the 19^th of May.

I loved the discussion we had in April. I kicked off with what was on my mind, but most of the time was spent discuss…

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As I mentioned in last week’s post, the week of April 20 I was in the UK for London Experience Week. My primary role at LXW was being a roving ambassador and question-answerer for the Experience & Transformation Economies. (For the first time, several people asked if I was working on the next book. No, I said, please let me enjoy this one for a while!)

I also gave the opening keynote on Tuesday and conducted a workshop on Wednesday. My intention for the workshop was to give a flavor of The Transformation Toolkit by explaining the Delta Model of chapter 6 and then giving participants time to work on it. My preparation for the session was my speech, so I showed a summary slide of the Progression of Economic Value overlayed by the Time Progression (time well saved, time well spent, time well invested) from chapter 1 and asked for questions. I soon realized there were many great questions, interesting thoughts, and intriguing provocations to discuss, so I just let it go and we all had a great conversation. With a few minutes left, I finally cut the questions short to give participants the basics of the Delta Model and a handout from the tool to do as homework.

Speech: “The Transformation Economy”

But let me describe the core points of my keynote.

The tough part here is that I had already talked many times to World Experience Organization members on the Transformation Economy, including at the first and second World Experience Summits in 2023 and 2024, plus a few of the WXO Campfires. But not everyone attended those, so I wanted to hit the highlights of the Transformation Economy and weave in some new things for those that heard me before.

I opened with a story that I hadn’t told previously, that of my friend Frances Turner and her lifelong struggle with weight (from pp. 188-9 in the book). With her permission, I related a part of her story:

Frances has long been over 300 pounds. She tried many different options to lose weight, including bariatric surgery, and several times lost 100 pounds or more – but could never keep it off.

Until, that is, she found Calibrate, a weight loss transformation that subsumes the GLP-1 Wegovy into it. With agreement from her primary care physician, the offering started with diagnosis virtually with a clinician, and proceeded through biweekly one-on-one meetings with a personal coach who worked with Frances on her personal “why” and gained a commitment from her on individual goals across a number of elements (food, sleep, emotions, exercise) to support her weight-loss aspiration.

This continued even after the weight goal was met, with Calibrate’s app offering interactions that spark enduring inspiration and commitment. Frances got down to her weight goal of 150 pounds in around a year, when the follow-through phase began. The coach, clinician, and medical team continue the focus on being healthy through this phase that Calibrate very appropriately calls “Sustaining”. To this day Frances has kept to her weight aspiration.

As you might be able to tell, I usually use that story to describe the three phases of transformation (diagnosis, encapsulated experiences, follow-through), which is what it does in chapter 7. But I think I like it as an opening example, for it has some emotional pull and gets across the idea of what transformations are all about.

I went from there to describe the Progression of Economic Value, which pretty much everyone knew about, with a string of examples. I ended this with at story I hadn’t thought of before, a personal one:

My wife Julie and I first went to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina 39 years ago, in 1987. I remember exactly when because she was 7 months pregnant with our first child. while I broke my ankle the week before leaving, so Julie had to carry all the luggage! Everybody knew us as the couple who walked down the beach with me on crutches as she waddled along.

The trip was a Marriott timeshare sales trip, and over a 4-day weekend we fell in love with the place! We go to Hilton Head pretty much every March for two weeks, as we were transformed into Hilton Headers, and into Marriott Vacation Club owners. Now some of you may roll your eyes at this kind of transformation, but we’ve spent over a year and a half of our lives there. It’s a real transformation, a change in identity.

I used that story to segue into invitational transformations, which I mentioned in last week’s post, and which Marriott definitely staged for us.

After giving my favorite examples of this – the Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience and Eataly – I made a point specifically for this group of experience stagers, designers, and developers: ALL experiences are potentially transformative. That of course led to THE model for turning experiences into transformations, encapsulation (see p. 92ff in the book).

My next point was that ALL transformation is identity change. This is the opening sentence of chapter 3, and after I said it in a presentation in January with The Transformation Architects (coincidentally also in London) one of the participants came up to me and said it was the key thing she learned from it and that I should say it every time. I didn’t up to then, but I do now!

Closing and Contending: On Human Flourishing

My last point was one that I also like to make every time: that human flourishing – via the four spheres of transformation: health & wellbeing, wealth & prosperity, knowledge & wisdom, purpose & meaning – is the raison d’être of business. I didn’t break any new ground on this in the speech, but I did when talking to several people afterward, saying that if Jim Gilmore and I had never written The Experience Economy, it would have happened anyway. After all, we didn’t invent it. We just discovered what people and companies – just like those represented here at London Experience Week – were already doing to make it happen, and developed a framework and vocabulary for people to understand and embrace it.

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As I post this I’m in Bath, England, for a speech, but last week I was in London for what was originally called the World Experience Summit but now is the key element of a city-recognized event, London Experience Week (LXW). Both are the brainchild of James Wallman, founder of the World Experience Organization (WXO), THE organization for the Experience Economy, which I highly recommend to all experience stagers, designers, developers, etc.

It began on Monday with a “takeover” of the big Picadilly Lights screen (second largest outdoor screen after Time Square, I’m told – unless you count The Sphere in Las Vegas) with a 5-minute video, which began with these words:

(That way undersells it, IMHO :-)

I gave a speech on Tuesday and did a workshop on Wednesday, which I will write about next week. Here let me mention some of the highlights of what I learned from others during the week.

The Event

The Tuesday-Thursday event is an exercise in FOMO, as there were always 3-5 sessions scheduled at the same time. (The powers-that-be actually scheduled the session “Tools for Transformative Experiences”, by narrative director Emma Oliver, AT THE SAME TIME as my speech. Arrggghhhh!!!!! I’ve spoken with Emma and she’s going to send me what she talked about, but unfortunately I can’t include any thoughts here.)

Many of the sessions had to do with transformative experiences – it was for good reason that I wrote this in the acknowledgements to the book (p. 244):

Another milestone in convincing me the business world was prepared to understand the Transformation Economy was discovering—across numerous campfires, several summits, and many, many conversations with WXO members—almost every experience designer that belonged to it was already thinking about or creating transformative experiences.

So here I’ll confine this to lessons that relate to transformations. (Note to all session leaders: This is not a statement on the quality or efficacy of other sessions I went to and from which I also learned, just that I didn’t find them as related to transformations!) I trust they will be of value to you as well.

Invitational Transformations

First, after the opening by James and my presentation, Bob Rogers of BRC Imagination Arts and a legend in experience design, gave a very well-received talk on what he’s learned over decades in the business, starting out at The Walt Disney Company. (This was a precursor to “Deep Story: The Complete Guide for Creating Transformational Visitor Attractions” out in September. I highly recommend you pre-order Bob’s book now, and not just because I wrote the foreword…..)

You may recall that Bob is the one who gave me the term “Invitational Transformations”, which I wrote about in a box on pp. 66-68 of the book when discussing the four catalysts for change:

Transformational desires can be intentionally sparked by companies. You can stage experiences that create the conditions under which people develop that desire, via deviation or discovery.

I am so grateful for this idea, as I’ve already given a number of presentations to marketing and other organizations where this concept fits so well. Invitational transformations are the higher-level offering equivalent to marketing experiences – experiences that do the job of marketing by generating demand for a company’s core offerings – which Jim Gilmore and I have been writing and talking about for over 20 years. (Best resource: chapter 8 of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want where we also call them placemaking experiences.)

One of the examples that I used in that box was the Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience, and here Bob gave me a statistic I didn’t know before, which makes the story even more powerful: over half of the people who go in are not whisky drinkers! And that makes the data Diageo related even more stark:

According to Rob Maxwell, head of experience for Johnnie Walker Princes Street, percent of visitors say they were “likely” or “more likely” to consume the company’s whisky after their visit, with a 91 percent “brand conversion score,” meaning they now identify with the brand. That may not have been something visitors sought, but they gladly ascend to such identities because of their engagement with the experience.

That shows how effective such invitational transformations can be. As I mentioned in the box:

This approach is not forced, nefarious, or underhanded; it engages you in time well spent through a marketing experience while simultaneously exposing you to new possibilities and letting you discover if you would like to invest your time in them.

Here, Bob himself disagreed with me! He asked himself, “Is this evil or manipulative?” and answered in the affirmative. This was, I am sure, tongue-in-cheek, but he did quote the line “With great power comes great responsibility” and admonished the audience to “Use your transformational power with responsibility”, as “The power you possess, the power of the heart, can never be replaced.” This echoes what I wrote on pp. 164-5 about altering (metamorphic) transformations, which I’ll say here applies to all four types:

In guiding altering transformations, therefore, as the alchemist you have a high ethical bar in how you conduct yourself. You’re affecting the innermost parts of people, forever. You have a fiduciary responsibility—a position of great trust—to ensure you do the right things for your aspirants, the designing and guiding of the right transformative experiences, as well as do right by them. [emphasis added]

It’s a responsibility you, and all transformation guiders, should take to heart.

Rewriting Identity

Raj Samuel, a brand & experience strategy director, did an interesting session entitled “People Aren’t Escaping Reality. They’re Rewriting Themselves”. Raj spoke particularly of what I call “quasi-transformations” in a box on pp. 12-13 regarding Stone Mantel research, where

many people say they are transformed after experiences, but note later that they did not really see or act differently. My immediate thought when encountering the data was, They weren’t transformed at all. The result of their various experiences was not effectual, or if they were changed, it certainly wasn’t sustained through time. But nonetheless, they said they were. Many research participants felt they underwent a temporary, transient, or provisional “transformation,” a change that happened to them for some length of time—a morning, a day, a week, maybe a month. But then they went back to normal, without much, if any, of a long-term change in how they saw the world or lived their lives. Those results are quite common, actually; let’s call them quasi-transformations.

Raj said in such experiences people can “act against their own script” to “short-circuit” their identity and rewrite it, at least temporarily. Then he talked about “the afterglow effect” where people can decide to “snap back or keep the transformation”. Which is something I should have said in the book! Great point, Raj. Sustained change can be triggered by quasi-transformations.

Use of Technology

Katrina Lat, a Toronto-based experience designer working at the intersection of creativity and commerce, talked on “High Tech, Low Tech, No Tech: Lessons Learned From 800+ Immersive Experiences” based on her undergoing, yes, 800+ immersive experiences, mostly in the past five years. (I believe her latest number was 952. I saw Katrina several times last month at SXSW making mad dashes between experiences.)

Her presentation came complete with a spreadsheet that scored each one of them. Katrina’s conclusion: there was no correlation between use of (digital) technology and the quality of the experience (what I would call “level of engagement”).

Note that the same statement applies to transformation experiences, not just “immersive” ones (whatever that means, as was oft said at the event….). Technology is a tool; as W. Brian Arthur famously defined it, “a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose”. So never start with technology; use it (of whatever kind) as a tool to guide customers to achieve their aspirations.

This was echoed in the WXO Campfire on Wednesday – a wonderful WXO benefit most Wednesday’s during the school year where everyone gets together virtually to discuss and be inspired. James Wallman led this one physically at the event, and one participant (whose name I didn’t catch; apologies) talked about a particular experience he’d seen as part of the event’s Experience Safari. He said that it used technology for technology’s sake, calling it “lazy technology” where human contact would’ve made for a much better experience.

Don’t be lazy!

Integration

In chapter 4 of the book, pp. 90-1, I introduced the need for encapsulation by discussing Burning Man. I won’t quote it at length here but summarize it by noting that everyone who goes there, to a person, says that they were transformed, and gains a new aspect of identity: “I am a Burner”. But for so many, returning to quotidian life soon dissipates the effects, leaving them not all that different than they were before (albeit with some amazing memories). They weren’t truly transformed.

Athena Demos, co-founder and CEO of Big Rock Creative, aims to change that. She created the BurnerSphere, a social VR experience that is in beta but already generating a community of Burners and a place for them to gather.

And integrate their experience into their lives! Athena already does workshops that do that physically, and is working to make it happen virtually within the BurnerSphere. I don’t have all the details on this one, so may come back to it after I learn more.

In the meantime, what might you do physically, virtually, or in some fused way to help guests/aspirants integrate your transformative experience?

Culture of Transformation

And now for my favorite session of London Experience Week, “How We Create the Worlds We Want the World to Be” with Mikhael Tara Garver, the founder of Culture House Immersive. Now with her own company coming out with a slate of immersive (whatever that means…..) experiences, Mikhael was the Director of Immersive Experience for the award-winning Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser at Walt Disney World. This was an incredible two-night immersion into the Star Wars universe that by many accounts one of the best – and most expensive – experiences ever created, but one that Disney ultimately cancelled (with many accounts as to why, with lack of profitability not one of them).

The news that Mikhael gave me was that she and the team intentionally designed it to be transformative. It was certainly memorable, meaningful for all fans, and undeniably transporting, and I knew that some people did indeed find it transformative. But I didn’t know it was designed to be. Mikhael pointed to particular examples such as people who said they didn’t used to have any friends, and now they do. Or parents who said they now knew how to talk to their kids (no small change that).

She also related that a specific design point was, as her session title intimated, creating a culture of transformation. Mikhael wanted the entire set of hotel guests (usually 300+ people across 100 rooms) to unite as one crew as they trained on the Starcruiser Halcyon and went on missions, with the signature call-and-response motto “Together As One”. That motto still lives on within so many people, as indicated by the fan-created convention Halcy-Con that continues to gather hundreds of people together every year.

Now, I would put this in the same category as Burning Man, a transformative experience for everybody who participates, many of which sustain the transformation, but others who do not – although I guess that Halcy-Con continues to help with integration for many to this day.

Are there any circumstances where you could design for a culture of transformation?

***

Next week I’ll talk about my workshop and presentation at LXW. It will give you a flavor of how I share my ideas, principles, and frameworks on the Transformation Economy, including some things I haven’t said before.

In the meantime, think about what you can use from the lessons above.

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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I just checked, and I’ve written at least four Substack posts that talk about applying the old manufacturing technique of “asking 5 whys”, most thoroughly in a post on the first phase of experience guiding, Diagnosis.

It took me awhile to figure out where I included it in the book because the editing team at the publisher changed (not corrected, in my mind :-) the phrase to “asking five whys”. When I finally searched under that term, it turned out there was only one mention in the book, on p. 167 at the end of chapter 6 in the section “Harnessing the Delta Model”. Here’s what I wrote (or the edited version thereof!) while specifically addressing those with offerings below the fifth genre of transformations:

The key is to discover what ends your customers desire for which your current offerings are the means. Why are people buying your offerings? What aspirations do they have that you can aid them with? Incorporating the technique of asking five whys into your design process proves very useful here. Whatever transformational desires customers express, ask why they have them. Whatever the answer is, ask why again, and again, and again, however many times it takes to get down to the vital aspiration sought—the why—which so often remains unspoken and even unknown. Follow that course to its logical conclusion and then trace it back to see how you can subsume your current offerings into higher-level and higher-value ones. Even if you can’t take them into the Delta Model, you can make your offerings more transformational and partner with companies that can more fully do so. As mentioned in chapter 3, this is especially important for B2B companies, for businesses never buy your offerings in and of themselves; they are always a means to an end. Sell the end, rather than the means, and you will gain much more economic value.

I discussed the issue of means/ends eight separate times in the book, four of them in chapter 2 with the four spheres of transformation, where the first term in each pairing – health, wealth, knowledge, purpose – is the means to the end of the second term – wellbeing, prosperity, wisdom, meaning.

Let me now expand (and expound) on what I view as a key technique for transformation guiders – and especially for those that sell lower-level offerings.

Start with where you’re at

First, while the penultimate sentence in the paragraph above alludes to it, I should have made this more explicit in the book: you don’t have to start with a transformational desire (ie, aspiration).

No, you can start with why people buy whatever genre of economic offering you sell, from commodities to transformations. It’s probably more important for lower-level offerings, in fact, as it can lead you in the direction of what transformations you can guide, subsuming your current offerings into transformative ones that create much more value. That’s why the following was one of the five questions I asked toward the end of the opening Preparation to the book:

Moreover, uncovering why your customers buy from you today can create great value even if you never intend to subsume your offerings into a true transformation. This is the import of the funky italics I used on p. 167 above: “you can make your offerings more transformational”. You may partner with other companies that do the full transformation, or you may also just determine how your current offerings can create more value for aspirants who are the general contractors of their own transformations.

In the Transformation Economy, being transformational is the next best thing to offering transformations, and a perfectly acceptable strategic choice for many enterprises.

Examine the sequence of whys

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I often say that 125% of the book was published first on Substack – meaning there were a lot of posts that I intended to go into the book but in the end got cut in the editing process. With my first draft I submitted 10,000 more words than my contract called for, so this was inevitable!

Much of the cuts were just to tighten my thinking. Some exemplars that weren’t really needed were edited out or got swapped for better ones, and some sections were just too long and cut down significantly.

Another category was frameworks that in the end weren’t as useful as I originally thought. This includes, if you want to look back at them, The Regeneration Matrix and Aspects of Identity Part One and Part Two. I love both these frameworks but couldn’t quite get the first one to sing as frameworks should, and the second is just beautiful for understanding your self, but I couldn’t see how many companies could operationalize it to understand their customers better. You may find them useful therefore in thinking about your own transformation journeys, as I discussed in a previous post, The Book as Transformation.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I wanted to post here the one thing in the book that’s not previously published on Substack!

That’s because it wasn’t actually part of the book until I went to record the Preparation and the Reflection for the audio version of the book. They said I could also write and record some sort of postscript for listeners to the book, and thought that would be a great thing to do.

So technically it’s not in the book, just an add-on to the audio version, but I thought even those who didn’t listen to that (or stopped listening before getting to it. . .) would benefit from reading it here.

I trust it is of value, with some echoing of last week’s post (which is what brought it to mind for posting here).

Joe

============

Thank you for listening to The Transformation Economy and especially for making it all the way through to the end. I trust you gained value from the book and are committed to guiding transformations using the ideas, principles, and frameworks that you learned here.

Something on which I focused for the first time while writing this book was making it a very personal book. That is, I wanted my readers – listener in your case – to feel what it means to transform as an individual human being, and not just what it means to be in the transformation business. I want you to understand the emerging Transformation Economy viscerally, to approach it from your own grounded, very personal perspective, and to always keep human beings and humanity at the very center of your work.

So as opposed to previous books, I never once referred to a person as “one”. So I didn’t just say “keep human beings and humanity at the very center of one’s work”; no, it’s your work. And as much as possible when writing about customers I referred to them too as you. Sometimes I would even switch in a single paragraph from you as the customer to you as the transformation guider.

I do hope that came through, and here at the very end, I want to emphasize again that you, as an individual human being, are at the center of this book. So, yes, please embrace all the ideas, principles, and frameworks in this book to shift into the transformation business and enable your business to thrive as we shift into the Transformation Economy. But also embrace them personally. Understand the facets of your own identity. Determine the aspirations you individually have for your life, not just your work or your business, and how best you can achieve them. Discover your personal meaningful purpose and what transformations will enable you to fulfill it.

And above all else, act diligently to become who you are meant to be and thereby flourish. Godspeed.

Joe Pine

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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When we hosted our ASCEND book launch event in Minneapolis on February 3 there were a mix of long-time fans whom I knew from many other events, people whom I knew but never physically met (including subscribers here), and then people I did not know at all.

One of the latter folks was Niels Gott, an executive coach who is a member of the xchange community that I highlighted as a great exemplar of the Transformation Economy two weeks ago.

Back to what I was saying, it turns out that Niels and I live about a mile away from each other as the crow flies in Stillwater, Minnesota, and invited me to a very interesting event he’s created, The 51 Threshold, as a “Flourishing Lab”, this Wednesday in Stillwater. While I’m not able to participate, I think this is a wonderful event with its focus on “What would it take for 51 percent of the world to be flourishing by 2051?”.

I was especially intrigued by the issue in Niels’ FAQs on how to best prepare for his event. He wrote:

No preparation is required.

If you’d like, you can arrive with one question in mind:

What system do I feel called to influence between now and 2051?

It could be your organization, community, industry, or something more personal.

I responded to Niels that the one system I feel called to influence is capitalism. No small task that! But as I’ve written about before, the importance of human flourishing as the raison d’être of not only individual businesses but of capitalism itself became more and more important in the writing.

And that’s a long way of introducing a new op-ed piece in the financial publication MarketWatch on principles of investing in the Transformation Economy. In my submission I called it “Investing in Our Selves” (with the space between “our” and “selves” very intentional), while the editors ended up entitling it “These 3 growth sectors are helping people flourish — and long-term investors are buying in”. (Not exactly clickbait, but I assume that’s better online than my more philosophical title.)

You can access it here:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-3-growth-sectors-are-helping-people-flourish-and-long-term-investors-are-buying-in-9951644f

although it requires free registration. If you don’t want to do that, you can also see it as a PDF here:

Marketwatch

581KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This truly is a foray into helping people understand that long-term investing should be based on how well companies foster human flourishing. (The opening line: “Stop reading if you’re a short-term investor.”) It outlines a set of principles of doing so (not exhaustive; there was a word limit), where investors should look for companies that:

• Sacrifice short-term results for the long-term benefit of their customers.

• Get people to pay out of their own pockets for well-being,

• Focus on the impact on customers’ lives or their businesses.

• Create new business models focused on the outcomes customers achieve.

• Charge for customers’ achievement.

• Commoditize goods and services.

It is investing in our selves as human beings. And that is not only what long-term investors should seek, it is what leaders in enterprises should do!

Be a contributor to human flourishing in the world.

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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My favorite book review thus far is by Dr. Aaron Hughey, University Distinguished Professor, Department of Counseling and Student Affairs, at Western Kentucky University. Entitled “‘Transformation Economy’ inspires readers to see the world”, it was published in the Bowling Green Daily News (and if you just don’t happen to have a subscription to it you can access it here).

He quoted me extensively, highlighting some of my favorite points in the book, and concluded:

Very few books inspire me to see the world, and my role in it, in a slightly more nuanced way than I have grown accustomed to over the decades. But [t]his one falls into that category. My sense is that my experience is probably not unique. Highly recommended.

I feel like Dr. Hughey “gets me”, if you know what I mean, particularly with this paragraph:

Honestly, Pine had me on this one from literally the first few sentences. So much of what he says in this exquisite little primer on how to be more successful in todayʼs ever-evolving economic landscape rings true to my own personal quest for satisfaction and fulfillment on a deeper level. And although “The Transformation Economy” is not a self-help book, the parallels to that genre are unmistakable. In many ways, Pine is bridging the gap between those two categories by providing an intrinsic connection that is often missing in similar efforts.

Bridging that gap was exactly what I intended to do! I want people to viscerally embrace the ideas, principles, and frameworks in the book as human beings first, and then as businesspeople second. I knew it would be much easier to turn your business into a transformation guider if you recognized your own, personal, very human desire to change, to have aspirations and seek out their achievements, to become who you want to become.

Personal Writing

While I was thinking along these lines who cemented the idea for me as the right thing to do was the Category Pirates – Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Katrina Kirsch. As I wrote in the post “Why The Future of Business Is Transforming Lives, Not Selling Stuff”, the Pirates – Arrggghhhh!!!!! – convinced me that I should write this book on Substack in the first place.

In their book Snow Leopard (which in turn is an edited compilation of their own Substack posts), they did a study about different kinds of books. The most successful were:

Personal Development books that speak directly “to” the reader. What our study revealed was that the best-selling business books of the past 20 years almost always addressed the reader directly:

· “Here’s how YOU can…”

· “Here’s why YOU should…”

· “Here’s what YOU need to know…”

The Transformation Economy, however, clearly fit in the Insights/Thinking category, the third-largest category of books in revenue. But then their research further showed:

The key here is, when writing an Insights/Thinking book, to try to make as Personal Development focused as possible. Insights/Thinking books that are interesting but not actionable rarely reach the heights of a “this book changed the way I thought about my life.”

Just like what Dr. Hughey wrote above, no?

Transformational Writing

So I focused on integrating my insights while emphasizing the personal reader to make The Transformation Economy itself, as much as possible, transformational if not a full transformation.

The book really is about you. It’s not just about what’s going on in the world of business and what you can do about it; it’s also about what’s going on in your life and what you can about that. It’s not just about how businesses can embrace the Transformation Economy and what your own business can do as a result, it’s about what you can do to achieve your own aspirations. It’s not just about how fostering human flourishing is the raison d’être of business and the reason your business exists; it’s about how you can flourish as a human being.

In prior books I would often write in the third person about customers and businesses, often writing about “ones”. After the book went into copy editing, I searched the book for an example of where I used “one” in this sense, and found only two examples (both in quotes of other people!). Then I searched the endnotes and finally found one – and only one. In Chapter 5 I wrote: “while esthetic refers to the place in which one is immersed”. I got that changed to “while esthetic refers to the place in which you are immersed”.

Yes, that makes the book easier to read, but again it’s really putting you in the book itself, and in particular in thinking about yourself as not solely a businessperson but as an aspirant, as someone who has desires to transform, as someone not simply thinking about your business and your customers but your self. (A few times I even switched between you the reader as aspirant and you the reader as guide in the same paragraph!)

Through this I hope that you discover personal as well as corporate aspirations (perhaps even communal or societal ones) and want to take action on them. Thinking about your self will also make it easier, I believe, to sympathize with your customers, and desire to create transformation offerings that will guide them to flourish.

Transformational Reading

Therefore, when you read/reread the book (as well as my posts on Substack) think in this dual mode, on behalf of your business and on behalf of your self. (And, yes, in all these cases I am intentionally separating “yourself” into its two constituent parts.) It doesn’t make much difference if I write transformationally unless you read transformationally. (You can lead a horse to water, . . . .)

And please do one more thing when you read the full book. Take advantage of its most transformational aspect, what I’ve done to encapsulate the book. Maybe you tire of hearing that word, as I seem refer to it all the time, but as I wrote just last week, if you do nothing else, encapsulation is THE Model in the book to embrace. Therefore, it’s still the most important thing you can do to turn any experience – including a reading experience! – into a transformation.

That’s why when you read the book you didn’t – or won’t, if you have yet to crack the spine or play the audio – start with a Preface and end with an Afterword, but began with a Preparation and finished with a Reflection. I wrote the opening specifically to prepare you for absorbing the ideas, principles, and frameworks and enable you to develop ideas for what you can do – personally and corporately – to embrace the Transformation Economy and thereby create greater economic value with your offerings. After introducing you to the book and showing you where it’s headed, the Preparation asks you a few questions to open your mind to the possibilities of the Transformation Economy. Ideally, you started to work on your business as you read – and maybe your self.

Transformation Resources Available Here

Then, I wrote the bookending Reflection after the last chapter specifically to help you embrace everything you’ve read and learned and apply it to your business. It also contains a series of questions – one for each chapter plus one final, overarching question – to help you determine what you should do differently as a result of reading the book, again not just corporately but personally.

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Three weeks ago I published a list of upcoming public events in which you could join. Let me add another one: The Transformation Economy: Moving Beyond Experiences To Create Lasting Change with coaching transformation platform xchange. This will be on Thursday, April 9, from 11am-12:30pm EDT (17.00-18.30 CET), and anyone can join by registering in advance here:

http://xchangeapproach.com/TransformationEconomy

I’m very excited about this virtual conversation (everyone has a chance to talk and contribute!) because xchange is a terrific exemplar of the Transformation Economy, where meetings become platforms for genuine change rather than containers for content delivery. If in particular you are a coach, facilitator, or leader who designs transformative experiences – a transformation guider, in other words! – you’ll find this upcoming event valuable.

A Pioneer in the Transformation Economy

Always on the lookout for new (to me) exemplars, I discovered decade-old xchange in November 2025. It designs and facilitates meetings intended not merely to inform participants, but to change them. Its work has included internal leadership summits for firms such as BMW, Facebook, HP, and Google, along with conferences for organizations such as Conscious Capitalism, HeartMath, Women Presidents Organization, and Arthur Page Society. Through its training it now has thousands of Certified xchange Guides that know and use its methodology.

xchange recognizes that the old way most meetings, trainings, and conferences still operate is no longer enough. You know the routine: Put chairs in rows. Face them toward a stage. Have a small number of experts speak while everyone else listens. Transfer information, hopefully make it engaging, and pray people leave with a few useful ideas.

As Jon Berghoff, founder of xchange, told me:

That model made sense when information was scarce and expertise was hard to access. But in a world awash in content, information itself has become increasingly commoditized. Under those conditions, the opportunity is no longer simply to deliver insight. It is to guide aspiration.

Exactly! Rather than treating meetings as vehicles for content consumption, this company considers them platforms for connection, creation, and change. (See pp. 115-120 of the book.) The movement shifts from presenting to participants toward engaging them, from presenting ideas toward generating them, and from centering the stage toward centering the room.

When Jon and I first met, he shared how xchange sees itself as supporting a cycle of four transformations.

Transforming the Meeting

First is transforming the meeting itself.

xchange developed a platform, or operating system, for designing and leading large-group gatherings around human connection rather than passive reception. Many organizations still treat gathering design as a logistical exercise: build the agenda, sequence the speakers, manage time well, and trust that engagement will emerge. But transformational meetings require changing how they flow and operate.

Here’s how Jon described on such example:

Consider Hewlett Packard, which brought together 500 leaders for an annual summit. The company wanted to deepen participants’ connection to mission, help them learn from one another, and move them toward bold action. A conventional approach would have attempted to accomplish those goals largely through presentations from the stage.

Instead, xchange designed the summit so that key presentations were interspersed with structured conversations across the entire room. Participants reflected on stories that surfaced shared purpose, exchanged lessons around execution, and made commitments to action. Every participant engaged. More than twenty times, leaders took the microphone to bring their conversations into the larger room, unscripted and in real time. The room became the stage. The participants became the presenters. And the connective tissue of the leadership culture was strengthened in the act of gathering itself.

That is a useful distinction: a meeting need not be a “container for content delivery” but “the medium through which aspiration is activated”, as Jon puts it.

Transform the Participants

The second transformation is the transformation of participants.

The xchange methodology, as Jon outlines it, centers on “intentionally designed questions, collaborative sense-making, conversational processes that invite contribution rather than spectatorship, and structured reflection” – no surprise, given the importance of reflection for turning experiences into transformations I posted on last week! Via xchange, the room itself shifts from being a venue to a chrysalis.

Being such a chrysalis recognizes that people come to gatherings not only for information but for transformation – or at least progress on the transformation journey they’re already on, the aspirations with which they arrive. Some want greater clarity. Some want courage. Some want belonging. Some want higher levels of capability. Some want to become better leaders, better collaborators, or more fully themselves.

xchange recognizes that such people aren’t mere attendees or event participants, but aspirants. Jon shows how this plays out through another example:

One can see this dynamic in a summit we helped design for Facebook, where forty behavioral scientists and forty company insiders came together with a shared aspiration — to understand how technology was affecting human behavior and what could be done about it. The conditions were also ripe for division, distrust, and competing agendas.

Rather than opening the gathering by telling participants how to work well together, xchange asked them. It broke the room into teams and invited people to co-create the principles by which they would work together. By noon on the first day, Dr. Dan Reidenberg, a world-renowned expert in suicide prevention, remarked to me, “I have never seen a group work so well together under conditions where the potential for distrust was so high. This entire process is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, in how it transformed the way the entire room showed up, and worked together.” Over two days, the participants were able to solve major problems and design solutions that reportedly made their way onto the platform within a few months.

What changed was not merely the quality of the conversation the relationship participants had to one another and to the work before them. They became co-creators of the conditions under which progress could occur, helping them achieve their core aspirations for the work that had brought them into the room together.

Transforming those on Stage

The third transformation may be the hardest of all: the transformation of hosts, leaders, planners, experts, and anyone else on stage.

The dominant image of value in conferences, leadership development, and education has long been the expert at the front of the room – the one who knows, who tells what he knows, and who delivers answers to everyone else. But if transformation is the goal, that identity can become a hindrance.

This is where xchange does more than offer facilitation techniques. It invites an identity shift in leaders, speakers, educators, conveners, etc. The point is not to abandon expertise, but to deploy it differently: not as the centerpiece of a broadcast, but as the architecture behind a transformative experience in which others can learn, contribute, reflect, and change. One example:

One can see the commercial power of this shift in xchange’s work with Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson’s Scaling.com. When The Science of Scaling gave rise to a membership model for entrepreneurs being coached to scale their companies, the first large member event could easily have followed a conventional formula: experts teaching from the front. Instead, Hardy and Erickson were willing to try something different — devoting roughly half the time to peers learning from one another through the xchange approach. On the final day, participants gave the conference a Net Promoter Score of 91, an extraordinary figure for any event, let alone one in the conference industry. Participants reportedly credited the interactive design as central to unlocking creativity and helping them make bold decisions about the future of their businesses. The next member conference is expected to draw more than 400 attendees, up from 87 at the first event, with the xchange approach again at the heart of the experience.

You can see what Dr. Hardy thought of the results of the event on his LinkedIn post here.

This identity shift matters more than it might first appear. In many industries, expertise alone no longer commands the premium it once did. Information is widely available. Answers are cheap. What remains rare is the ability to design and guide conditions under which people make meaning, deepen trust, generate insight, and commit to change.

Transforming the Transformation Guider

When the host transforms, the meeting transforms. When the meeting transforms, participants can transform. And when those three transformations reinforce one another, a fourth becomes possible: the transformation of the guider’s own work.

Since 2020, xchange has been certifying consultants, coaches, leaders, and community builders in its methodology. In doing so, it is helping them reposition themselves with a higher level of economic value, shifting from expertise delivered to aspirations achieved. Aspirants invest their time under a guide’s direction, and the economic promise of transformation lies in helping them become a new version of themselves over time, in shifting meetings from merely time well spent to time well invested. As Jon related:

Tina Parker’s story offers a practical example. A retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, she transitioned into leadership development and found herself increasingly uncomfortable with the expectation that she needed to hold and deliver all the expertise in the room. After finding xchange and becoming certified, she shifted her workshops toward a much richer mixture of peer learning and expert guidance. She still shows up with authority and presence, but now more as a host and guide than as a sole source of answers. By her own account, the change paid for itself many times over within a year, generating clients and revenue that exceeded ten times her original investment in certification. Hers is one example of what may be the most commercially significant transformation xchange enables: not just transforming meetings and participants, but transforming the career possibilities of those who learn to guide in this way.

You can see how xchange is not merely a facilitation or training company. It is an exemplar of what becomes possible when an enterprise recognizes that meetings can become experiences, experiences can become transformation platforms, and transformation platforms can become the basis for new forms of value creation.

The broader lesson is thinking about the meetings you go to. If you’re a host, how can you help them go beyond information transfer to transformation guiding? Or if you have influence on the agenda, structure, and delivery, how can you refocus it on the people who come to it and their aspirations? Or even if you are merely an attendee – and even if the organizers have no understanding of transformation – how can you be aware of the transformation journey you (and colleagues, if appropriate) are on, and devise ways for the meeting to help move you along on that journey? In these ways meetings can be places where aspirations are surfaced, identities are reshaped, and real change occurs.

When that happens, meetings become platforms for transformation.

Meeting Transformation Exemplified

If what you’ve read here raised questions you’d like to explore further, please do join Jon and me for a live conversation at The Transformation Economy: Moving Beyond Experiences To Create Lasting Change. Again, it’s on Thursday, April 9, from 11am-12:30pm EDT (17.00-18.30 CET).

This won’t be a presentation. It will be exactly the kind of gathering described here — one where your questions and perspectives are part of what we’re building together. You can register here:

http://xchangeapproach.com/TransformationEconomy

Joe

© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II

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