This is (somewhat obviously) Part Two of what I expect to be the second chapter of the book. Part One can be found here, in case you missed it or need to refer back to it.
This post builds on the first three levels of the Time Progression discussed in Part One to get us where we want to go in guiding transformations: time well invested.
Here I also include the feedback form at the end, with the questions covering the entire chapter.
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Time Well Invested
The highest level in the Time Progression is the province of transformations, the economic offering that enriches and enhances people’s lives. But companies can’t do it alone; they can only offer the circumstances through which people transform themselves, as I discussed in Chapter 1 on the Progression of Economic Value. It is customers of transformation guiders (whether consumers, B2B organizations, employees, or other aspirants) who have to undergo the transformation themselves – whether doing their reps at a fitness center, taking their prescriptions and following personal wellness plans from healthcare providers, doing their homework and studying for tests at school, following the counsel of their consultants and the instructions of their coaches, and so forth.
That’s why transformations offer time well invested. Customers invest their time, under the guidance of the transformation guider, to achieve their personal and corporate aspirations, reaping dividends now and into the future. Companies that guide transformations should of course still concern themselves with the time well spent of experiences – for we all change through transformative experiences and only through transformative experiences – but must also then embrace and gain value from the compound interest of time well invested. For when you guide customers in achieving their aspirations, you help them wisely spend their most precious of resources, their time.
Embrace and gain value from the compound interest of time well invested.
Think back to the example of going back to school to get an MBA from the previous chapter. Few transformations are more impactful on the rest of your life, more concentrated into a focused timeframe, nor more dependent on the time you actually spend, experience after experience, on gaining the most. Sure, the reputation of the school – or lack thereof – can have a huge influence on the job you get afterward and how well set you are at achieving your career ambitions. So can the networking you do at school. But that influence dwindles unless you actually perform well in that next job, and the one after that, and so forth. And your performance is highly predicated on the time you invest in learning, in applying, and in becoming.
There may not be a paragon of time well invested in the app age that parallels Uber and Airbnb for name recognition, but Noom presents a good example.[i] Originally a provider of fitness equipment, Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov started the company in 2008 “because they were dissatisfied with how the American healthcare system focused on sick care instead of health care” with the vision of “helping more people live healthier lives”.[ii]