As I announced last week, the book is finished! Except for a few ancillary parts at the end (acknowledgements, “about the author”, and the index) and the copy/line editing to fix any typos and grammatical errors (and, maybe, just maybe, a few additional thought I really want to get in there), it’s done.
I’ll still be sharing a lot of things from the book, particularly what’s changed from previous posts, as well as a lot of things regarding the Transformation Economy that aren’t in the book – some of which only because I learned of it too late.
Let me start with the Table of Contents. This is the complete TOC in the final book:
Preparation
Chapter 1: Getting into the Transformation Business
Chapter 2: Fostering Human Flourishing
Chapter 3: Understanding Aspirants & Aspirations
Chapter 4: Shifting from Experiences to Transformations
Chapter 5: Staging Transformative Experiences
Chapter 6: Creating Transformation Offerings
Chapter 7: Guiding Transformations
Reflection
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
I posted the original Table of Contents last August, with paragraph descriptions and the key framework from each chapter. It had six chapters and the final one seven, but many are very different – thanks to you, my Substack readers, as well as Harvard Business Review Press and other reviewers, my editor at HBRP, and my own thinking.
Note that as I go through all these changes you’ll find links to the original content, which should be especially important for those newer to this Substack who have not seen it all or gone through the Archive. Since then everything’s been edited, usually somewhat shorter and definitely somewhat sharper, from the original posts linked to here, but you will gain a lot of value from them.
Basically, I consolidated the first and third chapters – Beyond Staging Experiences to Guiding Transformations and It’s About Time – into today’s first chapter, Getting into the Transformation Business. It’s focused on the Progression of Economic Value as given there, then I go into the Time Progression from the old third chapter, but instead of calling it out as its own framework show it atop the Progression, where commodities, goods, and services provide time well saved, experiences offer time well spent, and transformations guide time well invested. (And no one should inflict time wasted.) This is MUCH shorter than the original to major on the transformations/time well invested level rather than the lower-level economic offerings. That chapter concludes with a section entitle You Are What You Charge For, about how with transformations you should charge for the demonstrated outcomes your customers achieve.
I decided to focus chapter 2, What Business Are You Really In?, less on the four spheres of transformation than on human flourishing. And that is precisely because in the writing I determined (or was it discovered?) that Fostering Human Flourishing (the new chapter title) is the raison d’être of business. This is, in my mind, a really huge statement, and one of the areas that I expanded in the writing rather than shortened.
In the writing I determined that Fostering Human Flourishing is the raison d’être of business.
The original chapter 4, Understanding the Human Desire for Transformation, became two chapters, Understanding Aspirants and then Understanding Aspirations. Then it became one chapter again: Understanding Aspirants & Aspirations, naturally. That’s basically because there was one framework in each of those chapters that I intended to include, but in the end they didn’t work out. (More on those in some later posts.) The final chapters opens with the fact that all transformation is identity change, and then covers the varieties of aspirants, the catalysts for change, and the types of aspirations. (That was three 2x2s in one chapter, so left out the framework for the varieties of aspirants!)
The feedback I received here on Substack led to the creation of the Delta Model!