Happy new year!
Actually, my favored salutation at this time of year is “Have a prosperous new year!” or “Here’s to a prosperous 2025!” I’ve long done that, but it relates directly to the health & prosperity sphere of transformation that I wrote about last April, with prosperity basically meaning “having a nice life”.
Back then I laid out the four spheres of transformation, using the term “sphere” rather than “industry” for reasons explained below. The four start with health & wellbeing and continue with wealth & prosperity, wisdom & understanding, and purpose & meaning. I also posted back then a short section on how they all came together to foster human flourishing. (Note that I changed the name of the third sphere to knowledge & wisdom for reasons that are explained below, and further in the section on it.)
Since then I’ve extended the sphere sections, including robust definitions of what each entail and how you and your enterprises can embrace them to create greater economic value, even without fully getting into the transformation business. I also fully fleshed out where the notion of human flourishing came from, what it means in terms of business and economics, and how fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business. My research didn’t yield any definitions of human flourishing that I fell in love with, so I came up with my own! (I look forward to feedback on that.)
So this is the first (short) post in a series on what is now Chapter 2 of the book, Fostering Human Flourishing, section by section. I’ll intersperse in a few other topics, such as book reviews, as we go along.
Enjoy, and may this year yield a new you! And as my friend, illustrator, and consigliere Kevin Dulle said recently on The Transformation Zone podcast with an even longer-time friend, Stan Hustad, “Stop making New Year resolutions.” Instead, “start the New You Revolution!”
Joe
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
This old proverb, popularized by American founding father Ben Franklin, recognizes three qualities in life to which we all should aspire. “Accidents” of birth – DNA, country and place, year, etc. – greatly affect your starting point and your potential for being healthy, wealthy, and wise, but progress on each of these aspirations help people experience lives well lived and flourish as human beings.[i]
Each one describes what I call a sphere of the Transformation Economy, a sector comprising multiple companies focused on similar endeavors and business opportunities. I avoid the term “industry” as it is so, well, industrial. “Sphere” is also fairly amorphous, as each of the three encompasses huge swaths of businesses and their economic offerings, overlap to a degree, and will over time grow larger as more and more companies embrace the value to be gained in guiding people and other businesses in achieving their aspirations.
The terms healthy, wealthy, and wise do not go far enough
However, healthy, wealthy, and wise do not go far enough in describing the opportunities in the emerging Transformation Economy. It’s not just about staying healthy; it’s about having health & wellbeing. It’s not just about becoming wealthy; it’s about having wealth & prosperity. And it’s not just about being wise; it’s about having knowledge & wisdom. Why put “wisdom” second in this last formulation? Because knowledge is the means to which wisdom is the end, just as health is the means to which wellbeing is the end, and wealth is the means to which prosperity is the end. It is wellbeing, prosperity, and wisdom that most foster human flourishing.
But they do not encompass all that enables us – as consumers, employees, and businesses – to flourish. It requires one more sphere of transformation: purpose & meaning. In fact, this is the most important sphere within the Transformation Economy, the one without which we simply cannot flourish.
Joe Pine
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II
[i] In The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2017), p. 16, Tara-Nicholle Nelson calls them “the Three Aspirations”.