Join us for an electrifying conversation with best-selling author and management guru Joe Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy and his latest, The Transformation Economy. Joe takes us through his fascinating journey from a technical role at IBM to pioneering the concept of staging experiences and, ultimately, guiding transformations. Discover the critical mindset shift required to move your business from selling services and experiences to fostering meaningful, life-changing outcomes for your customers—or, as Joe calls them, “aspirants.” Learn why “human flourishing” is the true raison d’être of business and how embracing intentionality and accountability can transform trauma and aspiration into a powerful force for good in the world.
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Beyond The Experience: The Transformation Economy And Human Flourishing With Joe Pine
It is truly my honor and pleasure to introduce my guest Joe Pine. Joe is an internationally claimed author, speaker and management advisor. He’s appeared on many different stages, spoken at World Economic Forum in Davos, TED in California, South by Southwest in Austin, and the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Joe specializes in helping people see the world of business differently through as many groundbreaking books, including Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition and including Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want and many more.
He’s most well-known for his bestselling book, The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money, which twice has been named one of the 100 best books of all time. His latest book, The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations is truly amazing. I’m looking forward to sharing more of that with you. Please join me in welcoming Joe to the show.
Tony, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
I’m so thrilled to have you here. As I said, I’m a big fan. Your books had an impact on how about things but also seeing the world in a different way is powerful. You’ve done a great job of getting people to see things differently. On the show, we are going to explore your journey into how you get to making all these amazing impact on the world. The humble beginnings if you will. Are you ready to start exploring that?
Let’s go.
The way we do this is through what’s called flashpoints. The points in your journey that have ignited gifts in the world. As you’re sharing, we’ll pause along the way and see what themes are showing up. With that, I’ll pass the mic over to you, Joe. Take it away. What are some flashpoints you’d like to share?
Early Career & Flashpoints At IBM
Tony, I appreciate that. I’ll preface it by saying that I’m a nerd from way back. I have been using Computers since elementary school in the late 1960s and ‘70s. My father’s in the computer industry in the late ‘50s from the ground floor. I got an Applied Math degree, and I joined IBM. It was very technical job. I loved it, but the first flashpoint I’d say, and I’m not quite sure how this happened, but this switch flipped. I decided I wanted to go into management, rather than be technical the whole time.
I did that. I was one of the youngest managers in IBM at the time. I did great there. I moved into management and strategy. The next big flashpoint, I still remember when my manager came into my office and said, “IBM sends four or five people to MIT every year to get a Master’s degree. Would that be of interest to you?” I immediately said, “I should go ask my wife, but yes. Sign me up.” There was no hesitation.
To continue that, I found out I had to write a thesis and I said, “I’m going to write a thesis that I can turn into a book.” That was my first book, Mass Customization, the first four chapters and the appendix are my thesis at MIT, then I extended it. After I got done with MIT, the idea was taking normal headquarters job and then moved back to Minnesota, where we had our laboratory for the AS fund, our computer system.
Within a few months, I began looking for a spot that could give me time to write the book and that could make a difference. I joined the IBM Consulting Group which they just started out and a management research function, which my job was to developed ideas. I was like, “This is wonderful.” We developed ideas. They gave me time to finish the book. It came out in late 1992. My dad always told me I was brainwashed with IBM.
The term we used, we bled blue, IBM blue. I said, “I love this company. I can’t imagine ever leaving.” Within nine months of the book coming out, I left because IBM gave both my wife and I six months’ salary. I said, “Let me see if I can make it on my own out of this book. I can always get another job if I had to.” It’s been several years and my wife is still not sure it’s going to work out, but so far so good.
I love that your keeping your sense of humor in this whole process. It’s amazing.
Discovery Of The Experience Economy & Transformation Economy
Those are the big early things. Discovering the experience economy and the transformation economy together was a big deal. It came out of Mass Customization where I had long said that mass customizing goods turned them into services and this workshop I was doing and some smart Alex in the back of the room. When you talk about services and mass customize, what does it turn a service into it? I shot back that mass customization automatically turns a service into an experience.
I went, “That’s sounds good. Hold on a second. Let me write that down.” It just came out of my mouth. It was providence and I wrote it down. I figured out. If that was true, then experiences would be distinct economic offering. If that was true, then you’d have an economy based off experience. That was the birth of the Experience Economy. I hasten to add that I didn’t invent it. I just discovered it. It wouldn’t be happening with or without me ever needing. Somebody else would have come along and done that, but I discovered what was going on.
I also had this pension for when I was in strategy to always ask what’s next. I said, “What’s next?” What happens when you customized experience? We design experience. It’s so appropriate for this particular person. The experience they need at this moment in time. You can’t help but turn to what we often call a life-changing experience. An experience that changed this some way and that’s a transformation. You only ever changed the experiences we have. When they change us, we’ve gotten better in some way.
A life-changing experience is one that changes us—a transformation. We truly change only when an experience helps us grow and become better.
That’s always been there. When we first published, my partner Jim Gilmore and I, the Experience Economy in 1999, the last chapters were on the transformation economy. There’s many other things in between, but I’d say, it was like coming out of COVID because I’ve been asked for 25 years, “When are you going to write a full book of transformation?”
Coming out of COVID, I realized now is the time. You can see the people went back to all the experiences they missed during COVID in a big way but there’s something different in that. It was not just about memorable experiences but about meaningful experience as well. Which I always considered a half step to transformation. Another thing led me say, “Now is the time. Let me write this book,” which I began in January of 2024. Now we’re here where it’s just been published.
It’s a remarkable what you just shared. First of all, one of the things that I’ve realized about you is when you ask what’s next in business, it’s also you constantly following a thread of what’s next for you. Things start to connect the dots start to connect from your first book to your most current book. Ultimately, it’s about you pushing the edge yourself and saying like, “What do I want to be sticking my hand in the ground or whatever you want to call it, and claiming as what’s the next iteration for myself?’
I love that reflection. The fact that you are IBM, which have all the companies, what an amazing flip the day went through to go from being a strictly hardware organization, to being a service offering. I know you talked a little bit about that in the book, but that’s an important thing, to be part of that journey but also knowing that, “This is the start of something bigger than just this.”
I remember when I was at MIT. There was a program called the Master’s in the Management of Technology, and most people there were not for manufacturing companies. They were from service companies or in my case, I’m in the service side of IBM. All the case studies and everything where all about manufacturing companies. I did a lot of talk with professors saying you got to shift to services and do more around service companies. I didn’t realize it, but that’s partly where I saw that shift from goods to services. It’s easy to say, “From service to experience.” I primed myself for that transition.
There’s something about that. The primary self but also creating this flow. As I said earlier, all your book seem to connect.
That’s the DNA of them all. It’s there.
I love that. I see this book as a pinnacle moment for you, which is not to say this is not more to come. It’s an important book that brings a lot of these elements back to the table and codifies it. This is where we’re at now. I couldn’t agree more with the fact that we’re on a precipice of more experiences that are going to be offered. People are thinking, “When they come to my business. what do I want them to experience?” What you’re aiming towards and we’ll talk about this more is, we need to be thinking more mindfully and intentionally about what we want the people to come away with.
Aspirants & Human-Centered Mindset
Which is understand why are they buying from you. That’s the key. Maybe commodities accepted but, whatever goods you buy or whatever services or whatever experiences you buy, understand why because all of those are means to an end. If you sell the end rather than the means, you gain much more economic value. It’s about understanding those ends which gets to those core aspirations that people have for why they’re buying you then you can think about how do I subsume what I’m selling into the end transformation that my customers truly desire.
I love that you brought in what they aspire to because I know that’s a big part of this and I want to pull that thread. Your latest book talks about aspirants. It would be great to give some more language or definition behind it. It was such a beautiful part of the book and it would be great to share that idea.
All my books have had a degree of what my friend, Eddie even calls languaging. You need to come up with new vocabulary for new ideas. If you think about businesses, they all have customers. My definition of customers is very simple. The customer is the one who pays you money. That’s what a customer is. The type of customer or the category of that customer differs on your economic offering. Commodity extractor sell into markets. They have no idea who ends up with their products. It’s an anonymous market out there.
Goods manufacturers have users. Service providers have client, which is just a French word for customer. Experience stagers have guests. You think about hospitality guests. It was a term Walt Disney used when reopening a theme park. Transformation guiders have aspirants. These are people who aspire to become something, who want to achieve those aspirations, who want to become who they want to become.
I’m not necessarily saying use it with your customers. At least not in your marketing materials. You may want to enter in because it’s weird word as a consumer to think about it, but maybe. It is how you need to treat them and recognize that your job is not done. Let’s say finally transformed for aspirant to achiever, to achiever of that aspiration or whatever it is.
That’s a great way to frame that. One of the things I think about first and foremost is that someone might aspire to be like a person on social media on Instagram and all the different places they go. That’s great. It doesn’t necessarily take it to the next level, which is to say you want to attach yourself to a brand or be seen as, “I’m a big fan of this person. Therefore. I’m going to do what I can to aspire to that person.” The true transformation comes down to take it to the next place. How can you help them achieve that transformation? Not just talk about it or read this one-sided relationship.
It’s about the impact you have on them. An important thing to understand, transformation are build on top of experience. We only ever change to the experiences that we have. Experiences on top of services and goods and then commodities. You need them all to be able to create a transformation, but what all the rest of those are mere inputs. Commodities, good, services, and experiences you provide are mere inputs. What your customers or your aspirants want are outcomes. Inputs don’t matter. Only outcomes. How do you guide them to achieve those outcomes and ideally get paid for the outcomes that you achieve?
In the threatening to poll here says that sometimes you can do all you want in terms of trying to create the expectation of what they’re going to get the outcome. You have to make sure that you’re following this path of like, what’s your intention? The impact is necessarily isn’t in your control. What happens oftentimes is people say like, “I wanted this to happen and they didn’t happen.” It’s because of the fact that you’ve got to be more intentional and more mindful about what you’re putting together and what experience you want people to have. At the ends, the impact is more achievable, if you will.
Commitment To Process & Intentionality
You tell me you had listened to the book on Audible and got all the way through the reflection, which I recorded myself, the preparations, beginning, and the reflection at the end. I talked about how intention is, in fact, a thread that goes throughout the entire book. I didn’t point it out a lot but your aspiration is your intention. Your ideal future self is your intention of who you want to become. You have to, therefore, have that intentionality.
One of the things that a transformation guider needs to do is that if you don’t already have a commitment to the aspiration. That needs to be part of the process. There’s different places in the process you do. You have to gain a commitment. Ideally, I would have them write it down at sign it to say, “This is my commitment,” because you can’t change them. As the old saying goes, “You lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink.” They have to change themselves.
Without a commitment, there are minor transformations, lesser aspects of identity and smaller scale and so forth that don’t require big commitment. Particularly because they may not care how long it takes to do it. It’s just something that they’re working on. Anything big needs that commitment to be able to change and without it, large scale changes just don’t happen.
Anything big requires the commitment to change, and without it, large-scale changes just don’t happen.
You just did a master class right of what it takes to make change happen. You have to be committed to the process or committed to what they’re doing. I often think about, we as creators, let’s call or people who is creating experience, I like to think of it as the end in mind of, what do I want people to feel? That’s where the intentionality comes from, but then also the open to whatever else comes up.
You write a book, for example. Oftentimes, you think like, “This is great. I wrote the book and it’s done.” The book then takes on a life of its own. You as the creator of that book or a creator of whatever it is it that you create, you want to be thinking, “That’s interesting how they consumed this. Maybe I need to follow that thread and see where that’s going.” It has a living element to the book. Would you agree?
I know very much so that the book is a living thing. I want this book more so than any other books, to have an impact on the world. I want people to ascend to the proposition at the transformation business and thereby contribute to human flourishing in the world, which transformation is do most directly. I got a heart and a passion for that. They developed in the writing more so than anything. This is what the world needs. It’s to help people become who they’re meant to be.
It’s so interesting to hear this. You started the beginning of your story of being this technical person working in IBM.
I still have pocket protectors.
You said you’re a nerd, so it all fits. You see the evolution of what you’ve gotten to. It’s almost like you’ve gotten the essence of why we do what we do. It’s to come up with this idea of how we transform, how we create flourishing through this process of thinking and what I am creating for the people around me.
I like how you said commitment to the process. It’s not something I highlight in the book. Generally, I talk about commitment to the outcome, to aspiration that you want. Often, you may have that but the greater commitment is to the process. One of the examples I talked about in the book was a profile plan by Sanford. They got bought and they changed your name. I can’t remember what the new name is, but that’s what they asked for.
It was to lose weight. They had a special plan for doing it. It involved meals that they could provide, but it also involved coaching. In fact, weekly coaching physically before COVID. Now, both physical and virtual you can do. What they want is a commitment to the process. You may have a weight goal, but they don’t know how long it’s going to take to get there, which is going to differ from people. Whenever you have a transformation going from here to here going up into the right. It’s never monetary increasing. There’s always regressed along with progress.
They say, “Commit to the process and you will get there.” Whenever they have a coaching session, and once a week they do this. They make the appointment for the next session before you leave that session. We’re not done until we make it. You’re on vacation. When is the next time that you can do it? They know as long as they keep them to where they’re making those appointments, they will meet their weight goal.
It’s that sense of real strong accountability that you’re creating through this process. One of the things I often say is when you’re coaching or working people like having compassion, put accountability, and finding that balance because you want to show them that you care deeply. You want the best for them. At the same time, you want to hold them accountable to continue. If they said they’re committed to this goal, how do you make sure that they stay on track?
That’s where that’s where you bring up that commitment that hopefully they sighed and said, “Did you mean this? Did you did you mean what you wrote here?” You sign this with your name. If necessary, you shame them into it. You say, “This is what you committed to. You have to keep going. Don’t give up now.”
There’s so many threads I want to pull here but I’m going to start with going back to your process. Which is to say, along this journey of doing the work you’re doing, where there moments when you started to say, “Am I crazy? Is this the right path for me?” Where there times that you said, “Something’s not working and I need to change?”
Not once. We added new offerings and new things that we did. Right before I left IBM, in fact, this consultant sent me a package and a video tape. I remember Jim Gilmore is his name. He worked for a small consulting company that eventually got bought by CSC. He said, “I loved your book on mass customization. I’ve been talking about it. Here’s a video tape of me speaking on that.” We happened to be in Chicago at the same time for different events and so forth.
We met for a drink and got to know each other. A couple months later, I left IBM. I’m like, “I need clients. Who was that guy I met in Chicago?” I look him up, call up and he became my first client and eventually my partner. He joined me 30 years ago. He left and joined me on this journey. I had already explained to him the Experience Economy. He’s my co-author in the Experience Economy and HB Articles and Authenticity as well and so forth.
We did come out with new offerings. We came out with a learning encounter and a learning excursion. Learning encounters is like workshop but vary based off and incorporating a learning experience where we go out in the city and experience things. You can see firsthand what was going on. We added an annual event called Think About that we did for many years. We then decided to stop doing it and all for various reasons.
Those sort of things are going out, but nothing ever caused me to question the path that I was on. I question things. I’m still coming out with new idea. We did a gym initiated doing an expert certification course. Very high cost and very high value. There’s a four-day immersion in it. We did that in 2006 and we have over 340. I certified one in the Experience Economy. I did a course in the Netherlands and that took eight years after the first edition of the book was out.
I’m already recognizing that I can do that this summer for transformations. I also wrote a transformation toolkit to allow people to understand the ideas better, and do a bunch of exercises, bunch of templates and tools that they can use. That forms the basis the new certification course. Those sorts of things that I’m doing, but the path is long been the same.
Scaling Impact & Certification For Transformation
What I love what you shared is a sense of like, it’s great to put something out in the world. You do need to make money at some point. You need to have the right customers in place, but also seeing how you look beyond that and say, “I can’t do this alone.” Partnering up with Jim was a big moment for you. Also, thinking about, “How do I spread this so that other people can start to utilize it in their own way?”
That’s 340 proselytizers that are out there. Putting a word on experienced guy either in their company or with their clients. I want to do that with a transformation certification as well. One of the things I read was quoted in the book where I wrote about the heroes journey and turn that into a more generic transformation journey. Dave Ferguson is a Pastor of Christian Church in Chicago area. He came out with a book called The Hero Maker on the hero’s journey. I said wow.
One of the things he said specifically talking to pastors, but I read it for myself. He said, “You need to be a hero maker. You need to not think that, ‘I’ve got my church and that’s it.’ You need to think, how do you take people in there and turn them into heroes that are spreading the word? How can you foster daughter churches all over the place that are doing that?”
That’s what I want to be. I want to make heroes that spread the word that transform the world because of what they learn here. Some of them do compete with me. They’re like, “For half the price, you can get this guy talking about it and so forth.” I’m fine with that because then I’ve got more capacity to do other things. It’s about finding those people that truly embrace the ideas and letting them make their difference in the world. That’s what the toolkit and the certification do, is make Heroes out of others.
What’s interesting is you bring up the pastor. I think of the journey of a pastor and what they do. There’s something powerful about that. They’re spreading the word, but they’re also not saying like, “Since I spread the word, I’m the one who owns all of this.: It’s more about creating other people who will then extend and continue to spread more of that ripple impact.
I can still remember. I got advice on the Experience Economy to trademark the term. I said, “No. I want everybody using it, I don’t want to think that it’s just mine.” Again, I didn’t invent it. I discovered it. The same with the Transformation Economy. One of my dear hopes is that at least at some point economist the world over recognized experience and transformations for the distinct economic offering.
They lump them into services and start to measure things differently. We have a lot better data of what’s going on. If you tease out the data, what your experiences and transformation, they’re growing far more than services are, both in employment and percentage GDP, where goods are declining and employment and GDP. Commodities go up and down. That’s one of the reasons why they’re commodities, but they decline also. All the growth is a little bit in services and mostly an experiences and transformations.
There’s something about selling a service that is an invisible outcome. You can’t say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” You can try. Especially when it comes to coaches and people who are doing the work of helping people to see what’s possible, you have to sell them and invisible thing. That is a challenge but it’s also a promise that you’re making to that person, which is to say, “I can’t guarantee that you’re going to get exactly these results but my promise is I’m going to do what I can to make sure that you get the feeling of a transformation.” I jammed a lot of things in that conversation, but I want to get your general reaction to you just heard.
One of the things you remind me of is that research shows that if you can envision, which is a word I would use about your future. If you can envision your future self, like what you’re going to look at age 65, when you plan on retiring. You’ll make better decisions now. You make better financial. You’ll save more money. You’ll eat better. You’ll exercise more because you’re thinking on behalf of that future self. It’s one of the techniques to be able to get people to invite them into a transformation.
If you can envision your future self—what you’ll look like at age 65 and when you plan to retire—you’ll make better decisions today.
When I first discovered this in the original Experience Economy and the last two chapters on Transformation. I didn’t think a lot about this particular aspect. My thought was like, There’s this bluebird of happiness that lands on your shoulder.” You go, “Bing. I got an aspiration. How do I do that?” That’s not it. Often, you have to invite them to have that transformation to think about their lives and wealth advisors should do that.
Doctors should do that and go beyond the immediate treating whatever the issue is at the moment to think about what your future self is, and what your future self should be to think about why you exist yourself, what your own purpose in life and how you’re going to help fulfill that across your well-being, prosperity, wisdom, and meaning. You’ll be able to then help them do that.
One of the things in the research that I did for this book is that a lot of transformations happen because of trauma. They’re in a devastating car accident. They get cancer or a loved one dies or get divorced. Often, retirement is trauma from any people because they’re not prepared for it. The thing about trauma is that it immediately changes you. You’ve changed. Now, the task is, how do I get back to some semblance of hole? Looking for those opportunities with trauma to help people recover from that, to transform trauma into something that betters them and their family, and perhaps their business and the world in some way.
You just basically embody what a flashpoint is. It’s the sense of trauma can be the most amazing flashpoint. It’s about how do you put the pieces back together? How do you figure out what meaning you want to make from it? I often talk about that. Sometimes you got to fall apart to come to find yourself and not to say that we should be in trauma and looking for it.
Sometimes those moments open us up to saying like, “The things I was doing before this moment weren’t serving me the way I wanted them to be. Now I get to make a different Forward from this event that allows me to see things differently. Maybe even be things differently to the future self.” I love that you bring that element into this conversation. We’ve talked a lot about the new book. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about or anything that you want to share that you feel is so important for people to recognize?
Human Flourishing & the Role of Businesses
I’ll share two things if I may. I alluded to this a second ago and I used the term human flourishing. One of the things I discovered in the writing the book too is that the raison debt of business and the reason why business and I’ll say capitalism exists at all is to foster human flourishing in the world. It’s something that businesses need to understand that their end goal is not profits. Profits are the measure of how well you can contribute to human flourishing. All economic offerings contribute to it.
We only buy any economic offering or the commodity, good, service, experience or transformation because we think that having that offering or partaking in that offering is worth more than the money that you have in your account. You’re paying somebody basically to be better off in some way. Sometimes, we’re diluted about what’s going to make us better off. Sometimes we’re addicted to something that we can’t help but buy it .Even though it’s not good for us or they’re better things for us.
Transformation do that most directly. They translate to a flourishing because that’s what they do. They directly transform us into a better version of ourselves that flourishes more than we did before. Which I define as flourishing is the extent to which you are and who you are meant to be. It’s very intentionally vague and a difference for every person. If businesses accept that, then there’d be so much good that happens.
Capitalism already has been the greatest force for good ever invented. There’s so much more abundant in our lives than we were 20 years ago than were 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, or 250 years ago before the industrial revolution. It’s an amazing thing. There’s an opportunity to go into a golden age, I’ll say of flourishing if companies recognize that’s what they’re all about. The other thing I’ll say fairly quickly is that if you’re in the experience business, even in the service business where you have a direct interaction with customers. There’s one framework in the book that will all most automatically get you into the transformation business. That’s what I call Encapsulation.
Encapsulation, which is my term for stuff that’s been around a long time. It’s been very academically researched that many people and companies do naturally. You take the experience you’re having and encapsulate it with preparation beforehand. Reflection afterwards and integration on ongoing basis. Preparation primes them for the experience. It maybe get some thinking about themselves like envisioning that future self that you talked about, Tony. It’s a beautiful thing to think about during preparation.
You have the experience, but ideally immediately you reflect on that like, what was the highlights for me? Was there anything that sparks an aspiration? It’s because of this experience, am I seeing differently? Am I thinking differently? Am I doing anything differently? If so, then how do I make that a part of my life? To take that change that happened. That’s integration.
That’s where most companies pr at least putatively in the transformation business fall down. They think, “You’re transformed. Boom. We’re done.” Not realizing they haven’t integrated that in my life particularly true through of trauma. You need that ongoing relationship with them. You need ongoing work with them. If you do that, you will be transformative.
There’s something about that which is to say we sometimes forget about the full arc of experience that we’re trying to create for others and the aspiration that we’re trying to get them to achieve. The biggest problem comes down to maybe losing sight of why you’re doing it. Coming back to the human flourishing element, it’s to say, “If you start with that in mind, how am I making the world better through my service product or all the things that you’re wrapping up into your offering?”
The best thing you can do is make sure that you follow the thread all the way to the end to the integration. Oftentimes, if we’re getting stuck into like, “I’m making money. I’ll do this talk then walk away. Who cares what happens?” Instead, you’re like, “I want to make sure whatever I share with them, they’re going to take to the next level because that’s going to allow them to feel the difference between having a commodity to experiencing something that will take them to that next level.”
I love everything you shared. This book is such a powerful thing and I’m so glad that you decided to put this into the world. Let me ask. What happens now? Once you’ve gotten this book out in the world and you’re starting to see that Transformation Economy is very essential now for us to move towards. What are some things that you think people will be challenged with? What do you think your challenge will be intrinsic moving forward? I know it’s a difficult question but answer it how you’d like.
The thing people are challenged with is primarily to make any true change. You need to change in mindset. If they approach transformations from a service mindset or even from an experienced mindset, it won’t be effective or it won’t work. You need to gain a new mindset that does treat your individual customers. You can’t treat them as a market or a segment or niche.
Your individual customers, as human beings that they are, understand that you have a fiduciary responsibility to do what’s best for them. Not to extract more money out of them, but what’s best for them. You send to the proposition that you are in the transformation business, which means you focus on the outcomes. Not the inputs. You’re ideally charge for the outcomes. Ideally even further, you recognize that it’s all about human flourishing. That’s the mindset that you need.
Focus on the outcomes, not the inputs.
That mindset shift is so important because you can give people the best possible tools and things to work with. If they’re not committed to this new process which comes from mindset, then they’re never going to get where they want to go. In essence, that’s where the breakdown of that of that exchange happens when you say you don’t get people enough information to be able to see themselves in that transformation.
My job again is to make heroes. I’m not the heroes of this story. I’m just writing about it. I’m just telling people. People are doing it out there and I want to make them heroes through the book and through the transformation toolkit, through Transportation Economy certification and the speeches and workshops I give through shows like this. I appreciate it, Tony, for this opportunity to share these ideas. I’m hoping that there are people out that go, “That’s what I’m about. I’m about transformation. I’m going to do this more, better and effectively.” Thereby, change the world for the better through the transformation to help people become more of who they are meant to be.
Bridging Human Flourishing & Value: Influential Books & Transformational Insights
Joe, you’re a font of great knowledge. I love how you thread the needle between two different things, which often people miss. You can be someone who sees the bigger picture and has that connection to transforming people but also getting back to the economics of it all. You talk about a lot of economies in the name, but there’s something about that which is to say fundamentally, we need to understand both sides of that. The heart part of seeing, what do I want for these people? The more Analytical in mind part, which is to say, how does all this exchanging of value to human flourishing? Last question is a question I ask everyone, but I’m always intrigued by what I get back. Which is, what are one or two books have had an impact on you and why?
I’ll start with a almost 40-year old book that changed my life. In the story mentioned earlier about what you call flashpoints. I usually mentioned this book but I didn’t this time. It’s Stan Davis’s book Future Perfect. It came out in 1987. He died after COVID, but he’s my intellectual Godfather. He wrote this book that I read when I was a strategic planner at IBM. It was like the heavens opened up in the angel saying. It was amazing.
I explained everything that I was seeing. He had a chapter in mass customization. He had another chapter that was called No Matter that inspired by my book Infinite Possibility. The two chapters inspired entire new books. It helped understand why what I saw when I ran this project where we brought customers and business partners in development of the IBM AS 400 that they were all different. They were all unique and they wanted different things.
We had to efficiently customized for them. Not just Mass produce but mass customized for them. When I got that opportunity to MIT and I realized I had to do with thesis. I merely said, “I’m going to turn mass customization into a full book.” I believe that book is as applicable now as it was when he wrote it many years ago. The second book I’ll add is even older than that and that’s the Bible, which truly changed my life as well.
As it says in 2 Corinthians, “You accept Christ, your transformed into a new creation.” That was a core transformation and a flashpoint also when I was much younger. It is also as I said, mass customization is the DNA of everything I write about but there’s always that perspective that comes from understanding God, and who He is and how we underlies everything in the world. You see that also come throughout.
What I wrote in the book that human flourishing is the extent to which you are who you are meant to be. The predecease is, no matter who or wHo does the meaning? We all have this this basic desire for meaning in our life and that’s what God fulfills us. If we don’t get it from God, we’re going to get at someplace else and not all those places are good places to be.
I love that you bring this up because there’s something about, who am I? The existentialism that we need to sometimes question and say, “Who am I aspiring to be? How am I getting here?” When you think about it, those are the questions that God and other religious or whatever you believe in, helps us to see beyond just like the transactional world and into that transformational world.
We start to think about, who do I want to be and how do I want to understand my own life experience. Through that transformation is the way that we get there. This has been amazing. I want to respect your time and all, but I’ll just say thank you so much for coming on this journey and sharing all the things you did. I wanted to just start by saying thank you.
I appreciate that, Tony. It was wonderful because I love that it was a conversation. It’s not rapid-fire questions. We’re able to get a lot of things out in a short amount of time. I appreciate you.
We did touch a lot of ground. Thank you so much for saying that. Before I let you go, what is the best place for people to find out about you and learn more about? They need to get all your books.
Let’s start with the Transformation Economy. Start with that. You can find it everywhere books are sold, which reminds me. I haven’t gone to a physical bookstore yet. I haven’t seen it in a bookstore, which I got to go do now that you mentioned it. Thank you. You can find more about me and my ideas at StrategicHorizons.com. That’s the name of my company. You always LinkedIn with me too if you want to connect and have particular questions or anything.
Thanks for that. Thanks, readers, coming on this journey with us. I know you’re leaving inspired and your mindset has been shifted about what you think transformation looks like and how to make sure that you are creating your own business and your own service offerings as how am I transforming people. With the last thread, which is the human flourishing element, which has love.
Thank you.