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.
Businesses unlock vast value when they help customers realize their true aims
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.
What enables companies to best shift from experiences to transformations? Encapsulation
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/
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.
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.
Here’s a good taste of some other ideas with some interesting extensions to my thinking
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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