In Praise of Joe Pine’s New Book on Transformations

Joe Pine is about to do it again. For over 35 years, business leaders have been reading his books. First came Mass Customization—the first book to articulate the fundamental principle of value creation today.  Back in 1993, mass customization didn’t exist as a business principle. In 2024, customization, personalization, contextual adaptation, and customer control are fundamental to almost every solution.

Then Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy. The book came out in 1999 and revolutionized the way companies think about their customers and their solutions. That’s when I met Joe and Jim. Like many of you, the book won me over. Heart and soul. And it set a direction for my vocation. Today, you cannot have a strategy meeting without someone talking about the importance of experiences—for customers, employees, other companies. We live in the Experience Economy. Just as they predicted.

Joe and Jim have written subsequent books that look at different aspects of the Experience Economy. One on authenticity. Another on virtual experiences. But many of you will remember that in The Experience Economy—a book that has been a worldwide phenomenon and top seller for Harvard Business School Press—Pine and Gilmore foretold that the next economy would be a transformation economy.

This week, in The Experience Strategy Collaborative, Joe Pine shared his foundational framework for transformations. And the Stone Mantel team shared the first research study that was based on Joe’s framework. (In 1999, I created the first research methodology based on The Experience Economy, so doing it again is very meaningful to us.)

The transformations economy book that Joe is writing is a watershed book, just like Mass Customization; just like The Experience Economy.  It will be the most important book that experience strategists read in 2025. What I find fascinating about this important work is that you can see that this book is personal to Joe. (I’m sure they all are, but this one is special.)

While it is clearly a business book, this new work transcends book categories. It brings heart and soul to value creation. It taps into the elegant philosophical and spiritual tradition of what it means to be transformed. And it benefits the individual reader, causing each of us to reflect on our own lives. It is definitely not a self-help book, but you will be better for reading it. He writes for individuals, organizations, businesses, and communities.

Now, you might be asking how I know all of this? Have I read the manuscript? And the answer is, yes, I have. Or at least the parts that he has written. And so can you. Joe’s writing his chapters on Substack.

So, if you are not subscribing to Joe’s Substack, might I suggest you find the money and the time. It will be time well invested.