An Excerpt from The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations
From the author who defined the Experience Economy comes the next big shift: the Transformation Economy.
A fundamental economic shift is emerging. Goods, services—even memorable experiences—are no longer enough to attract and keep your customers. Customers are clamoring to change, eager to reach their aspirations and to become better versions of themselves.
Welcome to the Transformation Economy.
To truly compete in today's marketplace, enterprises must create transformative experiences that guide customers to achieve their aspirations, whether that's improving well-being, increasing prosperity, developing knowledge, or finding purpose. These aspirations speak to customers' greatest desires, their dreams for the future, and their conceptions of who they are and who they strive to be.
In this book, bestselling author B. Joseph Pine II builds on his iconic work on the Experience Economy to explain what this new shift means for companies looking to stand out and gain competitive advantage. Using examples from organizations across industries, including Noom, Symplany, Hydrafacial, London Business School, and Johnnie Walker Whisky, Pine provides practical, proven frameworks for organizations to design, create, and guide transformative offerings that help customers reach their greatest aspirations and flourish over the long term.
The excerpt below comes from Chapter 5: Staging Transformative Experiences.
◊◊◊◊◊
THE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
Think now of how you can design the drama in your sequence of transformative experiences through the hero’s journey. Modeled after Christopher Vogler’s insightful rendition, figure 5-4 illustrates a Transformation Journey that incorporates many of the ideas and principles in this book. It entails twelve stages over four parts, beginning and ending in the ordinary world of life as it passes through the transformation world, a liminal space and time where the aspirant is neither the original individual nor the fully transformed one. Consider how your business would apply the steps along the journey, recognizing that you need not follow it slavishly, but can adapt it to your perspective, circumstances, and language.
Metamorphosis aspirations are perfect for this form of dramatic structure, but the other types can benefit from it as well. Here’s how the Transformation Journey proceeds:
PART 1: ASPIRATION
1. Living life: An individual—which could be an organization, a business, or a community, not just a person—is going about their ordinary life, lacking any desire for transformation.
2. Aspiration: Something sparks a desire for change. Eventually that aspiration coalesces into one of refinement, ambition, cultivation, or full-on metamorphosis.
3. Hesitation: The aspirant may hesitate or outright refuse the call to transform, realizing they don’t have the time or resources to go on the journey, or decide the aspiration is too difficult or even unachievable. It may take another catalyst to encourage the aspirant to embrace the journey of transformation—and sometimes that spark is the guide.
4. Meeting the guide: Having a mentor turns the journey from an individual pursuit into an economic offering—and thereby greatly increases the chances of success. This encounter could come in the first two steps, as with invitational transformations, and could result from the aspirant seeking help, not just the guide offering it. Whatever the case, it’s time to develop the individual from/to statement and design the series of transformative experiences, properly encapsulated, for the journey ahead. (This process should be informed by matching the type of transformation to the type of aspiration, as will be discussed in the next chapter.)
5. Commitment: The transformation begins in earnest as the aspirant “crosses the threshold” from the ordinary world to the transformation world. Commitment proves crucial to doing so successfully, for without it the aspirant doesn’t put the work in. You’ll learn more about commitment and its power in the next two chapters, but with that in place, the set of transformative experiences required to achieve the aspiration can proceed.
PART 2: EXPERIENCES
6. Preparation: This step encompasses imagining the entire journey before it happens, picturing its sequence of events, thinking about what it will be like, and envisioning life with the aspiration achieved. Doing so sets up each aspirant for success, and the more arduous the journey, the greater the preparation needs to be.
7. Starts—and fits: After preparation comes the first experience, then the one after that, and the one after that. Most will progress the aspirant toward the aspiration, while some may necessarily be remedial experiences to handle regress that occasionally—and for aspirations of ambition and metamorphosis, inevitably—happens. In some cases, this step may even be filled with trials and tribulations, especially for those with a disruption catalyst.
8. Crucible: This step is often named ordeal in the hero’s journey, but crucible is a much better term for the transformation journey, for out of the most difficult of experiences comes a new creation, a changed identity, a transformed aspirant.
PART 3: TRANSFORMATION
9. Transformation: The aspirant achieves the aspiration, going from what was to a new identity, finally able to say, “I was X, now I am Y.” If the aspiration is one of metamorphosis, the part of the journey through the crucible into this third part is like a chrysalis, the place of transformation from which emerges some one or some thing new.
10. Reflection: As the aspirant heads from the transformation world toward living life anew, the question arises: Will it last? To ensure that the transformation endures and does not dissipate under the pressures of daily life, the aspirant must be guided to reflect on the journey. Helping them look back on what transpired, and simultaneously look forward to contemplate who they are in light of the transformation, will reveal how it will likely impact the rest of their life.
PART 4: INTEGRATION
11. Integration: This step completes the overarching process of encapsulation by taking reflection and putting it into action. The aspirant is guided on how to incorporate the transformation into their daily life, seeing how it impacts and is impacted by other aspects of identity. Their perspective then broadens out to include how the transformation affects and is affected by relationships with others, for it is often the pressures, considerations, and impacts of the external world that cause the internal change to lessen, regress, or dissipate.
12. Greater flourishing: With integration the aspiration is achieved, the identity change is complete, and the transformation is sustained. As the guide, you have fostered greater flourishing for the aspirant, who can return to living life until the next aspiration starts the cycle of the transformation journey anew.
As mentioned earlier when discussing Vogler’s illustration, in every hero’s journey the hero returns with a reward that benefits others. With the Transformation Journey model this naturally happens for any organizational, business, or community transformation, since the aspiration always involves employees, customers or members, respectively. And it is often the case with individual people, but you should explicitly convey the benefits of having a positive impact on others, including helping them flourish, into the overarching encapsulation process.
Given the transformation journey results in greater flourishing, note that the return to step 1 means living life on a higher plane, if you will. Think of this as the third dimension of the Journey, rising up from the paper as a helix, spiraling up and around with each transformation, guiding aspirants in progressing closer and closer to who they are meant to be. That is the promise of the Transformation Economy, that as a guider you can, aspirant by aspirant, foster human flourishing and thereby fulfill the purpose of business.
Of course, not every step on this Transformation Journey is needed for every aspirant nor every guider, and there can be a lot of variation, such as where the guide comes in, when commitment happens, and how deep the crucible is. Feel free, as with the sphere examples earlier, to take professional and poetic license to design a journey that best fits your or your aspirant’s needs. And realize you don’t have to do it all—you can buy from or partner with other businesses and integrate their offerings into your transformation, or specialize in aspects of the journey that you can provide to other companies.
Moreover, this Transformation Journey is not the only way to approach dramatic experiences, and it may not be appropriate for everyone. But when it is, this structured framework, modeled on such a quest, can be a powerful tool for designing and depicting, staging and guiding your experiences and for turning them into full transformation offerings.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations by B. Joseph Pine II. Copyright © 2026 B. Joseph Pine II. All rights reserved.
About the Author
B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management adviser to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups alike, and cofounder of Strategic Horizons LLP. He is the coauthor, with James H. Gilmore, of the bestselling book The Experience Economy, as well as Infinite Possibility, with Kim C. Korn. His other books include Authenticity and Mass Customization.
