We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joe Pine a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joe, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

I did a number of workshops for Walt Disney World in the early 2000s on the Experience Economy. The Walt Disney Company was — and is — the world’s premier experience stager, but its people are always seeking to get better, since experiences are the lifeblood of the company.

One of the things I emphasized with the participants was the need to customize the experience down to the individual family, and individual guest. Going to Walt Disney World was an amazing experience, but it was a mass experience. It was the same for everybody.

These made an impression on the group, one of whom, John Padgett, helped create the project that resulted in the MagicBand. Now for the first time the company could know who each person was in the park and customize experiences for them.

Not enough to John’s satisfaction, however. When he couldn’t get everything he thought necessary to mass customize the Disney World experience through the organization there, he left to become Chief Experience & Innovation Officer at the cruise company Carnival Corp. There he created the MedallionClass experience platform that could not only identify individual passengers but learn about their wants, needs, and desires and fulfill them at scale. It can even remember such things as when you’re on the pool deck with your kids your favorite drink is an iced tea; when you’re in the bar with your buddies it’s a mojito; and when you’re in the restaurant with your spouse it’s a glass of Shiraz!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started out very much as a technical nerd at IBM, but worked my way up to management and strategy, where I discovered that every customer was unique. There are no markets, only customers! When IBM sent me to MIT for a year to get my Master’s degree I resolved to turn my thesis into a book on Mass Customization — how to efficiently serve customers uniquely.

After the book was out for about 18 months I left the IBM Consulting Group to see if I can make it on my own. Three decades later my wife still isn’t sure it’s going to work out, but so far so good! I started Strategic Horizons, and eventually took on two partners, Jim Gilmore and Doug Parker. We aspired to be “two gurus and a marketer”.

Shortly after leaving IBM I discovered the Experience Economy, realizing that customization automatically turned goods into services and services into experiences. If you design a service that is exactly right for this particular customer at this moment in time, you can’t help but make that customer go “Wow!” and turn it into a memorable event. I realized therefore that experiences were a distinct economic offering — as distinct from services as services were from goods — and that there would be an economy based on experiences: memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way.

Jim and I wrote the book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage in 1999, and it was twice named one of the best 100 business books of all time. It’s had a tremendous impact on the world of business, and people tell me all the time how it changed their lives. We updated it in 2011 — by which time it was no longer the “forthcoming” Experience Economy; it was here! — and re-released it in 2020 with a new Preview on “Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money”. Jim and I followed that up with Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, and I also wrote a book on how to fuse the real and the virtual, entitled Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier.

Now I am working on my next book to be published in late 2025 — The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations. It recognizes one more economic offering where companies use experiences as the raw material to guide their customers to change, to help them achieve their aspirations. Any company that is in the business of helping customers become (to use Ben Franklin’s phrase) healthy, wealthy, and wise is in the transformation business. It’s important in the B2B world as well, for no company ever buys your offering because they want your offering; it’s a means to an end. Sell the means, rather than the end, and you generate much more value. In fact, there is no more economic value you can create than to help customers achieve their aspirations.

Over the years I have come to realize that my personal meaningful purpose is to figure out what’s going on in the world of business and then develop frameworks that first describe what’s happening and then prescribe what companies can do about it. Short version: Frameworks ‘R’ Us. So in addition to writing books and scores of articles I give speeches, facilitate workshops, and advise companies on how they can create greater value through their economic offerings.

It’s very rewarding, seeing light bulbs go on above the heads of clients. Helping them enhance their offerings to create more value for their customers. Knowing that I’ve had an impact on the world through my writing and work.

In fact, in writing my latest book on transformative experiences, I’ve realized that the raison d’etre — the reason for existence — of business in the first place is to foster human flourishing. As a company, how can you help your customers flourish as human beings?

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Once I left IBM and went out on my own, I collaborated with a number of people. I was looking for ways to extend my ideas on Mass Customization to expand the value it would create for companies, and so worked with a number of people to see how their ideas could merge with my own. This resulted in a number of new ideas, principles, and frameworks, as well as many articles, including three in the Harvard Business Review.

One of those collaborations stuck. Shortly after my book came out I received a package from James Gilmore, a logistics consultant in Cleveland for CSC. He wrote to me that his reaction when he saw Mass Customization in a local bookstore was “Oh, shoot! Someone else has already written it.” He included a videotape (remember those?) of a talk he gave on the subject.

I wrote back to thank him, and we arranged to meet for drinks when we were both in Chicago. Ah, but when I left IBM and needed clients, I contacted Jim again, and CSC Consulting became one of my biggest clients. We did a research project that resulted in an HBR article, “The Four Faces of Mass Customization”, and when I discovered the Experience Economy, I shared it with Jim.

He was getting tired of working for a big company, one that bought the much smaller firm he joined after working for Procter & Gamble, and we started talking about going in together. Once we decided to do it, we also took on Jim’s key marketing person, Doug Parker, and created the partnership Strategic Horizons LLP with the idea of being “two gurus and a marketer”.

Jim and I worked on developing the ideas on the Experience Economy, and soon got a publishing contract with Harvard Business Review Press. The book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage came out in 1999 and the rest, as they say, is history.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Let me start with the book that changed my life: Future Perfect by the late Stan Davis. It is as relevant today as when Stan wrote it in 1987. I read it when I was a strategic planner at IBM, and when I got to his chapter “Mass Customizing” it was like the heavens opened up and the angels sang. It explained everything that I was seeing at IBM, and I chose to build on that one chapter and turn it into my first book, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. I will be forever grateful to Stan for putting me on the path that led to where I am today.

Amazingly, Stan’s book inspired not one but two of my own! He was one of the first to recognize the growth in intangible resources, such as digital technology, and his chapter “No-Matter” led me to come up with a framework that recognized that all of our experience can happen with matter (ie, atoms) or no-matter (bits), in space (physical places) or no-space (virtual places), and in time (actual events) or no-time (autonomous events). This framework, the Multiverse, was core to my book Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier.

A second book that’s significantly impacted me is going to sound weird, but here it goes: Roget’s Thesaurus. I deal in ideas, especially in communicating those ideas, and Roget’s Thesaurus helps me do this tremendously. Sure, you can use the Word synonyms function as you write, and I do for simple word choices, but for thinking I use Roget’s. And not the dictionary form version; the original with its index of words in the back linking you to all the different senses of a word. It’s not just a thesaurus, it’s numbered organization is a compendium of thought!

I would also point out TEDTalks. Having given one at TED in California many years ago and listening to all of my fellow speakers, I know the power of a great idea explained engagingly and succinctly. I recommend people seek out one of interest at least once a month, even once a week. It’s an intellectual respite.

I also recommend that you find a few thinkers to follow online, particularly on Substack or Medium or LinkedIn. My favorite is the Category Pirates — Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Katrina Kirsch — who show you how to design not just economic offerings but create entirely new categories of value, categories you can value. I’m on Substack myself because of them, their book Snow Leopard in particular. I’m writing my next book on the Transformation Economy there, and it’s made a huge difference in what I’m writing, and in how quickly I’m writing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://strategichorizons.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepine/
• Twitter: https://x.com/joepine
• Other: https://keap.page/xm785/onstage.html

Image Credits

Milan Vermeulen