Joe Pine - Co-Founder at Strategic Horizons LLP [Experience Economy]

Joe is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. He is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, which is a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings, and he is also the co-author of The Experience Economy. Joe talks about the Experience Economy and the importance of it, and what is to come.

Nick Glimsdahl 0:03

Welcome to the Press 1 for Nick Podcast. I am Nick Glimsdahl. And my guest this week is Joe Pine. Joe is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and management advisor to fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups alike. He is a co founder of strategic Horizon LLP, which is a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses can see even design new ways of adding value to their economic offering. And he’s also the co author of the experience economy. Welcome to the Press 1 for Nick podcast, Joe.

Joe Pine 0:31

Thanks. Nick. The pleasure to be here.

Nick Glimsdahl 0:33

Yeah. So I always try to find a little bit of tidbit that people might not know about Yeah. So can you share with us maybe something that people might not know about you?

Joe Pine 0:44

Oh, well, people might not know that. As of nine months ago, I became a grandfather, my wife and I have a beautiful little baby grandson, Luke, Joseph Pankratz, that’s just adorable.

Nick Glimsdahl 0:57

That’s awesome. Yeah, we talked about it just a briefly at the very end there. But I feel like that is the ideal scenario is to is to be a grandfather, and you get to feed him as much candy and run around and get on and say, you’re gonna go hand them off to the parents is a vessel that

Joe Pine 1:14

I’ve added the candy feed stage by getting handed backward, like he poops his diaper, it’s

Nick Glimsdahl 1:17

like, Yeah, it sounds like a perfect scenario. But I’m so going back to, you know, you always see wrote a very successful book called The experience economy. What made you write that book?

Joe Pine 1:35

Well, it was it was a book that had to be written. Number one, you know, I eventually figured out that my you know, my purpose in business is to figure out what’s going on in the world of business, and then develop frameworks to first describe what’s happening then, and then prescribe what company should do about it. And I did that first with mass customization, which actually came out in October of 1992, an extension of my thesis on the subject at MIT. And, and from there, I discovered the experience kind by recognizing that that customizing a good automatically transmitted a service and customizing a service turns it into an experience because you make it’s done, it’s just so appropriate for a person makes them go wow, and creates a memorable event. So once I discovered that I knew which is late 93, early 94, I knew that, you know, there was a book there and that it had to be written that you could, once you see that you can see it everywhere. It’s a lens, even way back then you could see people told me I’m so forward thinking I said, No, once you know it, you see it, whatever, whatever, whatever you learn about it, right? Whether it was in 93, whether it was a 99, when we came out with a book, whether it was in, you know 2000 2010 or now it it it once you see it, it’s like Yes, of course I understand that.

Nick Glimsdahl 2:55

Yet, almost like, you know, every time that I buy a another vehicle, I’m always let’s say it’s a blue Honda. I look around and I see blue Honda’s everywhere,

Joe Pine 3:06

right? Exactly the same effect,

Nick Glimsdahl 3:08

you now are aware of your surroundings and you’re like, hey, there’s there seems like that there’s a pain point for the experience, like how do we how do we improve that? So I would 100% agree that I am constantly on the lookout of ways to improve experience and what the experience economy is. So from your definition, what is the experience economy?

Joe Pine 3:32

Well, the The important thing to understand is that experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services and services are from goods and goods are from commodities, right. So we’ve had thus far for this, we let these four distinct levels of value, each one with their own economy, the agrarian economy based on commodities that last for millennia, the industrial economy based off goods last for several 100 years, the service economy based off services that came to the fore in the latter half of the 20th century. And now we’re in an experience economy where we’re experiences have become the predominant economic offering or experiences or what consumers and increasingly business people seek out. And where goods and services are no longer enough that they become commoditized. And that you and that shift, then is both a supply and demand factor supply factor, hey, we’re becoming commoditized. What do we do? Well, we got to create more value. How do we do that? Well, for manufacturers originally was getting a service business, right, then that becomes to monetize. So now, manufacturers and service providers need to get into the experience business to get create the value that people desire. And that’s the demand side, people desire experiences over things. It’s it’s one of the things that is most clear now in this in this, this pandemic environment and the corona crisis, that it makes us realize that we don’t need more stuff. Right in the developed world is we’ve got enough stuff, it’s the experiences that we really value. It’s the experiences that give of life meaning, and that’s why every time an experience opens up, boom, it’s swapped. Because people want them. They’re getting them digitally now, but they want those live physical experiences with other human beings. Yeah, absolutely. So

Nick Glimsdahl 5:13

I’m sure that when everybody hears the book, or everybody hears about experience economy, they’re not at all. Everybody is not automatically like, Hey, Joe, that’s my aha moment. I am sold 100%. So my guess is there’s some type of objections behind those. So maybe what some objections that you’ve heard regarding the experience coming?

Joe Pine 5:34

Well, today, I rarely hear objections. Yeah, right. Today, today, it is where I said people go, Oh, yeah, of course. Now, sometimes he gets translated poorly. Like with the whole cx movement, right? customer experience is not experiences as a distinct economic, offering customer experiences about making our interactions with customers nice and easy and convenient, which are all well and good. But they define good service. They don’t define a memorable, a remarkable, a time well spent experience. So you do get that translation problem when people think they know what experiences but it is. That’s why it’s important to understand the distinct economic offering. I used to get a lot of objection, objections out. Back in particular, I first started talking about the mid 90s into the early 2000s. where there were some people that just there that you didn’t believe experiences were a distinct economic offering no good commodities, good services are enough to explain everything right. And then I relay a story or golden Gordon Bell, right Microsoft, Reacher searcher inventor of the Vax computer for Digital Equipment Corporation, I was given a presentation once where I described how today it’s even worse today, right? That only, you know, less than 10% of employment is in goods less than 10% of GDP is a good so we’re kind of as classify as services makes up over 80% of the economy. And he shouts out, did he raise his hand? Alright, Gordon shouts out anytime a category gets 80%. You got to break it up. Right? Exactly. You got to break it up, and break it up into services time while saved and experiences time well spent. And there are other people that recognize it, but don’t like it. Just as there are a lot of people to complain about the hollowing out of America. And you’re too young for this was like back in the 80s. As we shifted from manufacturing to services, which does have a grain of truth, as we see now, we can’t even make our own pharmaceuticals, and so forth. But it’s simply that the manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back. And so people decried service jobs going away, but they’re not going to come back, either. In the same way. It’s experiences the experience sector of today’s economy, that will create growth in GDP that will create jobs, because it is what people want. Yeah.

Nick Glimsdahl 7:57

And you also mentioned that even some of the most mundane tasks can be turned into memorable experiences. So maybe what are a few examples of taking the the mundane tasks and making a memorable?

Joe Pine 8:10

Well, the the the customization aspect of it, I think is key to that doing only an exactly what people want. You know, you go to a Ritz Carlton Hotel, for example. And you walk out that, you know, that you’d been to once you know, a couple years ago, and you walk up to the front desk, and they say welcome back, Mr. Pie. It’s like, how did they do that? Right? How did they do? And it’s because the the, the Bellman got your luggage saw your tag radio ahead, they quickly, you know, put it in their database? Has he been back here before? Right? Then you come in, they walk you back, or they just walk you to the Ritz Carlton. Right. They remember your names, I remember your your preferences. And so a lot of those interactions, just you’re like, you know, the phenomena of being a regular at a restaurant, right? Where people do know your name, they know your favorite drink, they bring you down, you know, my favorite restaurant, they know, they know what, what drink I like, you know, they know, they can suggest some of the favorite foods that they know that I like and so forth. And it makes you feel at home, and it makes it into a more, you know, more goes away from that mundane reaction into a memorable experience.

Nick Glimsdahl 9:28

Yeah, yeah, I’ll reach back further than then I probably should have but it’s kind of like cheers, right? Where everybody knows,

Joe Pine 9:36

damn. You guys young as you look.

Nick Glimsdahl 9:41

But it’s creating that experience so that it’s personalized, to make you feel valued. And just that small thing of looking at the luggage tag, telling the front group, it didn’t take a whole lot of effort, though, but it defined that experience for you moving forward. Right, right. It’s a proper training. And it’s the the focus and the and the desire to say, Hey, this is how we’re going to do it. This is how we’re going to make a difference in our guests lives. Yeah. Um, so in the book, at the end of chapter one, you close it by saying those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. So to avoid this fate, fate, you must learn to stage and rich, compelling experiences. So how do you begin to stage a rich, compelling experience?

Joe Pine 10:33

Well, what are the things we did in earlier this year, we released the book right for the third time. And this time back in hardcover, with a new preview, I’m competing for customer time, attention and money. But we also introduced a new construct in there of five qualities of experience that, that do that that create those rich, compelling experiences. And it’s about being robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic, and even transformative. And those are that and that basically gives you an outline, then for the rest of the book, we got to chapter and be robust to chapter and cohesive. Robust is about hitting the sweet spot of the four realms of, of entertainment, educational escapism, aesthetic experiences. cohesive is about having a compelling theme, that pulls everything together as the underlying concept of the experience. Personal is about the customization aspect that we just mentioned, again, experience kind of builds off of my work on mass customization that allows you to efficiently serve customers uniquely. And with experiences you want to reach inside of people and engage them from the inside. And customization is a great way to do that. And then dramatic experiences are, of course, about bringing a level of theater into a drama into it is something that rises up to a climax and comes back down again. And then even transformative is is is those experiences that actually change us in some way, you know, life transforming experiences. So if you can design around these five qualities of an experience, then you can’t help but be rich and compelling. You can’t help but be engaging, and provide time well spent. Yeah, yeah. So

Nick Glimsdahl 12:15

the easiest thing to do is just follow your book verbatim. And by line and don’t screw up and don’t blink. Because it sounds sounds easy. But it just going through that process, but it’s very difficult.

Joe Pine 12:32

Yeah, let me let me give you let me give you a quick example of that. Because I love this guy Omnia rod, in San Francisco has become a friend of mine, after somebody first told me about what this guy was doing is that he had a retail men’s store in San Francisco, and, you know, fairly small place, but he was making success at it. He wanted to build a much bigger place. And while he was in that process, he read our book and and like the line by lines, are they Well, one of the things that really stuck with him was the question we asked toward the end of chapter three that says, what would you do differently if you charged emission, because charge you to mission economically turns it into an experience charging for time any companies give away, the next level of value giveaway experiences, better sell the goods and services, but you want to economically be an experienced business, you got to charge admission fee membership fee, a per play fee or other ways of charging for time. And he really stuck in his cry. He was like, how can I charge admission to a men’s store, I just saw your work. I want him to come in and buy stuff. But he kept thinking about and thinking about it. And he finally hit upon the idea about creating a club. that in addition to the men’s store, he created a club and he prototyped and he told me this I couldn’t believe he prototype this he said we’d like a conference room in the back. It’s got a got a plain wooden table in there. I got some drinks, and Wi Fi, you know, and it just started charging, you know, some bucks a month for people and people wanting to do it. He said they they’d like to rescue it from their day. They, if they if they’re a company that really identify a person that really identified with wingtip, then they said, Wow, I want to belong to weak tip. It’s one of the key things about membership. And so it gave him the confidence that they could do that writ large. And he leased out the bottom two floors of the old Bank of Italy building across in the Transamerica building and created the wingtip store and then the top two floors of the ring wing tip club with an admission with a well with a membership fee of the highest level is $3,000 plus $200 per month. tremendous success, right?

Nick Glimsdahl 14:46

Well, I’m gonna be thinking about that for the rest of the day now on on, you know, looking into organizations and how to find ways to get them to charge a mission but what what type of value do you need to bring to do that? But you mentioned there’s a, you talk about variety and customization, you talked about customization just on the previous question, but what’s the difference between the two? And I’ll pause on that. And then I have a follow up question.

Joe Pine 15:15

Well, yeah, I will say this, you know, when we wrote the experience Academy in 1999, there’s nothing we got wrong. Right now, some exemplars didn’t make it what you expect in a time of innovation, and not every company is going to make it. When we updated in 2011. We didn’t have to change anything. We added new frameworks, new ideas, and sorry, including the charging admission framework. And then now in 2020, with with a new book, again, nothing has changed. We’ve only added to it new new concepts such as this this time model of time, most time well spent, and so forth. But that’s not true. My book, mass customization, mass conversation, I got some stuff wrong. And one of them was this, this, I didn’t make a distinction between variety and customization. That variety, because partly because they had all this data that showed that in many industries, variety was increasing, right? Therefore, I could show that well, so the logical conclusion would continue continue to increase until you get to customization. What I didn’t realize was variety is a mass producers last ditch attempt to be able to save his old paradigm, his old way of mass producing, still putting things in inventory in advance, instead of shifting to mass customization doing things on demand, right. And so that’s the difference. Variety is an inventory, we have lots of choices, but it’s still finished goods in inventory, or a finished activity that we can do as a service. And obviously, experiences can have variety as well. But it’s only customization when you’re changing it based on this individual customer, right? The customer goes in customization. And and doing that on demand, right in response to what the customer wants, or like Ritz Carlton case, you don’t necessarily ask them what they want, you just figure out what they want. And you respond to them accordingly. So that’s the the standard difference between the two. And variety still doesn’t work. It’s customization that we need to shift to.

Nick Glimsdahl 17:12

So can you find a way to customize for every single customer?

Joe Pine 17:18

Absolutely, absolutely. They are the key to low cost, high volume efficient customization is modularity, right that you design your offerings like Lego building bricks, and what can you build Legos? Anything? Anything, right, anything you want, why? Cuz you have a large number of modules, different sizes, different shapes, different colors, and a simple, elegant linkage system for snapping them together. And that’s what modularity as modules plus linkage system. So if we design our offerings, like Lego building bricks, we simply pick different bricks for different customers. And we can give exactly everybody exactly what they want at a price you’re willing to pay. One of the things I only discovered a couple of years ago, which shocked me that I’d often said that anything you can digitize, you can customize because once it enters the realms of zeros and ones, you can instantaneously changes zero to one and vice versa. I finally figured out was well is it digits or modularity, right, there’s digital marks like zeros and ones. And it’s, it’s even more robust to Legos. So for example, my favorite example of that is Carnival Cruise Lines. Right? They are the Carnival Corporation, particularly their princess cruise lines, created this IoT device called an ocean medallion that allows them to identify each individual guest and know who they are greet them by name because their picture pops up and their and their name pops up whenever you get near them on a tablet that they have. And then they get like Ritz Carlton, they can remember your preferences even much more systematically, it will automatically pay for anything, it will open your stateroom door by the touch of your hand because it knows that you by by tracking your medallion. And then they send you personal experience invitations to be able to invite you to experiences that they have a high degree of likelihood that you’ll like based on what they know about you. They can even remember things like when you’re on the pool deck with your kids or grandkids as the case may be your favorite drink is nice to you know, lemon. But when you’re in the bar with your buddies, it’s mohito. And when you’re in the restaurant with your spouse’s glasses, Shiraz, right, so saying customer but different context and that and so so digital technology absolutely allows us to provide every customer with exactly what they want. But again, do it with low costs.

Nick Glimsdahl 19:32

Yeah, yeah. So

how have

customer expectations changed even in the last five years?

Joe Pine 19:41

Well, the the definitely they’ve changed towards customization. You know, in particular, because we have these smartphones that allow allow us to basically revolve the world around our needs and our desires that we can instantaneously command a car. to appear right exactly where we are, they’ll take us where we want to go to, to cause exactly the song that we want to hear at this moment in time to start playing in our ears, and, and so forth. And, and they are mass customized, they may come out of the factory standardized, but we make them our own with putting our data in our apps and our contacts, our videos, and music and so forth on them. And so they really gotten people used to the fact that, hey, we can get exactly what they want. And they start to want that, you know, you get this snowball effect where they want that in industry after industry.

Nick Glimsdahl 20:35

Yeah, so another show that I watched, when I was really young, which is kind of getting us closer to this customization and, and getting us to companies understanding what we want, maybe even before we do is the Jetsons. Right, yeah, right, you have all this thing, these things and automation behind it, but creating a customized experience. I, I kind of always go back to that show. But you know, when it comes to customers with companies, how do you? How can companies keep customers forever? Is there? Is there a certain formula? Or is there a couple things that you can provide?

Joe Pine 21:11

You know, I’ll give you a formula, right? Here’s the formula, right? So it’s based on customization. That’s how you keep customers forever. That’s how you gain true loyalty. loyalty is not bribing our customers with the 11th, one free every time you buy 10, right? That’s not true loyalty. Loyalty, is when you know that every interaction you have with a customer is an opportunity to learn to learn about this individual living, breathing customer learn about the context or in to learn more about what they want, and so forth. And then that that opportunity to learn allows you to better customize to them to give them more exactly what they want. And then the more you customize to them, the more they benefit, they see that value of that individual customization. And so the more they benefit, guess what, they’re more they’re willing to interact. And the more they interact is another opportunity to learn. And so on that you get to write this virtuous cycle. That’s the formula around each individual customer, the forms what, what I call with, with Don peppers, and Martha Rodgers, the one one future we call the learning relationship, a relationship that grows and deepens over time. And that’s where that’s where you can gain true loyalty is, is to is to have this customer centric, virtuous cycle around each individual customer based on who they are and what they want, and the capabilities you can do for them.

Nick Glimsdahl 22:32

Yeah. Interesting. earlier on, you talked about how work is theater. What does that mean? And maybe give us an example?

Joe Pine 22:43

Well, when your stage and experiences your work is theater, right, it’s not a metaphor, it’s not work as theater, I literally mean that work is theater that whenever workers are in front of guests, they’re on stage, and need to engage in a way that that art or need to act in a way that engages the audience that they have. And so you need to to help them you know, give them roles to play, help them characterize those roles and perform them on your your business stage. give you two favorite examples of that. One is the Geek Squad. Robert Stevens, the founder of the Geek Squad, one of the getting computer installation repair business. And so I said well, we better do that in geeks. And then he costume them in the white shirt. so thin black ties that are clip on show, just in case there’s an altercation, Robert says black pants with things hanging off the belt and black shoes with white socks that really make that uniform pop. They drive around into their geek mobiles, a black and white Beatles with the Geek Squad logo emblazoned on the side. When they get your home or your offices, the first thing they do is they pull out their badge and say hi, I’m from the Geek Squad, and slowly stuff like that computer, sir. And they go about giving you a computer repair experience. And Robert says that his goal is make the computer repair experience so engaging, that their customers can’t wait to the computers break down. Right? And that’s all theater. I mean, they may be very good at installing repairing computers, are they that much better than everybody else? No, maybe they are but how do you how do you know? Because you’re no good at it? Well, you know, because of the great experience that they provide, again, turning that mundane interaction into an engaging encounter. And then another fate world famous example, of course, is a world famous Pike Place fish market in Seattle, where they sell commodities, right this is fish that they get out of the out of the ocean and put on ice in an open air market. But they do it with such wonderful theater, it’s really street theater, they have all these routines that they go to they try and get kids to get their finger up to a fish and they pull a string in the mouth of the fish snaps close. And they they have their their signature moment, right which is a great dramatic technique because it’s your signature moments everybody knows remembers and once you experience and that’s where somebody orders a fish you know and the worker will shout it out salmon fly away to Minnesota and all the other workers will shout it back to them. And then they’ll throw that salmon 1520 feet across the counter, somebody catches it, and then wraps it up and completes the transaction. Right wonderfully engaging. And it’s it’s there to to service the selling of commodities. Wow.

Nick Glimsdahl 25:19

Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting, you know, going through back to the Geek Squad, they can actually be not as good as the next person that doesn’t provide an experience. But if, if that person that is is better than them isn’t memorable. They’re not going to go back to them.

Joe Pine 25:36

Right, right. Who’s that guy we had in here? Oh, I don’t remember. No, but it’s a Geek Squad agent.

Nick Glimsdahl 25:42

Yeah, just go online and search for a computer repair then if that guy and get

Joe Pine 25:47

AAA computer repair.

Nick Glimsdahl 25:49

There we go. Yeah. So there’s different forms of theater? Can you break them down for me? Sure. There’s

Joe Pine 25:56

four forms of theater. So first, there’s improv is basically where you make it up as you go along. And you think about the old show, Whose Line is it Anyway, which was a great video love, we’re talking about all these old TV shows, yeah. Whose Line is it Anyway, is all about, I think it’s still showing, but it’s all about Improv Theater, that they don’t know what’s coming, they’ve got to be sharp on their feet, and so forth, and, and respond to anything that’s out there. And then their platform theater and platform theater, is like it’s on a stage on a raised platform, and you’re saying the same lines all the time. And so here’s where it’s where it’s not a lot of customer interaction, that but people are watching you work, you know, you think about that, like in you know, Krispy Kreme donut stores, you got that window, you can see them work while they’re on stage, right? They can’t be picking their nose while they’re making the donuts, for example, because they’re on stage, or, you know, CEO who’s giving a talk to analysts, and that he doesn’t want to improvise, because that’ll get him in trouble. He wants to say his lines, right, that’s what platform theater is. Then there’s matching theater, which is the province of film and TV, where you have you film different scenes at different times. And it’s all got to match together. And the business application there. Think about companies that have a relationship with a customer. And sometimes it’s it’s, you know, in a retail place, sometimes it’s on the web, sometimes it’s email, it’s going back and forth. Sometimes it’s a chat room, sometimes they get a flyer or a catalog in the mail, all these things have to match. And there’s so many companies that even to this day, basically have websites and retail stores that are completely at odds with each other. Right. And one of things I say to retailers in particular is like, if it makes sense for you to pay a salesperson to be in a retail store to talk to an individual customer, guess what it makes sense for you to talk to individual customers online, what’s with the chat box? So you’re handling 11 chats or chat bots and that sort of thing, or no mechanism or send us an email, no, no talk with them individually. And then all of that has to has to match. And then finally, they’re street theater. And I mentioned that’s a Pike Place. But you know, you go to a any square in a large city and you have street theater, you’ve got flame throwers, and jugglers and acrobats and minds and all this. And that’s where you have a bunch of routine street tears, in fact, mass customized theater, you have mindfulness, they’re called bits, right? And you perform a bet. And they say, what next pit do I want to perform to get people to best put their money in the hat, you know, as you lead up to your finale? So your every performance is different. It’s not like improv, where they they have technique, but they’re making it up. It’s like, which bid do I do at this time? You know, which Lego brick am I calling off the shelf at this time to be able to engage the audience

Nick Glimsdahl 28:41

and almost being able to, in that specific instance, seeing the the nonverbals or what people are responding to, to be able to adapt in that exact moment, right, to customize the next step. So whoever is the conductor in that moment, being able to switch and change even if if we’re, if we’re, you know, listening to a set of a band, if somebody if an organization or if a if a community of listeners is reacting to a certain thing, being able to switch in the moment for that next song.

Joe Pine 29:16

I love Exactly. yada, yada, yada read the audience. Yeah.

Nick Glimsdahl 29:21

So you believe eventually the experience economy will run its course. And you think it’s going to be in the decades to come and and there’s something called the transformation economy will take over. So what is the transformation of common economy? And what needs to happen for the experience to run its course?

Joe Pine 29:37

Well, duh, let me let me be clear that it’s the experience economy that runs its course, just as the agrarian economy ran its course we still have commodities, though. We still have people that have to work in commodity businesses. But it just takes fewer people and and you get fewer output, you know, relative to GDP. Same with goods takes fewer people to produce manufactured goods. There. Less than less a part of GDP services, the same way experiences that will happen as well as they become commoditized, which is basically the Been there, done that effect. Right. I’ve been there, done that up to do it again, right? Check if you’re not refreshing the experience. I think theme restaurants are the first industry to commoditize themselves in that way. And so so what’s next, right? We’re always asking what’s next. And the as customization is the antidote to commoditization, you know, commoditization is like the law of gravity. If you do nothing else, it’ll drag you down year after year, and you’ll become commoditized. customization lifts you up, you can’t help but be differentiate, right, which means not a commodity, if you customized for individual customer, so what happens when you differentiate an experience, when you design an experience that is so appropriate for this particular person or business exactly the experience that they need, that’s where you can’t help but turn to what we often call a life transforming experience. Experience changes us in some way. And that’s a transformation. And that’s, of course, what I meant earlier about even transformative because not all experienced dangers need all experienced ages should be robust and cohesive and dramatic and personal. But not all of them have to be transformative, but eventually, more and more will as experiences get commoditize you know, so, so transformations are where we go beyond time loss, and provide time well invested, that people gain compound interest and, and that pays dividends now and into the future of transformations, our fitness centers, and health care and management consultants and coaches of all stripes, any company that is there to help you achieve your aspiration to guide you along the path that you want, is really in the transformation business, not the experienced business. And in fact, it’s hot on it’s hot on the heels, right? That in terms of GDP and employment transformations is not very far behind experiences, particularly because healthcare is such a big part of your sector of the economy. And that’s, and that’s partly because it’s a transformation industry. So they’ll both be growing. And now more and more in the future.

Nick Glimsdahl 32:07

Yeah, it’s always interesting to see see what’s next and how to adapt and how not just there’s the opportunity of changing expectations. And then there’s the opportunity of different stages going from experience economy to transformation economy, and then it’s up to the company to decide, am I willing to change? And how much time or resources Am I willing to invest, to adapt to that next stage? So I can go on and on and ask another 30 questions regarding this book. But we only have so much time, but I wrap up every question every podcast with two questions. And I’m gonna ask you the first one, ask them both at the same time, but then I’m going to follow up with a little statement because I think it’s important. The first question is what book or person has influenced you the most in the past year? And then the second one is, if you could leave a note to all the customer service and all the customer experience professionals, and it would reach everybody, what would it say and what was it? I’ve had a quite a few people already on so far. And I’ve had two people answer this the the what book or person has influenced you the most in the past year. And your book came up twice?

Joe Pine 33:22

Wow.

Nick Glimsdahl 33:23

So one was Jonathan MCI. He’s actually in Columbus, Ohio here and runs a cx practice. And then there’s another guy, Shep hyken, who also recommended your book. So kudos to you and you’re doing you’re doing something right. So I’m always interested and intrigued on on what people are going to ask.

Joe Pine 33:45

Well, yeah, well, I appreciate that. So I mean, if I, if I were to think about a book that came out in the past year, it would be the age of experiencing experiences harnessing happiness to build a new economy by Benjamin Honeycutt, who’s a professor at the University of Iowa. And I met him a couple of times, he was featured in the Atlantic a few years ago and talked about the experience times I got to meet him. And and it’s a great book, they’re really, you know, very academic, but extends what we’re thinking about brings in all the happiness stuff and how it relates to experiences. And he spends just as much time early on transformations as experiences which which is good. I see I see the mention of transformations transformation economy more and more over time. And and this is one that you’re probably the first book that really treats it at the level that it that it deserves. So if I were if I were to say a book, that would be the the one and then on all customer service professionals, what I say to them is see if you’re not really in the experience business, rather than the service business. Again, that any you can turn any interaction you have with With with your customers with with guests into an experience you can turn the mundane and the memorable. And it first of all just takes that mindset that you are in the experience business and have you had that mindset and you’ll be able to figure all this out and make sure that you go beyond mere service to offer engaging experiences.

Nick Glimsdahl 35:21

Yeah, that’s that’s some great advice. You can connect with Joe on LinkedIn. So go and type in Joe Pine, Joe epi and he, you can go to Twitter and type in Joe Pine is twitter.com slash Joe Pine, and his website is strategic horizons calm. Joe, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining me on the podcast and look forward to keeping in touch on and learn more about the book.

Joe Pine 35:49

Thanks, next pleasure to be with you.

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The Press 1 For Nick podcast is both educational and engaging, and each episode offers listeners a dynamic blend of insightful stories, best practices, and invaluable lessons.

Nick’s guests – each with a unique wealth of knowledge – include leaders from a variety of backgrounds and industries. Some of his guests include:

Customer service & customer experience leaders
A hostage negotiator
Award-winning authors
Home Depot’s Senior Director of Customer Care
Former VP of Disney’s Magic Kingdom
Lyft’s Head of Partner and Customer Engagement
Deputy Chief Veteran Experience Officer from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs

On every episode Nick asks his guest two questions:

What book or person has influenced you the most in the past year?
If you could leave a note to all the Customer Service and CX professionals, what would it say?

You can find all the podcast guests’ answers under their episodes below.

If all you want is the guests’ book recommendations, you can go here.

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