Kelly talks to Joe Pine, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. He is cofounder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. He is the co-author of the best-seller “The Experience Economy” and his latest book is called “The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations.”   

I was so proud of myself when I started reading this book and I’m seeing all these connections to theatre, only to realize you already make these connections yourself. 

“The original version of my book ‘The Experience Economy,’ the subtitle is ‘Work is Theater and Every Business is a Stage.’ Whenever you’re at work, you’re in front of customers, and you’re on stage. I often like to quote, famed stage director, Peter Brook, who wrote a book called ‘The Empty Space.’ And the opening of the book is the idea that you can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him and that’s all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged. In other words, the simplest definition of acting is someone watches someone work. Right? And so, you’re on stage.” 

So, you wrote a book about the experience economy and now you speak about the transformation economy – what pushed you to this new concept? 

“One of the things I was trained in when I was in strategy at IBM is always ask what’s next. And so, I asked myself what happens next? What if you customize an experience and what if you design an experience that’s so appropriate for this particular person? Then you can’t help but turn to what we often call a life-changing experience. In other words, an experience that changes us in some way. And so that’s what transformations are. The transformations too are a distinct economic offering, different than the others, where you use experiences as the raw material to guide people to change and to help them achieve their aspirations.” 

Transformation is central to the way we teach improvisation at Second City. 

“I can point to somebody I used to work with a company headquartered in Chicago called Diamond Technology Partners, a part of PWC now. I worked with them on the experience economy, as well as on mass customization with their clients and so forth. And one of the consultants, sort of a new consultant, took this to heart and went to The Second City and took improv classes. He said, ‘I want to be able to project on stage; I want to be on stage; I want to be a performer who captures the audience.’ And he was able to do that, and it changed the trajectory of his career to be able to be on stage. Absolutely what you have done with those is transformative. And it’s just what you do. What The Second City does makes it hard not to transform people. You know, you’d have to really work at it to not be transformed.”