The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Gilmore and Pine has quickly become one of my favorite books, alongside another very popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. Both books feature what I believe to be some of the more unique, and applicable, thinking about the world in the new millennium that we find ourselves now a part of in everyday life. Let me describe to you, briefly, why:

1. View business as part of life, not merely as something you do. In The Experience Economy, the point is made that customizations on core items of business - commodities, goods, services - can ultimately lead to providing an "experience" for the customer. The cost to the customer for this experience can be quite high, but customers will pay for it because it is a revolutionary leap from their boring, average experiences with most services. In The Four Hour Work Week the chief aim of working only four hours per week is not to be lazy, but rather to only be spending four hours per week working on stuff you'd rather not do so that those four hours constitute 80-95% of all the income you'll ever need in any given week. Both books, therefore, view business not as a means to an end purely for the sake of financial gain, but as a means by which one can experience more of life than a rudimentary, mundane existence of doing the same thing over and over.
2. Start with the goal in mind, not with where you're at now. Most people who have worked in most companies for the past thirty years are still stuck in the rut of thinking that work represents that which must be accomplished today, or within the next three months. Few are engaged in truly planning 5, 10, or even 20 years in advance. We have a massive health-care crisis because everyone thinks it is their RIGHT to retire at age 57.5 or 65 at the oldest. But this isn't how life should be lived - to work at the same thing for thirty or forty years and then simply stop doing. The Four Hour Work Week is particularly big on experiencing more of life now by being more frugal and less extravagant, while also eliminating work for the sake of work in the here and now. The Experience Economy expects that those businesses that will thrive in the future will be those businesses that can create experiences for people that are worth paying very good money for in order for a person to grow, to experience, to be a part of the business transaction. Put these two things together, and day-to-day activities cannot be geared towards just simply making it through another day. Activities become geared towards achieving a personal, business, or organizational goal that results in both unique experiences occurring and transformation taking place in every person's life that is involved with achieving a particular goal.
3. Old souls just don't get it. Now neither of these books advocates this position, but it is certainly something I am hard-pressed to see a way around in the year 2010. When I say "old souls" I am specifically referring to a person's maturity relative to their surroundings, not their physical age. Granted, this tends to be people over the age of 36 who have not managed to keep pace with the technological advancements during the course of the past 20 years; however, it is also those who have no desire to continue to grow and learn and be actively involved THROUGHOUT the course of their entire life. So what don't they get? There are too many things to name them all, but here are a few examples:
   • requesting further analysis of an analysis - what do they really think they will gain by doing this when they aren't even taking action on the first analysis? More reports about non-rosy reports will not make you a better manager or better at managing your business - it just drowns you in a sea of work for work's sake.
   • being excited about improving an existing service with another or more or slightly better service - this is only turning services into commodity-priced outputs for the business. This is not innovative, it's not great, and it's certainly not exciting those workers you lean so heavily on to work like robots when they would rather be acting more creatively to make the whole enterprise more flexible, efficient, profitable, useful, etc.
   • managing through fear and creating huge disparities between "leader" and "follower" - now I get it, fear can be a useful tool for the 80% of your workforce that isn't contributing much, if anything, to the bottom-line, but for the other 20% you are forcing them into consulting jobs where they charge you 2-5x more for the EXACT SAME results. (In many cases, this can yield poorer results because now they care even less about your business or organization since they don't have a vested interest in it.) Guess who will be laughing all the way to the bank in the new millennium as they begin to create the experience economy that will topple the old guard?
4. The world is our oyster (but not many people like oysters!) OK, so maybe oysters literally make you sick to your stomach and you should never even go near them; so, do you prefer ostrich eggs? Leaks? Fresh salads served under a Tuscan sun? A walk through untamed woods? A life without ANY debt? Why aren't you (and me) out in the world experiencing these delicacies?! Too many of us have made the mistake of spending our time, energy, and resources in the wrong places for all the wrong reasons. Travel can be cheaper than we make it. Acquiring knowledge is now quite cheap, thanks to the Internet. Communication is practically free. But we squander ourselves instead on new gadgets, bigger and better homes, luxury cars, and orange mocha frappacino's for that exceedingly short thrill! Both books, again, are really advocating not a return to simple living to counter this problem, but a growth towards more experiential living - in business, in social life, in spiritual life, and in family life. We need to stop squandering our personal, organizational, and publicly collective resources and start experiencing more of life!

For those of you in Generation X or Y, our parents taught us wrong because they didn't know any better. The world was gradually changing around them in ways they never could have anticipated, and they simply didn't see it at the time. But now that we can look back and see the ways in which we erred, we can see the way forward. We need to get out of debt, stop catering to lazy thinking or falling into the trap of doing it ourselves, and start living to experience and impact our world through the relationships we will be forming during these experiences. Get out there, and do it!