Hacking Happiness (20 page)

These types of scenarios, on a personal and communal level, will become more prevalent as the personal data economy comes into full swing. When people control their own personal economies, they’ll get to decide who they want to share value with, in whatever form.

Sample Virtual Currency Models

For a comprehensive introduction to virtual currencies, an excellent resource is a paper created by the European Central Bank called
Virtual Currency Schemes
.
¹³
Defining a virtual currency as “a type of unregulated, digital money, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers, and used and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community,” it provides a detailed explanation of how these currencies relate to existing banks. It
also provides a good synopsis for reasons to implement virtual currency schemes.

By implementing a virtual currency scheme focused on the online world (basically for virtual goods and services) a company can generate additional revenue. The use of virtual currencies can help motivate users by simplifying transactions and by preventing them from having to enter their personal payment details every time they want to make a purchase. It can also help lock users in if, for instance, it is possible to earn virtual money by logging in periodically. If users are asked to fill out a survey or to answer other questions in order to earn extra virtual money, users reveal their preferences, thereby providing valuable information for commercial use.
¹⁴

In terms of how to introduce these ideas of virtual currency, an organization called Innotribe created the concept of something they call the Digital Asset Grid. The video documentary about the project
¹⁵
was shown at an event called Sibos, which is an annual conference presented by SWIFT, the global provider of secure financial messaging services (you may be familiar with the term “SWIFT codes” referring to your credit card). Here’s a description of the Digital Asset Grid from the Digital Asset Grid Session at Sibos:

The idea is fairly simple: While many of us share digital assets every day and store them on various websites, these are, for the most part, assets of low value or low consequence. Few of us would feel safe conducting a complex banking transaction on Twitter or Facebook. In contrast, the Digital Asset Grid would provide a way of conducting transactions involving any high-consequence digital asset on the
open Internet but with SWIFT-grade security and privacy. The Digital Asset Grid is conceived as a set of services built on top of the open, standards-based Internet. SWIFT is working on the Digital Asset Grid to position banks as platforms upon which online services can be built.
¹⁶

A video showing examples of how the Digital Asset Grid could work provides the case study of a woman buying a motorcycle. After seeing an ad for a motorcycle she likes from a trusted seller, she asks for some further information (photos, maintenance reports) that are provided via a protected data exchange. Meaning only the data requested is provided between the buyer and seller. She likes what she sees, goes for a test drive, and buys the motorcycle on the spot using the Digital Asset Grid. All associated digital assets of the motorcycle also change ownership, including things like the insurance policy and maintenance history of the vehicle.

Ven is a virtual currency that’s growing in popularity. I interviewed Ven’s founder, Stan Stalnaker, for my Mashable article “Why Social Accountability Will Be the New Currency of the Web.” Stalnaker had a number of fascinating insights about the nature of evolving digital currency.

“Facebook will become the biggest bank in the world,” says Stan Stalnaker, the founding director of Hub Culture, a social network that revolves around a virtual currency called Ven. “This will happen the moment they allow for P2P exchange of Facebook Credit between users. If they can link that to Likes, and map the value of Likes and other activity on their imprint of the social graph, these values will begin to function like money.”
¹⁷

But Stalnaker has already created this P2P exchange via Hub Culture where, like citizens of Worgl, members are expected to put
Ven into virtual circulation as much as possible. Based on a portfolio of units that includes leading currencies, commodities, and carbon futures, the Ven is less volatile than other global currencies and is traded for everything from knowledge to travel discounts and even a Nissan Leaf.

Stalnaker recognizes that the notion of virtual currency is in its infancy. When the disparity of definitions surrounding currency and influence someday merge, a singular value will reflect a common exchange of goods. Until then, he notes that “what currency really is . . . is language. We all speak in English dollars, and some people speak in rubles. What the Internet needs is its own language for currency.”
¹⁸

I Speak H(app)y

Accountability-based influence provides a language for currency that should be used in the Connected World. Once we build our own individual economies, our actions more than our words will build trust. Once augmented reality becomes pervasive, people will also digitally tag or life-tip us depending on their perception of our actions. Virtual currency will soon complement the paper in our pockets, and someday remove it for good.

  11  

SHARED VALUE

Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center.
¹

MICHAEL E. PORTER AND MARK R. KRAMER

M
ICHAEL
P
ORTER
is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School and the most cited author in business and economics from the
Harvard Business Review
. Within corporate circles he is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field.

For many people in the business world, this concept of shared value doesn’t compute. Survival depends only on increasing quarterly profits. It’s essential to have a good product or service to increase revenue, but helping others is left to people in public relations or corporate social responsibility. People may feel good about their companies giving to needy causes, but philanthropy or charity aren’t respected with regard to the bottom line.

But shared value isn’t about charity. Shared value, as the name implies, means identifying all the key stakeholders in a value
chain for a business and seeing how everyone can benefit. There doesn’t need to be a moral imperative to help others. Identifying how everyone can benefit means you sustain your business longer than competitors who focus only on short-term gains.

A case study of shared value success comes from specialized coffee company Nespresso, one of Nestlé’s fastest-growing divisions. The company has enjoyed an annual growth of 30 percent since 2000, largely based on its dedication to working with coffee farmers to grow the brand.
²
Most coffee farmers around the world work in impoverished rural areas and suffer from low productivity or quality of product due to their circumstances. Realizing that the core of their business depended on reliable sourcing, Nespresso made a business decision based on procurement needs: Establish local facilities near farmers to pay premiums for coffee beans while also providing education and equipment needed to produce higher-quality and more sustainable crop yields. The initiative was hugely successful and is now globally recognized as a case study to emulate with regard to maintaining a happy and healthy supply chain.

It’s easy to read this case study and think Nespresso was offering a form of philanthropy to its coffee growers by providing training and equipment that was able to increase farmers’ salaries. That’s not the case. Working with farmers was a core business decision not based on charity. While the company may have taken some short-term losses to purchase new equipment and provide training, long-term profits increased dramatically. Farmers were able to produce a higher-quality product, and that meant Nespresso outsold competitors. Greater levels of production offset salary increases, plus farmer loyalty meant attrition rates dropped. Shared value means higher profits in the long term. Employee loyalty also engenders a higher level of company morale, but it’s not a primary goal. Shared value provides a tangible economic benefit to an organization, not just philanthropic goodwill.

I wrote an article for Mashable called “Social Responsibility: It’s Not Just for Brands Anymore” where I compared the trend of shared value in the enterprise to accountability-based influence shaping people’s behavior. It’s reprinted here to show you how Hacking H(app)iness on a personal level means understanding and embracing the idea of shared value for your life.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: IT’S NOT JUST FOR BRANDS ANYMORE

It’s 2015 and you’re trying to get into an exclusive SoHo club. You fidget while the bouncer holds his smartphone to your face. From behind the red velvet rope, he takes a step back, his face morphing into a mask of disgust.

“You haven’t done jack for anyone else in over a week?” His voice is loud enough that others in the line point their devices at you as well. “No way you’re getting in here. This club is for people who give a damn about things other than themselves.”

Your face burns with embarrassment as everyone calculates the accountability-based influence (ABI) score branded on your forehead like a virtual scarlet letter. Your lack of involvement means you’ve been ostracized by the “in-cloud.”

What if your action-based reputation preceded you digitally? In one sense, brands have lived with this type of situation since the late sixties, with the advent of corporate social responsibility [CSR]. Today, social media’s focus on transparency has changed the attitudes of consumers and employees regarding the modern corporation. People won’t buy products from or work for organizations that aren’t actively trying to change the world for good.

At what point will this lens of morality be turned on individuals, where a variation of CSR is more personal? Although, to some extent, we’re already judged on our actions, we may soon be measured by the accountability metrics applied to
organizations. Individuals need to understand how their actions will, quite literally, speak louder than their words.

The good news is that CSR is evolving as brands incorporate social good into their everyday business activities. Those lessons, largely based on the concept of shared value described below, provide a roadmap for individuals: how they can increase their personal value, or accountability-based influence score, while living a life that benefits the greater good.

Shared Value—Corporate Social Responsibility Permeates the Enterprise

“The idea in its purest form is that you reorient your business model around the fact that there’s an intersection between where your company is trying to go and what’s best for society,” notes Margaret Coady, director of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. “[CSR] is not a department or a job title—it’s a strategy for a firm to be successful over the next few decades.”

This model of sustainable value creation, similar to Michael Porter’s idea of shared value, moves CSR out of the realm of pure philanthropy and refocuses the notion of value based on overarching business strategy. For example, Coady cites that Western Union has created policy round tables that discuss immigration reform. At first, this seems odd for a company focused largely on wiring money. But, as Coady points out, many of Western Union’s customers are successful immigrants who wire money home to their families. “[While immigration reform] may be a controversial issue for a company to engage in, it’s central to the core customer of Western Union. It’s a social issue that’s also a business issue.”

In other words, the stuff you do that helps the world will help your bottom line. That same logic applies to individuals.
As online influence metrics evolve, you’ll be able to increase your ABI score as you pursue everyday career and lifestyle actions—all while making the world a better place.

Supportive Accountability—Weight Watchers Members “Lose for Good”

“The [Lose for Good] campaign actually started as an idea from a local leader,” explains Cheryl Callan, chief marketing officer for Weight Watchers. “She was looking for ways to inspire members and told them to stack up piles of food equivalent to the weight they lost. It may not feel like that big of a deal when you’ve lost ten pounds, but when you see the food stacked up that you didn’t eat, it’s very motivating.” When members then brought the food to local pantries, they got to see how their efforts directly help others.

Since the campaign launched in 2008, Weight Watchers members and online subscribers have lost almost twelve million pounds. The brand has donated nearly three million dollars to charitable partners that provide children and families with access to nutritious food. The campaign was “not just the CEO who had a cause and somebody wrote a check,” notes Callan. By correlating the success of members losing weight to the good they could affect, Weight Watchers utilized shared value as a core business strategy.

For members, the Weight Watchers accountability model meant supporting others while encouraging more personal success.