The Fork in the Business Road

There’s been a lot of lamenting coming out of the hollows of Silicon Valley lately, and ex-tech employees’ admissions of guilt and regret couldn’t be sweeter music to our ears. Their recognition of how social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have exploited—and continue to exploit—human vulnerabilities is a powerful echo to our vision for businesses of all industries: a paradigm shift in how they think about the path to profit, from one that allows any means possible to one based on truly addressing people’s needs.

So, how did these companies—and their ex-employees—end up in this state? Let’s explore.

Whether you’re a social media company, a manufacturer, or a market research firm, the path to profit starts with a simple question:

How are we going to get there?

In other words, how are we actually going to generate that profit. The trick here is to think carefully before you answer. Because the answer is what defines you as a company. It is your purpose. It is your culture. It is the strategies you build and the steps you take, day in and day out. It is what you—as a company, as a brand, as an individual—decide as the means you are willing, or not willing, to take to make money.

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Flashback to 2004 when Sean Parker, founder of Napster and first president of Facebook, joined the social media company. And joined its culture—one in which, in Parker’s own words in an interview with news website Axios, “the thought process that went into building these applications… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

So, there you have it.

That was their answer.

Facebook’s path to profit was going to consist of consuming as much of people’s time and conscious attention as possible. Forget rebuilding lost connections between people. Forget deepening relationships. Forget meaningful interactions. The goal that they would spend all of their energy on was hijacking your time and attention—and not letting go.

So, embarking on that path, they created “a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” Parker says.

And what’s more, he says, “the inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.“

Because that was the path they chose.

And here we are today, with our addiction to social media being likened to that of gambling. In other words, here we are today with so much of our time and attention consumed by social media that it’s affecting our expression of human will, our sense of self-worth, the strength of our real-life relationships, and even our ability to make informed political decisions. In other words, here we are today with Facebook earning $4.7 billion in profit a quarter.

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So, that’s one way to do it. Define your company as one who is willing to take advantage of people, build that mentality into your culture, operations, products, and services, make lots of money, feed the machine, watch it grow, and a decade later, sit with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’ve adversely affected millions of real people’s lives, and in the process, created a beast that’s too powerful to change, so it’s going to keep exploiting people ad infinitum.

That path starts with a familiar question—how do we get to profit—that gets answered like this:

How can we get her to buy more from us?

How can we get more people in our stores?

How can we get advertisers to spend more money with us?

It’s hard to miss the similarities in these answers, these paths. They all have the same tone, the same line of thinking—how can we get someone else to do something that benefits us?—without any mention of the value brought to the doer in the process.

In Facebook’s path to profit of “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” where is the value for people? Where is the conscious recognition of the service, the benefit, the value that Facebook is going to provide in exchange for that time and attention? It’s not there. Because it didn’t matter. The path allowed for any means possible.

The question you ask is the one you end up trying to answer.

And when your company is built on a culture that prizes people’s well-being, it asks different questions. The initial question—how do we get to profit—is often the same, but the answers—those paths—look more like this:

What are people’s most important needs in this space, and how can we address them better?

How can we make people happier, smarter, and more successful in this space?

How can we make people’s lives easier, more enjoyable, and more rewarding?

And when you start down paths like those, you can’t possibly end up where social media companies and their ex-employees are today. They simply don’t lead to the same places.

So, what path are you on?