If you’re ever lost your mind worrying that the 3-mile back up at the Lincoln Tunnel was going to make you miss dinner,  you’ll appreciate the unique value of the traffic app Waze.

Waze provides drivers with local maps of accurate, real-time traffic information. The information doesn’t come from a traffic helicopter or from cameras stationed on tool booths, but from data supplied by individual drivers right there on the road with you. The data is gathered, analyzed and presented to drivers on their own mobile devices. Drivers can confidently decide whether to ditch the Lincoln Tunnel and head north to the GWB, or relax knowing things will clear up so they’ll make it home on time.

Waze is a great product because it solves an acute pain for the user.

It’s also a terrific example of how one company, through its product and business model, can create a complete Boost Economy.

How Waze Works

Waze depends on drivers’ willingness to share individual data with an expectation of reciprocity. Waze only works if other people in front of you contribute their data on your behalf, and if you contribute your data to the people behind you.

Before Waze can create value, each user must share information about her drive in real time. The driver activates the Waze app on her mobile device, and then keeps the data flowing by keeping the app on as she drives. The mobile device and its internal GPS system communicate real time data about speed and location, which gets mapped along with the data from other travelers on the same roads at the same time. The information from travelers in front of you allows Waze to estimate the traffic flow on that road and roads nearby, giving you real time information about your options for making your progress as swift as possible.

Waze gives each kind of user a boost of information that they can use to improve whatever it is that they are doing. In my case, I’d be able to choose a better route over the Hudson using information I can get nowhere else.

Users Share Data, Waze Transforms Information, Everyone wins

However, it’s the Waze app itself that turns these individual streams of data into information that’s valuable. Drivers’ data has to be processed through the Waze app so that it can aggregate the data, make geographic sense of it (e.g., puts it on the road map), use its own algorithms to estimate the speed and the density of traffic, and then display this information on an easy to read traffic map.

Waze estimates that, on average, its users saves 5 minutes of driving time per day.

That nets out to more than 2 million hours of traffic a year that users are able to avoid. Each user is able to devote that saved time to something more important. The Waze app also has other functions, and Waze users can also volunteer to play additional roles (e.g., by sharing information about specific delays like tractor-trailer spills, by adding new roads to the maps, and by adding comments about road construction). Everyone’s capacity to do what they want to do is increased. In the eco-system of players everyone wins.

Waze (The Business) Creates the Foundation For the Boost

Waze provides the foundation that everyone (themselves included) builds on to create value. Their business model, formally called a multi-party/multi-market platform, is designed to match players with different contributes to players with different needs to fill. Waze (the company) designed their app intentionally to be open, free, and crowdsourced. It’s easy for users to give and get value simply by using the tool itself.

In addition, the platform is designed so that each player’s participation generates more value that that particular player needs to capture. Each driver is happy to receive  real-time traffic information simply by turning the app on. Drivers don’t worry about whether they’ve created more value for the drivers behind them than they themselves received from the people in front of them. (If you were just driving to Ikea, but the people behind you were late for a wedding, you could argue that they received more value from the app than you did. But really, nobody cares.)

In the meantime, Waze  analyzes the aggregated data over time and identifies opportunities to sell ads and adjacent travel services. Waze is able to calculate the direct revenue that they receive for the value they provide to drivers. Although drivers/users are unlikely to quantify the money saved by spending less time in traffic, everybody’s satisfied by the value they receive. The Waze platform generates additional value that many of the users don’t even recognize.

It’s the drivers’ activity that, over time, helps Waze offer the most complete and accurate maps of roads that drivers actually use. These maps are not only highly accurate, but also they are ‘owned’ by Waze. Waze doesn’t have to license map data from Google (in fact, it actually sells map data to Apple).

Waze and the drivers who use it can’t create value without each other.  Relative to the individual drivers, Waze has more power. Waze sets the basic terms of participation, determines how the app functions, and decides what information features are made available.

Still, there is room for drivers to contribute at higher levels for different kinds of additional value if they choose to. They can join local groups, participate in games, earn badges, work on expanding and correcting the map data base, and more.  The Waze platform provides a social community on top of the shared value, that members can engage in as they wish.

Waze has build a profitable business by providing a platform that makes it easy for users give what they have and get what they need. By doing a little extra analysis and selling on the back end for their own profit, Waze has created an economy / network/ ecosystem/ community that makes money and that makes everyone’s work easier.

 If one clever little app can create a boost economy of 30 million happy users, what could your business do? 

Data shame

It’s such a striking concept, it’s hard to believe that “data shame” gets only two legit google hits — one in a blog post and another in a glossary.

I only heard the term a few weeks ago in a presentation at Social Media Week NYC about Open Data for the Public Good about the challenges of working with governments to open their data.

Data Shame  is an organization’s resistance to opening up their data to outsiders because they fear that, if they did make their data visible, someone would find out how bad the organization’s data really is.

What struck me about the concept was not the idea that an organization would have a less-than-perfect data set. Every research paper I’ve ever read has had an inadequate data set— that’s the norm. What was surprising was the idea that organizations would experience shame about their data.

‘Data’— cold, hard, rational — doesn’t seem to fit with ‘shame’. Shame is so acutely human it’s hard to connect it to the numbers, labels, and measures that pile up inside machines.

Whoever coined this phrase was articulating something painful about the experience of our data being inadequate. And what I wondered was— how is pain like shame involved in creating boost relationships between organizations?

Business to Business Relationships that Boost Both Partners

Boost relationships require a particular type of openness between the partners.  For the relationship to give the participating organizations a ‘pop’ of energy, a pump of momentum, that they use to carry themselves forward, the relationship has to be closely fitted to what the partner organizations deeply need.

Boosts can come from (1) effective transactions and exchanges that accelerate what is, (2) combining our organization’s strengths to create something new, and (3) helping each other fix something that’s not working well.

If an organization needs something fixed (e.g., their inadequate data), but are reluctant to share this because they feel shame about it, how can they create the kinds of boost relationships that will actually help them? Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

All Data Is Inadequate

Data shame is a “rampant if little acknowledged condition.”  It’s rampant because its nearly impossible to have built a data base that’s error free and perfectly suited to today’s information tasks. Data shame is little acknowledged because who wants to let other businesses know that their business has done something (anything) poorly?

Think about it. Who wants to tell a prospective business partner
“Hey, our organization is kind of broken because we messed up. Can you lend us a hand?”

“Help seeking” is too often interpreted as a sign of weakness. In the business world, admitting weakness is akin to saying
“Please, come take advantage of us. Get a better deal because we’re not able to take care of ourselves.”

We’ve been taught to expect that when a business sees a weakness in a potential partner, that business is less likely to help than it is to pounce. Thus, we don’t feel good about business weaknesses, and in some cases we feel shame.

What Shame Says About An Organization

Shame is about being ‘not good enough’.

Data shame reflects that the organization knows it’s screwed something up with their data. The data might show something embarrassing about the organization’s results or the data maybe be misused. Sometimes the database itself is poorly designed or incomplete. And even worse, the data that exists and the forms in which it exists can reflect bad decisions about what the organization thought was important enough to measure.

Internally, data shame creates a challenge for the organization because the data isn’t able to meet the needs of the people who have to use it. And when organizations want to work with each other, data shame gets in the way of building a relationship.

Dealing With Data Shame

The organization with the inadequate data has to deal with data shame, and so does its potential business partners.

The organization with the inadequate (shameful) data has to find the courage to disclose that their data is, indeed, flawed. They have to own the fact that imperfect data is what they’ve knowingly been using. Imperfect data is part of what they’ll bring to the partnership. And, the organizational flaws that the data exposes come along too.

Bryce Gartrell of The Gartrell Group describes what disclosure looks like:

In projects where our firm has been brought in to help people lasso their data, we have come to expect the moment of pause, then followed by apologies and looks of mild embarrassment, just before our clients reveal the uncomfortable secret of their data’s deficiency… and the workarounds, assumptions, and wild guessing that they are forced to do in order to get work done despite imperfect information.

Disclosing that their data is inadequate makes an organization vulnerable, because data shame demonstrates one or more types of organizational incompetence.

Let me illustrate with a simplified example drawn from the Open Data talk:   A city’s Housing Agency wanted help with building a data-reporting application that showed which homes in a damaged area had been inspected, which ones had been condemned, and which ones were already demolished. When the consulting developers started working with the Agency’s data, they uncovered entire categories of missing data and incorrectly entered data. When they went to analyze (learn something from) the data, the consultants discovered that different inspectors from the Agency had visited the same houses to evaluate them twice, demonstrating inefficient routing. They also discovered that inspectors had given the same house different evaluations, suggesting that their conclusions were arbitrary. In the meantime, citizens were waiting for insurance checks that depended upon their house’s evaluation.

Bad data, bad information, ineffective management, and upset citizens. No wonder they were reluctant to share their data.

Can we get past the shame of shame?

Given how exposed and embarrassed an organization could be if others discovered their inadequate data, what could encourage them to share their data anyway?

It turns out that a little disclosure can go a long way in building a strong relationship with a business partner.

Disclosure.   Disclosing the organization’s weakness(es) and asking for a potential partner’s help is the only way to get the kind of boost that fixes things, because only real disclosure shares the specifics about the organization’s deep need.

Acceptance.   If an organization reveals their data deficiency, their potential partner needs to affirm that the business relationship is important enough that they’ll move forward — despite the data deficiency and the organizational failings the data deficiency suggests.

Helping.   Once the potential partner has a sense of what the organization’s weaknesses actually are, they can establish a connection that provides specifically what the organization genuinely needs. In the example of the Housing Agency, the consulting partners might offer help with data base design (a new facet of the relationship) as well as the mobile apps for inspectors that they were initially contracted for.

Disclosure + Acceptance + Helping = Boost

The disclosure-acceptance-helping dynamic does more than build functional interdependence in the business to business relationship. It also helps to build trust.

Being able to trust a business partner to accept your organization’s weakness and help you learn how to work through it expands the potential for the relationship itself. Trust makes it more likely that the two businesses can contrinue to explore how they might boost each other’s capacity.

If data insufficiency is rampant, then organizations shouldn’t be ashamed of it. And good partner organizations will be ready to deal with it. As Gartrell explained:

The thing is, data could always be better.  And helping define and get to ‘better’ is what we do.

Gartrell noticed that the organization his was partnering with worked through their data shame. Instead of holding back, he writes that the organizations found

“There is a strong sense of commitment to change, and I’m gathering that it is now being accompanied by a growing sense of optimism that the changes they seek are within reach.”

Should organizations feel Data Shame?

Of course, we should question whether or not organizations ‘ought’ to feel shame about their data.

Data systems are never complete, 100% accurate, or fit to the questions we have weeks, months and years after they were first designed.

No organization ever has perfect data.

Where the shame resides seems to be in what that data says about the organization: The organization is inadequate, The organization is imprecise, The organization has low standards, and so on.

Data shame is actually organizational shame.  

But maybe the way that organizations learn to deal with the dynamics of  shame around data can help them deal with the shame around organizational inadequacy and failings. Maybe working through ‘data shame’  can create a special kind of opportunity:

If we can figure out how to help organizations disclose, accept, and help each other with data inadequacies, we might be able to open relationships up so that organizations help each other fix deeper inadequacies. These might be the kinds of boost relationships that lead to real organizational transformation.

See also:

Data Shame, Big Data, and the Need to Tell a Story, by Bryce Gartrell
Open and Active: the Politics of Data for the Public Good: Jennifer Pahlka and David Eaves Social Media Week NYC 2012

Image: Hector Swims,  Some rights reserved by lifebeginsat50mm

There’s a lot of terrific advice out there to help you negotiate your total compensation package when you’re accepting a new job.

While this advice helps you as an individual get what you personally need, most negotiation advice overlooks how you can transform your personal compensation negotiation into a demonstration of your leadership.

This point was brought home to me recently when, shortly after seeing a great presentation on best practices for negotiating a job offer, I talked with an executive in the thick of negotiating a serious promotion. This executive was doing something more than the typical ‘best practice’.

Beyond ‘Best Practice’

This executive had already been quite savvy in her negotiation. She’d addressed salary, deferred compensation, equity participation, leadership development, and several work-life fit expectations. All of these individual asks were aggressive, but at the same time they were also conventional. It was the other stuff she asked for that surprised her CEO.

The executive included in her negotiation three additional asks, all of which had to do with getting something for her organization.

• She asked the CEO for a budget to fund an expanded employee development program that included mini-sabbaticals and defined ’10% time’. She wanted to demonstrate to her organization that innovation was not only encouraged, but also deliberately supported.

• The executive also asked to create a new EVP position and to have the CEO promote a specific manager into that position. She wanted to begin a larger, more comprehensive re-examination of top executives’ portfolios, and she wanted a strong, public commitment to this initiative from the CEO.

• Finally, the executive asked the CEO to commit to making 2 visits to her division’s location within the next 6 months. She wanted to create an opportunity for her managers to present their new product ideas to a leadership group that included the CEO. The CEO would not be there to approve these initiatives (that would be the executive’s decision). Instead, the CEO would see her managers in action, presenting work they were passionate about. This would get both the managers and their projects on the CEO’s radar screen and reinforce the culture of innovation.

Doesn’t this all sound great?

This executive was using the unique leverage she had in that moment of compensation negotiation to get commitments not only to what would benefit her personally, also to what would benefit her organization.

Demonstrating Leadership

By bringing these points into her negotiation, the executive also demonstrated to her CEO exactly the kind of leadership and assertiveness that the CEO desperately wanted in that position.

The executive also demonstrated that she had not only prioritized what her division needed, but also was putting her plans in motion. Needless to say,  the executive was already proving to the CEO that the CEO had chosen the right leader for the job.

The Stroke of Brilliance

The best part of this executive’s strategy was how she identified what to ask for.

While the executive could have identified these asks through her own due diligence, she did something extra. She went directly to members of the division and asked them what they thought they needed to do their jobs well.

Between the time she received the initial offer and the time she initiated her compensation negotiation, the executive talked privately with a handful of the managers who would report to her. These included members who’d been outspoken about the division’s strategic goals, members who’d made significant contributions, and members who were thought to be ‘high potentials’. She even talked with one of the division’s customers.

From these conversations, the executive distilled a list of members’ priorities. Then, she considered what kinds of support she could get for these priorities given the CEO’s resources. Finally, she explicitly asked for this support as part of her terms for accepting the job.

That Extra ‘Leadership’ Step

What I loved about this executive’s strategy was the way that she demonstrated to her division as well as the CEO how she’d act as a leader. 

By asking division members for their ideas, she demonstrated that she would consider their needs and seek their input in her key decisions.

And, by making these priorities part of her personal compensation negotiation, she put her own interests on par with those of her organization. She demonstrated that she’d personally go to bat for what her managers needed.

Possible Downsides to Negotiating as a Leader

Could this extra negotiating have backfired?

Usually, by the time you’re negotiating compensation it’s less about whether you’ll take the job than it is about the terms upon which you’ll take the job. The executive was unlikely to lose the job offer, but there was a chance that she might have lost the CEO’s full support.

If the CEO had been ambivalent about the executive and her potential, he might not have been willing to entertain these negotiation points. And, if the CEO had actively disagreed with the executive’s priorities, the executive might have found herself in a battle with the CEO before she even started the job.

In either case, however, the executive would have gotten some very useful information about whether the job was right for her.

Take a Leader’s Position in Your Next Negotiation

When you’re negotiating your next offer, go ahead and ask for whatever you need as an individual to feel well-compensated and to set yourself up to succeed in your new role. But be sure to look at the negotiation as a leadership opportunity, and ask for what you, your colleagues and your organization need to be successful.

Use your individual negotiations to demonstrate organizational leadership.

A friend told me once that we should only share our love with people who can benefit from it.

My friend argued that even though we might want to ‘love’ everyone, in reality we can’t. So, she said, we should be choosy about whom we love.

For a long time I thought that advice was weird and rather stingy.

–   Shouldn’t we love everyone?

–  Shouldn’t we love people regardless of their ability to benefit from our love?

The more experience I got with throwing energy into relationships that weren’t worth it, the more I realized she had a point:

In a world where energy and attention are limited, we need to be choosy about where we invest ourselves.

We can have a loving attitude in our interactions with anyone. And, it’s also okay to be picky about where and with whom we actually invest our love.

This is true in person-to-person relationships and business-to-business relationships.

Whenever we can, we should choose to work with businesses and business people who ‘give the love’ themselves.

These are the ones most likely to benefit from the boost energy we have to offer. These are the businesses and business people who will take our effort on their behalf and create the most good from it.

 The Point of a Boost Relationship

The point of a boost relationship is to build the capacity, the opportunities and the new possibilities for each other’s businesses.

We have to keep in mind that we are creating boost relationships precisely so that we can send energy, attention and support to other businesses (managers, employees, customers, people). We do create boost relationships just because we want to be generous. We create them because we want to help create something ‘more’.

If the other parties in our network are unable to use this generosity, if they are unable or unwilling to use the different kinds of resources to boost their own businesses, then the boosting energy is wasted.

Aside from the good feeling we can have as we offer  (and not in any way to diminish this), boost energy directed where it can’t be used is boost energy that doesn’t have legs. The boost energy doesn’t get amplified, it doesn’t build capacity, and it doesn’t extend out into the network to generate more good.

So if we need to be choosy, how do we find business partners who’ll use our boost energy well? How do we find ‘boost-likely’ partners?

In no particular order, we should look for business people who are already:

• Responding positively to our interest in them.
  If they share their perspectives and talk about their challenges with you, they’re likely to be open to your (positive) influence.

• Investing in themselves.
  Any business that is trying to grow (not just profits, but also thick value) will be more likely to look for a way to use wisely whatever it is you might have to offer them.

• Valuing the relationships that they already have with other businesses,
  with their members and customers. Businesses that value their relationships will do their part to help create a robust relationship with you, through which resources and support can flow.

• Willing to extend themselves and their resources to their current business partners.
  When you see a business that’s already trying to share its resources to boost others, you know that they have an open channel through which your resources can flow to them, and from them to others. The value is likely not to stop with them, but to amplify outwards.

We should look to create relationships with businesses that show some kind of interest in (1) using whatever we can offer (2) to build their own capacity and (3) to boost the capacity of their business partners.

We also have to be “boost-likely” in our own businesses.

Since relationships are two-way, our own businesses have to invite boost relationships with others.  While we might think it is our business that might boost theirs, we need to invite the possibility that value will flow in the other direction, from their business to ours.

(Value doesn’t have to flow both ways, but a two way flow needs to be possible.)

What if we don’t see boost-likely businesses around us? Then what do we do?

Sometimes we’ll need to take chances, by offering our boost energy on businesses that haven’t (yet) shown what they might do with it. We can hope that if we give these businesses a boost themselves, they will not only build their own capacity but also will be generous with other business partners.

And, we can hope they will learn to craft boost relationships with other business by drawing on the model of our boost relationship with them.

Other times, we’ll find ourselves in situations where we simply can’t be that picky about who we do business with. If that not-very-boost-likely supplier is the only business who sells what you need, you’ll have to do your best. And, you’l. have to be careful not to over-invest in the relationship if they show no interest in your offers to boost them.

Keep in mind that the goal is not to convert every business into a boosty business, or every network into a boost network.  At least, not yet.

Rather, the goal is to find other businesses and business people who are ready to partner with us to build boost relationships and boost networks right now.

There are plenty of those opportunities out there, right now, that we don’t have to work with businesses that don’t want to be boosted or to boost others.

Sure, it would be nice if we had unlimited energy, unlimited attention, and unlimited business opportunities, so that we could lavish boost energy in every direction.

It would be nice if we could ‘give the love’ to every business that wants it, because surely most every business needs it.

If you’re worried about the limitations on your business’ ability to boost others, you might take comfort in knowing that we don’t have to have a boost relationships with every business in order to help build their capacity.

When we help to build the capacity of a business through the relationship we share with it, we are making it more likely that this businesses will be able to extend itself to other businesses. If they are able to extend themselves, it’s more likely that they will extend themselves and start to create boost relationships with others.

The boost energy that our businesses relationships create isn’t limited to our own direct relationships themselves.

Any boost energy that gets out into the economy becomes available for other businesses to use. These are other businesses that we don’t work with and might never work with, but who nonetheless will benefit from the love that we and our boost business partners generate together.

See also:

Only Partner With Businesses Who Have the Love And Will Share It
Unique Layers of Value: Love With Food’s Boost Economy
Boost Economies Don’t Unleash Potential — They Channel It

“The Sharing Economy Has Come Of Age.”

So proclaims Steve Case, a major investor in Zipcar, on the news that this “car sharing” company has been acquired by Avis for $500 million.

Case and many others are celebrating the Zipcar sale as proof that a “sharing economy” is an economically viable business proposition. In the sharing economy, customers own less and share more, not only disrupting the ownership economy but also disrupting recreating the relationships between the business, the customer, the goods, and the community.

But there is a big problem with treating Zipcar as proof of the sharing economy.  

That problem? Zipcar isn’t a car ‘sharing’ business. Zipcar is a car rental business that simply calls itself a sharing business.

If we want to grow the sharing economy, we can’t count on businesses like Zipcar that streamline the experience of renting by eliminating human interaction. Instead, we need to focus on building profitable businesses around the social actitities of real sharing between real people.

Renting is not Sharing

First, we need to understand that renting is not the same as sharing.

Zipcar sells itself as a car sharing business.  Zipcar’s “sharing” is more branding than reality. In form, function and feeling, Zipcar is an efficient, convenient, short-term car rental business. It’s a business model that marketing scholars call “Access-Based Consumption” (Durgee and O’Connor, 1995).

Zipcar has been distupting the balance between renting a car and owning a car, largely by centering the rental experience around the individual customer. Customers can pick up and drop off the rented car right in their neighborhood. Zipcar’s smartphone and web-based reservation system bypasses the hassles of rental counters and kiosks, and requires no person-to-person interaction.

But while Zipcar’s systems have minimized the hassels of renting, their systems have done nothing to build the person-to-person relationships at the core of real “sharing”.

Sharing is a Person-To-Person Social Activity

Renting is about “me” using the item when I want it, maybe with “you” using it some other time. Sharing is about “us” each using the item in turn, with respect for the item and for each other.

Although “taking turns” is part of sharing, it’s not what makes sharing different from renting. What makes sharing different is that it involves taking turns using items among people who pay attention to each other, within a system of shared valued, social relationships, and community. (Belk, 2010)

In short-term rental businesses, there are few if any social relationships among customers. Renters interact with the rental company, and they use the item being rented. Renters themselves are anonymous to each other and outside each others’ awareness — and it’s this way by design.

Think about the kind of interactions you have when you’re renting a hotel room. Do you even want to think about the people who slept in that room before you or who’ll sleep in that room after you, much less want to know their actual names?

Now think about the kinds of interactions you’d want to have– and you’d need to have — if you were to share a room in your apartment for a night. You’re likely to care at least a little bit about who that person is, what you thought of them, and what they thought of you.

In a sharing economy, we think about other people. We think about the people who might be affected by our use of a shared item.  We recognize that other people are depending on us to care about them and their future use of the item when we ourselves use that item.

“Sharing is Caring”

You’ve chuckled when someone has used that phrase to pry away a forkful of your dessert. But that joke tells us something that is deeply true about sharing.

Sharing requires that we care about other people.

Sharing requires that we care about the people from whom we borrow and the people to whom we lend.

Sharing requires that we care about what others think of us, whether others trust us, whether we can trust others, and whether we all can act responsibly. Sharing also requires that we each act differently, and demonstrate a ‘pay it forward to others/ pay it back to others’ orientation. Sharing requires that we put aside self-interest and focus instead on shared interests and reciprocity.

When we share, we create relationships with other people. These people might start out as strangers to us, but as we sharing with them we create relationships with them. These relationships, in turn, create a larger sense of community.

Real Sharing Means Creating Customer-to-Customer Relationships

To create a business based on real sharing, organizations need to create relationships between and among customers.

Zipcar and other short term asset rental businesses like Marriott Hotels work hard to create a relationship between themselves (the business) and their short-term users (the customer). They use their business systems and processes to create a conventional system of engagement, business to individual customer, that encourages consumers to trust the company.

For rental businesses, relationships between customers and among customers are irrelevant.

However, for sharing businesses, those customer-to-customer relationships are a core business asset.

These relationships are part and parcel of what the sharing business offers, and they are a significant reason why customers choose that business.

So, smart sharing businesses do more than build business-to-customer relationships. They develop systems to create and sustain customer to customer relationships.

Designing Customer-to-Customer Relationships to Create Real Sharing

Customer to Customer relationships are literally designed into the processes and systems of a sharing business.  For example:

• Zipcar has systems to build customers’ trust in Zipcar, most of these designed to fit the individual customer’s needs for friction-free access (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2011). In contrast, the apartment-sharing company AirBnB has systems to build customers’ trust not only in the company itself but also to build trust between one customer and another. Their aim is to create a trusting and trustworthy community.

• Zipcar shares information about its rates and policies with users but them nothing about the people who just returned the car or the people who need to use the car next.   In contrast, AirBnB collects and shares information about each and any AirBnB member. AirBnB requires users to create authenticated personal profiles, so that potential hosts or guests can ‘meet’ each other. Members then use this information to decide which other members they want to have sharing relationships with.

Reputation, Social Capital, and Reciprocity

Sharing businesses have systems that help sharers develop their reputation and social capital. These might include systems for users to rate each others’ treatment of the shared item, to create local networks among folks renting the same items, to evaluate users’ real-life social networks, or even to leave notes and treats for the next user.

Sharing business also have systems that build norms or reciprocity by holding users accountable to each other for meeting the terms of the sharing.

Consider that when a Zipcar renter returns a car late, she’s assessed a late fee that’s paid to the company. The late fee punishes the tardy renter, but does nothing for the person whose rental of that car has now been delayed.

In a real sharing business, that late fee would be paid to the next person in line. The fee would not simply punish the tardy user; it would compensate and apologize to the other car-sharer who has been inconvenienced.

Building a Community of Sharing

Sharing businesses may have digital platforms to make scheduling and payments more efficient and convenient, just like Zipcar does. But also, sharing business will have tools and forums that make it easy for sharers to communicate with each other, to raise concerns with the group of sharers, to alert each other, and to create a sense of community.

To its credit, Zipcar has tried to create a sense of community among its renters. Zipcar sends chatty company newsletters, encourages members to honk at each other when they see another Zipcar, offers members Zipcar swag, and reaches out to customers in an effort to build community.

Yet despite these efforts to build community around the rental process, consumer research consistently shows that Zipcar users choose the service for its cost effectiveness and convenience. Virtually no one chooses Zipcar because they want to participate in a sharing community. (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2011)

Zipcar disrupts the need for ownership. It does not create the context for sharing.

Real sharing businesses make it easier and more cost-effective to share items rather than owning them.

And, real sharing business build processes and customer experiences that support the person-to-person relationships that build community.

We can hope that  Zipcar’s acquisition signals a change in consumers’ tastes and interests. It would be terrific if Zipcar can generate consistent profits by making it easy for consumers to access goods on an as-needed basis. This could help move us towards an economy where we care less about ownership and less about “stuff”.

However,  Zipcar and other rental businesses can’t be expected to move us towards an economy where we also care more about each other.

To make the move to a real sharing economy, we need to support and celebrate companies — like AirBnB, like Streetbank, like Snapgoods — that are creating businesses

– Where we consume what we need, when we need it, in a way that respects what others need

– Where we earn positive reputations and build social capital by using shared goods in ways that build relationships with each other

– Where economic activity is less about ”me” and more about “us” 

We’ll arrive at the sharing economy not when we own less and rent more, but when we calculate less and care more.

References:

Bardhi, A. and Eckhardt, G. M. (2011) Access-Based Consumption: The case of car sharing. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 39 (4): 881-898.
Belk, R. (2010), “Sharing,” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 36 (1): 715–734.
Durgee, J. and O’Connor, G. (1995), “An Exploration into Renting as Consumption Behavior,” Psychology and Marketing, 12 (2), 89–104.

 See also:   

Scale Positive Behaviors by Designing Them Into Social Software
5 Ways to Expand How We Think About Value in a Boost Economy
5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

If there are many and different types of value that can be created, exchanged and maximized, how do these different kinds of value exist together?

Understanding that value is “thick” helps us recognize that diverse types of value exist together and are entwined with each other.

Rather than being created in single strands that can be kept separate, thick value is comprised of several types of value that are created simultaneously. The different types of value are stacked, nested, embedded, and fused with each other into layers that are weighty with meaning.

What is “thick value”?

“Thick” is a simple way to describe the quality of having multiple, related meanings at the same time.

Polysemous Meaning. If you were a linguist, you’d use the more precise term – “polysemous” -to explain that:

• These meanings are attached to the same thing,
• These meanings are connected with each other, and that
• Understanding one meaning helps you helps you understand something about the other meanings.

Don’t let the fancy word put you off. Recognizing that something is valuable precisely because it has many meanings helps to prevent us from dismissing these other meanings. It also helps us pay attention to the other people or businesses to whom these meanings matter.

Thick Value has more meaning.

The idea that value is thick when something has many meanings is a concept that’s been around since Socrates.

Thick Value in Anthropology

More recently, anthropologist Clifford Geertz described how thick value is created when an object or a behavior has not only functional value or material value but also has symbolic value, emotional value, social value and more. Geertz noted that thick value is created as something is used, as a behavior is executed, or as something is exchanged. Thick value passes between us.

Geertz’s idea of thick value helps us see that any particular item or behavior can carry with it many kinds of value. These many types of value are layered one on top of the other– the functional value on top of the financial value on top of the emotional value on top of the aesthetic value on top of the social value, and so on.

Thick Value in Philosophy

In philosophy, ethicists describe “thick value” as a judgment of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that has more content than an either/or binary (Massin, 2012).

For example, a thin value is something we know to be “bad”, while a thick value is something we know to be “unjust”. We understand more about a situation when we consider its thick value – when we call it “unjust” – than when we consider its thin value, by saying it’s just “bad”.

Similarly, when we know that we “like” something, we understand less about it than when we “admire” it. The word “admire” tells us more than that the object is good. It tells us why it’s good.

Thick value has more “why”.

Thick Value in Capitalism

Blogger/author Umair Haque used the term “thick value”, back in 2009 in blog posts and then later in his book The New Capitalist Manifesto. Haque offers various explanations of the idea of thick value, describing it as being authentic, and sustainable, and not based on someone else losing so that you can gain. Although he uses the term somewhat casually and without connecting it to previous uses, he also emphasizes that  “thick value” means  “more value than we think”.

Constant in Haque’s use of the term is that thick value is meaningful.

More than the immediate, isolated monetary value of a thing to shareholders, managers, the tuned-out market or consumers; thick value is the deep, enduring, human worth of a thing to everyone. (Haque, The Meaning Organization, DesignMind, 2010).

Thick value is “awesome stuff that makes people meaningfully better off”.

Thick Value => Value with many simultaneous meanings

Consider the interactions in the Etsy community.

The exchange of items between an Etsy seller and an Etsy customer is laden with thick value.

• When people buy and sell things on Etsy, they are exchanging more than just the financial value of the cash and functional usefulness.
• Sellers and buyers are creating and exchanging aesthetic value, where the item has valuable beauty because both the buyer and the seller see that beauty.
• They are also creating and exchanging symbolic value. The item being sold and bought represents the seller’s creativity and the buyer’s affirmation of that creativity.
• And, their exchange has social value because their ‘independence’ from the big business of conventional retail may allow the buyer to support the seller in having a business that allows her to be authentic.

(It turns out that it’s the thick value that drives most Etsy users to sell, buy or both on the Etsy platform.)

All of these values flow together, on top of the same act of exchange, making the value of that exchange not thin but thick.

Thick value has more layers.

Another way to understand thick value is to imagine that each of the different kinds of meaning, emotion, experience, expression, or assistance that an exchange might represent has its own layer. With thick value, these layers are enfolded, one on top of the other, like the phyllo dough in baklava.

Each layer represents a different kind of value that might be exchanged or shared or moved across a network.

Conventionally, we recognize the material and economic layers of value, the goods and money that are exchanged throughout a network.  Thick value reminds us to recognize the symbolic value, the experiential value, the emotional value, and any other type of value that is exchanged at the same time, in the same moment, through our interactions with each other.

Just like we can’t eat baklava one layer at a time, or eat independent layers of phyllo and nuts and try to say that what we’ve eaten was baklava, we can’t exchange one layer of value without exchanging other layers, because value is thick.  This means that despite all our efforts to reduce ‘value’ to price or profit, we can never fully financialize thick value.*

However, when we don’t pay attention to the thick value of an interaction, we can dismiss or even damage the other types of value that are also trying to flow within this interaction.  If we do that, we reduce the quality of the interaction, and diminish the overall value that is shared.

Thick value doesn’t mean indestructible value. 

The Value of Thinking About Thick Value

When we recognize that value is thick, we understand that our behaviors and exchanges convey and create more than one type of value at a time. So, we can consider how to craft our actions and exchanges to maximize more than one strand of value at a time. We can instead work to craft our actions and exchanges, as well as our expectations, to maximize the full breadth of thick value.

Organizations and individuals that build their businesses while boosting others can create boost economies that generate, sustain and maximize  layers of thick value – creating more than just financial success for each member and its partners.

See Also:

5 Ways to Expand How We Think About Value in a Boost Economy
Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters & Buyers is Timeless
Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Sharing Success in Etsy’s Community of Commerce
Is there a Business Model behind that Values Statement?

* (It’s not just that we can’t financialize thick value, we don’t want to. But that’s another post.)

Images: of tangled fishing line, from Flickr Some rights reserved by sevensixfive
Petals like phyllo dough, from Flickr  Some rights reserved by quinn.anya

It can be hard to convince certain “business” people that it actually makes sense to conduct their business in a generous, boosty way that creates opportunity for others.

The mainstream business conversation has remained so wedded to the notion that ‘price’ accurately captures ‘value’, and to the belief that financial goals trump other kinds of goals, that businesses and communities of commerce who don’t share these views are called “quaint” or “naive” or even “not real business”.

These different businesses are not naïve. They’re on the leading edge.

By operating in a world where the very definition of “value” is complex and expansive, these business are motivated to increase all kinds of value, for themselves, for their business partners, and for their communities.

To understand how businesses are creating ways to boost each other as they build their own business, I’ve been looking more closely at less-conventional ideas of ‘value’ and trying to identify some of the key features of this more empowering perspective.

The conversation about value is complicated, since human efforts to define value go back to the beginning of time.  I’m not sure I’ve sorted everything out yet, but I ‘ve started to distill come basic themes. Here, I want to toss out some ‘ideas so far’ and get your reaction to them. If anything intrigues you, shoot me an email or comment below. Here goes…

Expanding How We Think About Value

In a boost economy, what is considered ‘value’ is defined much more broadly than in conventional economics. This broader definition of value helps us see what’s motivating our participation, because we can see interdependencies and priorities that are guiding our choices.

When these interdependencies are made clearer, decisions that seem suspect from the perspective of profit or efficiency are more accurately understood as wise choices that maximize a whole range of values, for a whole range of participants.

Five Ways To Think About Value in a Boost (E)conomy

1. Value is Diverse: There are many kinds of ‘value’, from financial/instrumental value to emotional/symbolic value, and all of these diverse kinds of value matter.

2. Value is Thick: These different kinds of value are entwined with each other. Instead of being in single strands or chains, these diverse kinds of values are stacked, nested, embedded, and fused with each other into layers of value that are “thick”.

3. Value is Emergent: Value comes from the work we do together. We co-create value.

4. Value is Abundant: In addition to there being many kinds of value, there is also more value than what we conventionally recognize. The sheer abundance of value makes it hard to account for, hard to claim, and hard to capture.

5. Not all Value Can Be Claimed. We can’t build metrics and accounting procedures to figure out who created the value, who gets credit for it, or who owns it. Some value escapes our efforts to capture it, and becomes ‘free range’ value – there for anyone’s use or enjoyment.

There’s more to Value than we typically think

A Boost economy takes a different approach when it comes to identifying ‘what is valuable’. That means that we think differently about what any member or the economy ought to be creating, exchanging, or maximizing.

While a conventional economy wants to maximize the values of money and utility, a boost economy aims to create and exchange a whole range of values. These values include money and utility, certainly. They also include intangible values like goodwill, trust, beauty, and integrity, as well as experiences or ‘states of being’ like joy, delight, and love.

Here’s a bit more about the first feature of value –

1. Value is Diverse

Consider the many and vaired kinds of Value exchanged at LoveWithFood.

In the boost economy created around the business LoveWithFood, the hub organization LWF created financial value by getting product samples from the manufacturer to the customer – providing a service to each one that they were willing to pay for and making a financial profit from that service. Money was one value.

LWF also created less tangible social value for manufacturers by selecting them for their gourmet boxes and thereby positioning their products socially as ‘gourmet’ foods.

For customers, LWF helped to generate additional value in the form of knowledge, as each customer received recipes, instructions, and an expanded repertoire of ingredients they now knew how to use in their cooking.

Finally, the families and friends of LWF customers received the value of delicious food, lovingly prepared, that provided both physical and emotional sustenance.

It’s not that these additional kinds of value are missing from a conventional marketplace. We are told that the value of these values gets rolled up into the price that the market charges for things. Except that price, cost and profit never have and never can account for diverse, thick, emergent, abundant, free-range value that we generate, or that we seek.

What’s different is that in a boost economy, we explicitly recognize that these additional kinds of value are just as important as financial value.

By recognizing these additional kinds of value, a boost economy makes it easier for us consider how our individual, organizational, and community activities generate and distribute these values while we also pursue financial value. And, it helps us recognize if we are making financial value so important that we are costing ourselves all sorts of other qualities and experience that are fundamentally just as important as money.

The Value of Seeing That Value is Diverse

When we see that value is multiple and diverse and when we recognize more kinds of value, we are able to take financial value off of its pedestal. We see it in the context of other values that are ALSO important to us.

We realize that pursuing these other kinds of values along with financial value can make us happier, more motivated, more generative, and more productive in surprising ways.

Pursuing these multiple values makes the whole economy grow—not just in terms of more of any single value like money or product, but also in terms of more breadth in the types of value that we generate.

~~~

Next up, some ideas about Thick Value. Stay tuned.

See also:

Is your organization flourishing or withering?
The “New” Crisis of Meaning?
Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph

I was meeting with a Silicon Alley entrepreneur, talking with him about options for extending his company’s reach by partnering with other businesses that target his same audience.

He’d had a short-term partnership with Company A but the results had been lackluster. The entrepreneur had come away from the experience disappointed, and was about to conclude that not only Company A but also Company A’s entire genre was the wrong place to be seeking partnerships.

So when I asked whether he’d considered a different company — same kind of product, same customer group, just a different company — he replied “Why would Company B be any different?”

“Because Company B has the love, and Company A does not. They never will.”

My answer popped right out without me even thinking (as my answers are wont to do) but I knew I was right. There is something about Company B, something deep in their core, that makes them profoundly different from Company A and thus better potential partners for this entrepreneur’s business.

Having “the love”?

I knew when I said that Company B had ‘the love’ that I’d have to explain what I really meant. Which was hard.

(“Having the love” sounds like slang, right? But the term is really a placeholder to label something we don’t have words for right now.)

As I made myself explain out loud, I found myself describing Company B as warmer, more generous in their relationships, more genuine in their communication.

Company B would care about this entrepreneur’s business — not because it would bring Company B more profits or more customers, but because Company B would support the start-up’s larger vision.

We might use another bit of slang and say that Company B could grok what the start-up was trying to do. Or, we could say that Company B was committed to boosting whoever it worked with.

Not every successful business “has the love”.

I know the founders of both Company A and Company B, and have been watching them build their businesses over the past 3 years or so. They are both good companies, with solid business models and promising growth curves. The leadership teams of both organizations are nice people. They are hard working, focused, disciplined, and creative. Their products are good and their customers are satisfied.

But Company B’s team approaches their work with a different mindset. They care about each other, about their users, and about their partners in a way that Company A’s team does not.

Yes, Company A will send out samples of your product, or introduce you to a potential investor, or invite you to an exclusive networking event, but they are not really out there to care about somebody else’s business the way that they care about theirs. They aren’t a bad company; they just aren’t very boosty.

At Company B, the feeling is different. They’ll help you with a problem with no particular expectation of return. They will send you a chunk of code to put the polish on that website function you just haven’t gotten right. They will talk about your company when they’re being interviewed by TechCrunch. They will share the love.

How does a company “share the love”?

Earlier this year I’d talked with one of the founders of Company B about how she’d been handling endless requests from other businesses who wanted her company to promote theirs somehow.

She explained that she focused on opportunities where both parties and their customers could benefit from the connection. (The win-win-win approach.) The benefits could be subtle (e.g., reinforcing both brands’ personalities) or more specific (filling a gap in the businesses’ offerings) but rich value had to flow in many directions.

Company B’s founder went a little further. She explained she not only declined opportunities where she didn’t see that kind of (win-win-win) connection, she also declined opportunities where she didn’t feel a similar spirit from the potential partner company.

“We just don’t need to work with companies that aren’t going to be there for us,” she explained. “If they seem arrogant, or cutthroat, or super-competitive, or selfish, I move away from them.”

She was sure she probably missed some opportunities to grow Company B’s customer base and revenue, but she held out for partnerships that could grow the whole business – meeting the customer needs, selling the product, inspiring the employees, and nurturing the larger community that makes their business possible.

Sharing the Love and Finding Your Boost Community

Company B  wants to work with business partners that share their boost attitude. Lucky for Company B, there are many businesses like this in Silicon Alley.

Joanne Wilson (@GothamGal), speaking on a Venture Labor panel last week, described what she thought was the defining feature of Silicon Alley in the late ’90s:

“There was a desire among everyone who was in it (Silicon Alley) to see everyone else succeed.”

Wilson went on to note that, these days, this attitude no longer defines the entire digital community. However, there are many companies keeping this attitude alive.

Yes, we now have digital tech businesses that are solely focused on revenue, and less on a broader definition of value creation. Not only are their products less and less about true, creative disruption, but their approach to business relationships is also less generous.

That’s disappointing, maybe even inevitable. It doesn’t have to limit the goals that tech entrepreneurs set for their companies.

Choosing to Build Your Boost (e)conomy

The startup entrepreneur and his business have a choice. They get to choose which businesses they partner with, and they can choose to build relationships with businesses where they can boost each other.

Turns out that in most cases, there is more than one business in any particular vertical or market segment or offering any particular tool or service. The entrepreneur can look out into the business community and sort opportunities into two groups: those that share the love, and those that don’t.

Businesses that have the love will share it with you.

They will approach their business relationships with questions like:

• “How can we help you?”
• “How can we help each other?”
• “How can we build a context for success and for creating value that goes beyond what money we can earn together?”

The startup entrepreneur, his business, and YOU have a choice. YOU get to choose which businesses you partner with, which businesses you let into your own economy, and which businesses you will boost.

And with this in mind, the entrepreneur promised to email the team at Company B to set up a meeting. My work was done. And yours?

See also:

Boom and Bust, Venture Book Launch, by GothamGal
Use Extreme Leverage 2.0 to Change The Social World
Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness

I’m suspicious of the idea that people who want to be leaders should tell more stories.  

While I get the arguments that stories are persuasive because they are emotional, have a predictable arc that makes it easy for people to get engaged with them, are easy to remember, etc. etc. I’ve sometimes wondered whether using stories was actually kind of wimpy.

Why such reservation about stories as a key leadership tool?

I’m sure my suspicions have a lot to do with the stories that are so commonly used: the bricklayer & the cathedral, the boiling frog, United Hates Guitars.

Too many leadership stories are the equivalent of internet memes. They’re interesting when you first discover them, but the more you see them used, the more tired and uncool they become.

Another hesitation I have about using stories is that stories are so unacademic.

Academics are taught to be precise, to be objective, to focus on facts, to convince through rational understanding. No professors publish empirical research in top-tier journals by telling stories (unless, of course, the research is ethnography).

My graduate training instilled in my a Vulcan-like reverence for logic over emotion. Logic is the correct way to convince; emotionality is a short cut.

(What’s weird, of course, is that some of my academic research investigates the roles that founding stories play in sustaining an organization’s identity and strategy. So I obviously appreciate stories, but probably less for their emotion and persuasion than for the “logic” that they provide for interpretation and behavior.)

Teaching with 60% of the Story

As a management professor at a school that prized the case discussion, I was brought up using stories to teach. Except that we use only 60% of the story to teach with — since management cases are “stories-without-their-conclusions”.

Business school cases tell only enough of the narrative to set up a complex situation. The ending is rarely part of the case study, because we want students to remember not how the story ended but instead how to create multiple different endings depending on their goals, priorities and choices.

In case teaching, telling the end of the story often shortchanges the learning, because students get focused on what went wrong rather than on what else could have happened if the leaders had done x, y, and z.

On a more personal level, I’m not a big story teller. I’m good at asking questions that get people to look at things differently, at coming up with words of phrases that grab a concept and make it workable, but I can rarely remember even the stories I’ve witnessed in person. And I almost never remember them at times when these stories would be useful to tell.

At best, I’ve counted on stories for illustration, not for explanation. 

Trying to Learn More about Stories

Despite these hesitations, I’ve made an effort these past several months to learn more about stories and how they work.

What prompted me to take this on was, first, that I’d recently received three different emails from people who wanted to know “the rest of the story” of one of the teaching cases I’ve written.  The case, interestingly, is about an organization that sustained its uniqueness through the completely fictional story of its founder.   I’d assumed that keeping the ending a mystery added some weight to the learning, but these emails made me wonder whether satisfying students’ curiosity might have some learning value too.

Closer to home, I’ve been trying to figure out how to highlight the real experiences of entrepreneurs and start-ups that I’ve been interviewing for my current work.  Can I learn to be a better story teller?  Maybe if I can learn to use stories more effectively, I might be able to include more of the ground-level specifics of what these folks are sharing with me.

And, selfishly, I might figure out how to make my writing less pedantic, so that people don’t fall asleep while reading about The Boost Economy.

Cracking Open Lead With A Story

When I was offered a review copy of Lead With A Story: A Guide To Crafting Business Narratives, That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire, by Paul Smith, I jumped at the chance to read it.

I was expecting it to be an easy, breezy, airport-bookstore-ish overview that would get me psyched to learn more.  Instead, Lead With A Story turned out to be thoughtful, meaty, comprehensive and seriously useful.

Fun fact: Lead With A Story opens with a story about a student consulting team. I re-used that story the first day of class to drive home a point for my student consulting teams. Now all I have to say is “the whole round table thing” and they nod in understanding.

My people call that “proof of concept”.

Two Leadership Books in One

Lead With A Story is  meaty (almost too meaty) because it has two meta-narratives. Book One tells us “How To” create, structure and use stories. Book Two is series of story collections, each organized by a situation in which these stories would be appropriate. 

Book One — the “How To” story — is terrific.

It convinced me out of several of my hesitations about the usefulness and elegance of stories as a leadership tool. “How to” chapters addressed structuring a story, keeping it real, appealing to emotion, drawing your audience into the story.

A profoundly straightforward and helpful chapter closed the book, with Smith addressing the little fears that popped up as I read the book. These issues included “What if I can’t find stories?” and “What if I can’t remember stories?”

Unfortunately, Smith did not address concerns like “What if my stories are corny?” and “What if no one gets my stories?”.  These concerns still give me pause.

Obviously, the academic in me loved seeing the abstracted concepts of good stories and good telling clarified, organized and connected. Anyone who likes to look at the map of the forest before considering how to climb any particular tree will find these chapters very useful.

Book Two, on the other hand, promised to reinforce all my annoyances about stories.

Why? Because it’s  ”packed with over 100 ready to use narratives organized by different business challenges”. A recipe book? Really? But after three of these “Business Challenge” chapters, Smith had completely sold me on his point: These example stories can help anyone get started if (ahem, like me) they don’t really think of themselves as storytellers. And why not use these stories to get started feeling comfortable?

Fun fact: It turns out that the stories don’t have to be original to you for them to be meaningful to your audience.

I especially appreciated the Business Challenge chapters that addressed situations more specific and more personal than big sweeping concepts like “leading change”.

Smith includes situations like Valuing Diversity & Inclusion and Helping Others Find Passion in Their Work.  These are situations every manager faces and where every organization needs leadership. Topics like these helped the book feel realistic as well as encouraging. There’s a leadership lesson just in the list of chapter titles.

Smith also includes a summary of key points and a few exercises at the end of both “How-To” chapters and “Business Challenge” chapters. These are not useful as shortcuts to the content. Instead, these summaries demonstrate indirectly how much easier it is to remember more general, abstracted points when you’ve learned them first through — you guessed it — stories. Plus, these summaries make it hard to miss that Smith has embedded into each chapter actual leadership lessons for you, the reader.

Dear reader, I admit to you that I started the book feeling a little skeptical, and needing to consciously open my mind to being persuaded to learning. I finished the book with a handful of new stories to tell and a host of new insights about when and why stories like these should work.

It still frustrates me that logical explanation can’t always get the job done. However, Lead With A Story  has helped me see stories as less wimpy, more targeted, and more convincing as leadership tools.

Every boost economy has layers of value networks– networks through which different kinds of value flow.

When you imagine these nets of value stacked one on top of the other, connecting all the participants in the network on multiple dimensions, you see why we call it “thick value“.

While there’s no need to identity each layer of value by name, often a particular layer of value sets a given boost economy apart. This layer clarifies the economy’s strategic advantage and attracts participants who want to involve themselves in a community organized around that value.

Layers of Value at LoveWithFood

The power of a specific layer of value is demonstrated in the boost economy centered by LoveWithFood, a business founded by Aihui Ong. I met Aihui at BlogHer this summer and was excited to discover how LoveWithFood was generating its own lower-case e-conomy with a value layer that drew in a special subset of food enthusiasts.

On the surface, LoveWithFood looks like a typical “subscription box” business. LoveWithFood recruits unique, small-scale, and/or startup gourmet food manufacturers to supply samples of their products, curates these products into monthly collections, and mails these boxes to subscribers.

• Subscribers get actual samples to try new foods, recipes to incorporate these items to their menus, and discounts on full-size items.
• Food manufacturers get food enthusiasts to try their product and share feedback.
• LoveWithFood gets revenue from the subscribers and feature fees from the manufacturers, profits from the sale of full-size goods on their site, and market insights drawn from data about the taste preferences and purchase patterns of their subscribers.

Functionally, LoveWithFood is a typical multi-party platform, where the hub organization builds its business by linking sets of users with each other. The users get a boost through the initial link, and then can build their own business by following up on these links.

The Charity Layer

FoodWithLove, its subscribers, and its food suppliers all participate in a network of charitable value/contributions, what we might call the Charity layer.

With each box of samples that the subscriber pays for, LWF contributes to a food bank to feed hungry children. And, when subscribers purchase a food supplier’s full-size items from the LWF ecommerce site, LoveWith Food makes a donation to a food bank of that supplier’s choosing, in the name of that supplier. This way, every purchase leads to a contribution, with each of the network’s participants having some involvement in generating that contribution. The food banks that receive contributions from LoveWithFood customers and food merchants are able to serve healthy meals to more children, helping those children feel nourished and cared about.

This kind of ‘buy one, give one’ model is not unique — many other organizations like Toms Shoes and the Rootz ecommerce site use this model to link values to a purchase.  Nor is the idea of a charitable mechanism unique — initiatives from corporate philanthropy to social entrepreneurship aim to link doing good to doing well with your business.

However, when the charity layer has a strong, identity-based link between the charity and the economy’s members, it can create other layers of value on top of the material flow of money and goods, because a shared value or characteristic flows among the economy’s members.  Then, the ‘do good’ element of a charity layer spins off a network-specific ‘feel good’ element.

For LoveWithFood, the meaning of that ‘feel good’ element is its ‘special sauce’.

The “Love Layer” makes this boost economy special

What distinguishes LoveWithFood from other gourmet food subscription boxes is its “Love layer”.

“Love” is not just the first word in LoveWithFood’s business name. It’s also the emotional value that Aihui Ong wants to have flow through her business’s boost economy. As Aihui explains, food merchants and food enthusiasts generally share the belief that cooking and sharing food is an act of love and caring. So ‘food’ and ‘love’ are commonly connected, and loving through food is a shared passion.

Aihui believes that we share love when we prepare delicious and healthy food for others. For LoveWithFood’s subscribers, their cooking is where the additional layer of value begins. Her subscribers get a regular “boost” of new food ideas and recipes to incorporate into their cooking/loving, which they can use to build their capacity to ‘love with food’. The boost of love flows across the relationship between LoveWithFood and the subscriber, and from the subscriber out to her or his personal network.

The value also flows in a different direction, between the subscriber and the food merchant and then out to LoveWithFood’s network of charities and their clients.   The love layer creates the opportunity for food enthusiasts and the food merchants to interact with each other, affirming and increasing their experience that food is love.

Not Every Member Participates in Each Layer of Boost Economy Value

Aihui notes that not every party involved in LoveWithFood’s boost economy are directly motivated by the “love layer”, and that’s okay.

LoveWithFood’s investors don’t need to think of themselves as participating actively in this value layer. Aihui doesn’t even insist that her investors be deliberately “mission-aligned.”  However, because the charity and love layers are hardwired into Aihui’s business model, investors have to agree with the charitable contribution concept, mechanism, and cost.

Thick Value Includes Love Layers 

When I talked with Aihui about the ideas that prompted her business, she told me that she didn’t think her business’s story and motivation was all that unique. The desire to share love by sharing food is universal, right?

That’s the beauty of this business boost economy model.

The mechanics of curating, sharing, sampling, and selling food products are built into this business, and so are the channels and mechanisms for an additional layer of value.

LoveWithFood’s boost economy is designed for reminding, nudging, helping, showing, and enabling us  – subscribers, merchants, LoveWithFood employees,  charitable organizations, and clients — to express LoveWithFood.

The ability to express this love is the ‘boost‘ that allows us- if we choose – to build our capacity to LoveWithFood.

See also:

Investigating The Boost Economy
Is there a Business Model behind that Values Statement?
Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

Love with Food Subscription Box, NotExactlyBento lunch blog

Images from Not Exactly Bento.com and LoveWithFood