For 15 years or so I have been pursuing an agenda dubbed “ideas2money,” a slightly tongue-in-cheek abstraction of the premise that all business is about monetizing good ideas, in turn premised on the relatively venerable notion that the sole role of any business is maximizing profit and, thus, shareholder wealth.
After observing progressive companies such as Zappos (and, to some extent, Google), however, I propose a new theory of business = ideas2happy, whereby profits are maximized in any business whose primary goal is to maximize customer happiness.
According to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, dogged focus on customer happiness, increases shareholder happiness, and, ultimately, human happiness. Which, after all the analytics and short term profits and key performance metrics, is really the point. Isn’t it?
Stay tuned.