360 Value Creation 2: How can CPAs measure Social Well Being?

Overview

This is the second installment of a multipart series on how CPAs can attain a broader view of value creation by looking beyond shareholder value. This series of posts was written to address the idea that CPAs need to go beyond shareholder value when assessing value creation. Specifically, CPA Canada published Value Creation Decisions and Measurement Primer (available here), which recognized that:

“Value stream models should reflect multiple stakeholder perspectives. Solely measuring performance from a shareholder perspective is inadequate with respect to value creation. A well-performing organization must create value for all stakeholders: customers (or it won’t have revenues), employees (or it won’t be able to keep them), suppliers and business partners (or it won’t have access to needed resources), and for the communities and societies it operates in (or it won’t have a social license to operate).”

It’s the latter part — generating Social Well Being to maintain a company’s social license — that needs further exploration when it comes to assessing the “humaneness” of products or services sold. How do we consider the Social Well Being that the products deliver? Meeting product safety standards alone are not enough to guarantee the ability to provide such value. Social media has brought this into focus, but similar issues exist with other industries. Using a “T-Account Assessment Approach,” the following three factors:

1. Moderatability

2. Connection

3. Value-attainment

These factors are further discussed in section 4. But before looking at these factors in detail, we look at why the relevance of assessing Social Well Being.

Section 1 summarizes how this is relevant to CPAs. Section 2 looks at the problems that have arisen due to social media. Section 3 explores how similar issues exist with domains beyond social media. Section 4 looks at the factors that can measure how a project will enhance or potentially diminish Social Well Being.

Section 1: Why is Social Well Being relevant?

Most CPAs encounter Social Well Being at the workplace, instead of a specific domain of knowledge, like tax, accounting, audit and so on. Specifically, CPAs come to know the need for work-life balance. When the balance tips towards the work side of the scale, Social Well Being is diminished. Do we work to live or live to work? There’s more to life than just work. However, employees must impose limits on the company’s encroachment on their personal lives because employers will not automatically respect this boundary. The fact it’s an issue that needs to be addressed is a sign that Social Well Being is not a part of a business’s DNA.

As a result, the challenge extends beyond how companies deal with employees. Specifically, companies need to keep their customers coming back for more. Consequently, the financial incentives induce companies to find ways to keep consuming their product. Companies need to incite demand for their product — even if there is no need for it. The term Nike uses to categorize this is not marketing, but rather “Demand Creation,” which they define as:

“advertising and promotion costs, including costs of endorsement contracts, complimentary product, television, digital and print advertising and media costs, brand events and retail brand presentation.”

In other words, Nike is admitting that they are “creating” desires that do not exist within us. For 2020, demand creation expenses amounted to $3.5 billion, which was almost 10% of its revenues for the year.

Long before Nike categorized its marketing expenses as efforts to create previously non-existent demands, companies realized that they had to manufacture the demand for it in addition to manufacturing the product itself. This is the concept of repetitive consumption. For example, people used to buy biscuits from a barrel — as we do now for nuts and dried fruits at bulk foods stores. However, in 1899 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) started to use packaging to distinguish their product. They also advertised that the packaging would prevent the cookies from getting rained on. (Source: Slade, Giles. Made to break: technology and obsolescence in America, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, c2006, page 11–12)

As for advertisers to generate this demand, advertisements favour the fantastic over facts:

“We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent.” (Source: Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants (p. 16). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Section 2: Social Media impact on Social Well Being

Social media began as an extension of the Internet for people to connect, share and collaborate. However, to make money, these companies sold user attention to advertisers. As Bruce Schneier, renowned information security expert, put it back in 2010:

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not — you’re the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”

Before social media, radio and television also sold the attention of audiences to advertisers. In other words, the idea of users being products is not new. What is different, however, is how the Big Tech work to modify our behaviour. As Jaron Lanier puts it:

“A bigger problem is that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behaviour modification. For example, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals change their behaviours as they browse, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get the desired result. In short, your behaviour has been turned into a product — and corporate and political clients are lining up to modify it.” [emphasis added]

(Lanier was featured in the Social Dilemma and published a book about the need to quit social media. He also has a long list of technology accolades, including inventing the term virtual reality.)

We can see his concern in action when considering how Google got us to watch more YouTube. In 2012, the company set a stretch target to get users to watch 1 billion hours of online videos hosted on their platform. To achieve the goal, the company focused on the amount of watch time. This was a hard sell within the company that was geared for search:

“Google Search was designed as a switchboard to route you off the site and out to your best destination as quickly as possible. Maximizing watch time was antithetical to its purpose in life. Moreover, watch time would be negative for views, the critical metric for both users and creators.”

Explaining the mental shift that had to take place to get people to watch more videos, Cristos Goodrow (VP of Engineering At YouTube) ran the following hypothetical scenario to illustrate what needed to be done to shift user behaviour:

“A user goes to YouTube and types the query “How do I tie a bow tie?” And we have two videos on the topic. The first is one minute long and teaches you very quickly and precisely how to tie a bow tie. The second is ten minutes long and is full of jokes and really entertaining, and at the end of it you may or may not know how to tie a bow tie. I’d ask my colleagues: Which video should be ranked as our first search result? For those at Google Search, the answer was easy: “The first one, of course. If people come to YouTube to tie a bow tie, we surely want to help them tie a bow tie.” And I’d say, “I want to show them the second video.” And the Search cohort would protest, “Why would you do that? These poor people just want to tie their bow ties and get to their event! And I’d say, “I want to show them the second video.”

(Source: Doerr, John. Measure What Matters (pp. 161–162). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Although the scenario was hypothetical, it illustrates how the algorithm was designed to steer us to longer content. Goodrow rationalizes such a move claiming that the “viewers are happier watching seven minutes of a ten-minute video.” But does the user really matter since they are the product sold to the advertiser? More troubling is when we consider the reality of time. The amount of attention a person can give in a single day is 24 hours. Of course, it is a lot less than 24 hours when you factor in sleep and other necessities. However, as Lanier pointed out, Google modified our collective behaviour to watch an additional 850 million hours a day (in 2012, people watched about 4 billion hours per month). Where did those 850 million hours come from? Did it come from spending time with kids, parents, calling friends, studying for exams, being productive at work or trying to solve world hunger? Undoubtedly some of it was spent on good things like learning and the like. But as Tim Wu points out “attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative” rather than things of intentional study.

In extreme cases, watching online videos can result in addiction. One family opted to pay $60,000 to treat their child using addiction recovery treatment customarily used to address substance abuse. Google seems to be aware of the issue. As New York Post noted on Google’s digital wellbeing initiative:

“In a pre-emptive kickback against society’s growing worry that our lives are being ruined by digital addiction, tech giants are finally making baby steps to improve our “digital wellbeing.” The first step, as you’d expect, is to work out how big the problem is…Google is extending those stats to YouTube, arguably its most addictive product. “Our goal is to provide a better understanding of time spent on YouTube, so you can make informed decisions about how you want YouTube to best fit into your life,” the company wrote in its blog post.” [emphasis added, original links maintained]

Social media has a put spotlight on how companies can hack our physiology to increase profits and shareholder value:

“McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.” [Emphasis added]

Furthermore, people are better off when they get off social media. Tristan Harris (the central activist in the Social Dilemma) noted the following on his Center for Humane Tech site:

“1 month away from Facebook leads to a significant improvement in emotional well-being. In an experimental study of over 1,600 American adults (who normally used Facebook for up to an hour each day), deactivating Facebook accounts led to a significant increase in emotional well-being (including a reduction in loneliness and an increase in happiness), as well as a significant reduction in political polarization.”

Source: Allcott, H., Braghier, L., Eichmeyer, S., & Gentzkow, M., 2020. American Economic Review (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658) Via: Ledger of Harms (https://ledger.humanetech.com/#study_67)

But this reality of consumers being worse by consuming a product is not limited to social media and extends to other industries.

Section 3: How do we consume without being consumed?

Cigarettes are perhaps the best example of a product that was sold to the public, even though the companies were aware we could make a case that smoking was addictive:

“The company [Philip Morris] had vehemently denied that smoking was addictive for decades and decades, and then it just totally flipped in the year 2000. I thought that was so fascinating. What did its scientists do when they suddenly had to start conceding that smoking was addictive? I came across some incredible memos where they’re wrestling with that. The CEO of Philip Morris at the time was asked to define addiction, and he came up with a perfect definition, which is “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.”

Philip Morris also sells processed food. When Michael Moss was pulling together the research for his book, Hooked, he realized (ironically) that people who worked for Philip Morris could control their cigarette intake but not the amount of Oreo cookies they ate (also made by Philip Morris):

“What was most shocking, though, was not in the documents, but when I sat down with the former top lawyer for Philip Morris, Steve Parrish. We were just kind of chatting about smoking and his smoking habits, and he said, “Look, I’m one of those people who could take out my pack of cigarettes and have a cigarette during a business meeting, and put it away, and have no compulsion to look at or take it out again until the next day.” But he goes, and my jaw’s dropping, “But I couldn’t go anywhere near our Oreo cookies, for fear of losing control, because I would eat half the bag.”

Moss is not the only one to cite the addictive nature of food. BBC featured Dr. Chris van Tulleken’s journey in switching to a diet that consisted of “80% ULTRA-processed food diet for 30 days”. As noted in the video, the new diet built new connections in the brain to facilitate the automatic, repetitive consumption of highly processed food.

In his previous book, Salt Sugar Fat, Moss explained how the food industry hacks our minds and mouths. Specifically, he points to the work of Howard Moskowitz. “Moskowitz, who studied mathematics and holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard, runs a consulting firm in White Plains, where for more than three decades, he has “optimized” a variety of products for Campbell Soup, General Foods, Kraft and PepsiCo.” The optimization can be summarized as defining the “bliss point” as the point that elicits the “greatest amount of crave” for the food. In the interview with Moss, Moskowitz explains the “sensory-specific satiety” contradiction: people will keep eating bland white bread but get tired of flavour-rich foods like turkey tetrazzini. Some of Moskowitz’s greatest hits include Coca-Cola and Doritos. He applied a similar approach to finding the bliss-point for Cadbury Schweppes’ Dr. Pepper that combined three components “sweet cherry flavoring, a sweet vanilla flavoring and a sweet syrup known as “Dr Pepper flavoring”:

“Finding the bliss point required the preparation of 61 subtly distinct formulas — 31 for the regular version and 30 for diet. The formulas were then subjected to 3,904 tastings organized in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Philadelphia.”

Participants were required to complete a detailed questionnaire to document their experience. The “135-page report for the soda maker — is tremendously fine-grained, showing how different people and groups of people feel about a strong vanilla taste versus weak, various aspects of aroma and the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release. These are terms more familiar to sommeliers, but the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.”

The analysis also looks at things like colour, which needs to be balanced to induce the highest level of engagement. The report has an actual graph that gives “a sweet range, within which “bliss” was achievable. This meant that Cadbury could edge back on its key ingredient, the sugary Dr Pepper syrup, without falling out of the range and losing the bliss. Instead of using 2 milliliters of the flavoring, for instance, they could use 1.69 milliliters and achieve the same effect.” The interview notes that the small amounts can add to millions of dollars in savings — without impacting customer appeal.

But that’s not the only way the food industry is hacking our minds. Martin Lindstrom, the author of Brandwashed, explains:

“…many of these jars and containers are deliberately engineered so that when we unscrew that marmalade at home, we’ll hear that comforting smack sound, further reassurance that what we’ve bought is fresh, clean, and safe — never mind that the smacking sound was created and patented in a sound lab to manipulate us into believing that the marmalade was flown in from Edinburgh just this morning…Don’t be fooled. The reality is that this jar of marmalade has likely been sitting on this

shelf unbothered for months. Occasionally, a clerk will come by and dust it.” [emphasis added]

Source: Lindstrom, Martin. 2011. Brandwashed: Tricks companies use to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy. New York: Crown Business, page 43.

And like Big Tabaco, “Big Food” understood that their product was detrimental to their consumer. The warning comes from Michael Mudd, the former VP of communications at Kraft back in 1999 at a bi-annual food industry meeting:

“He warned the food executives that if they didn’t do something to curb obesity, they would be facing lawsuits down the road… As he spoke, slides demonstrating the link between processed food and diseases such as cancer and heart disease are presented overhead… the CEO of General Mills, Stephen Sanger, was livid with Mudd and refused to participate in his proposal for food companies to pool money to tackle the rise in obesity.” [emphasis added]

The critical input into processed or junk food is corn:

“Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it’s in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.”

Source: Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (pp. 18–19). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

And corn production is heavily subsidized. Federal payments “account for nearly half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer, and represent roughly a quarter of the $19 billion US taxpayers spend each year on payments to farmers.”

To understand why corn is subsidized, we need to travel back to 1971. It’s the same year that the US went off the gold standard, but we’ll get to that one later. As Richard Nixon was looking to get re-elected, one of the many challenges he faced was rising food prices. Nixon appointed Earl Butz as his agricultural security. Butz was “an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana” that could help bring the farmers on board.

The result was to pump up the production of corn. Corn has direct effects like more cereal products, animal feed but what concerns us is its indirect effects. While the US was hatching a plan to produce more corn, the Japanese had simultaneously discovered a way to turn that corn into sugar. And thus, was born high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) — arguably the most critical ingredient in processed food.

The consequence is that that this made processed food cheap. Dr. Lustig summarizes the problem of cheap — but bad — calories as follows:

“So high fructose corn syrup is evil, but it’s not evil because it’s metabolically evil; it’s evil because it’s economically evil because it’s so cheap that it’s found its way into everything. It’s found its way into hamburger buns, pretzels, barbecue sauce and ketchup. Almost everything. Somebody e-mailed me the other day and told me they went into their local grocery store and went through every single loaf of bread on the shelf and out of 32 types of bread on the shelf, only one of them did not have high fructose corn syrup in it.”

Consequently, the issue of companies hacking us goes beyond social media and extends to the things we consume. Ironically, the negative nature of processed food is used to baseline in comparing the negative impacts of social media. As cited earlier, “McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” [emphasis added].

The extent of the challenge — which goes beyond Big Tech — illustrates the need to measure the social wellbeing of customers and not just employees.

Section 4: Assessing Social Well Being: Factors to consider

When looking at how to assess a product or service, CPAs can qualitatively assess whether it will result in lower or higher Social Well Being. The following factors should be considered to determine the Social Well Being impact:

Each factor is assessed qualitatively as to (1) whether it is a debit (asset) or credit (liability) to Social Well Being and (2) how much impact it has (high, medium, low). Then an aggregate assessment is done on the overall T-Account. For example, a sample T-account that has a net contribution to society would look as follows:

#1 Moderatability

The ability to control the addictive nature of social, particularly Facebook, came to the fore with revelations from some of the early founders/employees of the company.

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, admitted during an Axios interview that they “knew they were creating something addictive that exploited “a vulnerability in human psychology” from the outset” and that “the objective was: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” It was this mindset that led to the creation of features such as the “like” button that would give users “a little dopamine hit” to encourage them to upload more content.”

Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former VP of User Growth, also went on the record to express similar misgivings. He felt “tremendous guilt” regarding his involvement in creating Facebook. He went on to say that the “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth”. He also noted in the interview that:

“I think in the deep recesses of our minds, we knew something bad could happen… I would encourage all of you, as the future leaders of the world, to really internalize how important this is. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it, to rein it in. It is a point in time where people need to hard brake from some of these tools, and the things that you rely on.”

In contrast, Tristan Harris, when he was working at Google, tried to influence his company to make email more moderatable:

“Six months after attending Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a trip Harris says helped him with “waking up and questioning my own beliefs,” he quietly released “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” a 144-page Google Slides presentation. In it, he declared, “Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers…working at 3 companies” — Google, Apple, and Facebook — “had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention … We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.”

Evaluation Guidance:

When evaluating a product or service using this factor, it is essential to consider proactively how the product is being used to promote Social Well Being. For example, Google ultimately had to moderate its billion-hour goal (to addict its users as much as possible) with an attempt to promote digital well-being after the fact by incorporating tools that enable awareness of one’s addiction to the platform.

In the non-digital space, it can be more challenging. It is challenging to get companies to make more humane products in the food industry, given that they are designed to pursue repetitive consumption. For example, people used to buy biscuits from a barrel — as we do now for nuts and dried fruits at bulk foods stores. However, in 1899 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) started to use packaging to distinguish their product. They also advertised that the packaging would prevent the cookies from getting rained on. (Source: Slade, Giles. Made to break: technology and obsolescence in America, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, c2006, page 11–12) That being said, people have tried, and there is growing awareness of the need for healthier, more sustainable foods.

#2 Connection

Positive connections with friends and family can lead to greater fulfilment. Consider the rise of illegal file sharing via Napster. It wasn’t due to a sudden rise in crime. Rather, sharing a digital copy of one’s music doesn’t diminish enjoyment of the original copy. Distributing something costless shares the fun amongst a circle of friends — building a better sense of connectedness. Sharing digital copies is different from the previous world where sharing music physically (e.g. via a CD) would diminish enjoyment. Also consider the impact of Chris Anderson releasing his book “FREE: The Future of a Radical Price” for free. One of the reviewers gave an insight on how this enabled communal enjoyment: “Anderson made the unabridged audio edition of Free available for free on Audible and some other outlets. This price encouraged a bunch of us at Dartmouth to read the book together, generated some great discussions and debate. Having the book freely available to our community proved to be an excellent argument for the library overcoming the scarcity of digital books to have them available to our community.”

In contrast, focusing on individuals can engender narcissistic behaviour and increase divisiveness. For example, a study found that “participants who posted large numbers of photos and selfies on social media developed a 25 percent rise in narcissistic traits over the 4-month study period.”

Evaluation guidance:

When evaluating products or service offerings, the question is to assess how they can facilitate communal enjoyment. This especially applies to digital, streaming and cloud offerings and experience-oriented venues, such as entertainment, parks, and the like. The latter, however, depends on capacity and goes back to the challenge of physical limitation.

Ways that companies can improve the connectedness of their products or services include:

· Authorizing multiple devices and family plans: The Apple iTunes Store allows for five authorized devices. Though it doesn’t explicitly allow for sharing, but people who live together can enjoy a single collection without each having to pay for that same library. Similarly, Apple Music offers a family plan, as does YouTube Premium. Netflix initially turned a blind eye to sharing accounts but appears to have cracked down the practice since then.

· Enjoying streaming content together: Services like Teleparty (originally Netflix Party) allow people to host a socially distanced party to watch content collectively. The large streaming services may sue such services out of existence or opt to leave such services to operate and improve the level of connectedness their service brings to their customers.

· Enabling remix culture: Companies largely police control of their intellectual property quite vigorously. For example, Universal Music sued Stephanie Lenz to take down a YouTube video of her 13-month-old baby running to a song they held the copyright to. From a trend perspective, the six-month failure of the $2 billion streaming service Quibi could signify how organic user-generated content is gaining dominance over the traditional Hollywood “brand-centric” approach of building celebrities. Such a trend could mean the “new owners of content” could opt for a less toxic approach to sharing content, but this remains to be seen.

#3 Value Attainment

Material values — pursuing profit and wealth — is a key part of the human experience. However, material values are not the sole value that humans seek. People also strive to attain moral values, humanitarian values, and spiritual values. Part of the reason why companies exploit their customers is that they only focus on the material value they can extract from society. As noted in the Cluetrain Manifesto, “Markets are conversations. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”: the idea is that marketing should not see people as depersonalized demographic objects to manipulate, but rather as an actual human being that you would enjoy connecting with.

Consequently, CPAs should analyze product and service offerings to see if they integrate the following values — in addition to the material value that is there:

· Moral values: Blue Ocean Strategy calls for the integration of “humanness” into execution. Specifically, they discuss the need for a “fair process” which “communicates through its action how much people are valued as individuals and recognized for their intellectual and emotional worth, thereby building trust and inspiring their voluntary cooperation in the process.” This is a good example of attending to moral values, attending to the human dignity of employees instead of just seeing them as “human resources” to be moved around like a piece of furniture or another “asset.”

· Humanitarian values: People enjoy helping others. Social media and open-source broadly tap into the desire to help others for the sake of helping. For example, people will post “how to videos” for simply sharing the knowledge as monetization of their sharing is immaterial or non-existent. Similarly, contributing to open-source is a communal exercise rather than solely about filling up experience on a resume.

Evaluation guidance:

As noted in the previous instalment in this series, two ways to measure the contribution to society were the amount of open-source integrated into their product (factor #2) and how their accessible proprietary assets (factor #4). Products that rank high in terms of such contributions to societal value will likely tap into non-materialistic values. For example, Zencastr leveraging “freeconomics” to offer hobbyists unlimited recording hours during the pandemic illustrates how a company can integrate humanitarian values into their offerings.

Companies can also build a sense of community within their offering. Early crowdsourcing models, like iStockPhoto, emerged as a way for amateur photographers to improve their skills and avoid having to pay exorbitant fees for stock photos. (Source: Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing (p. 7). Crown. Kindle Edition.) The community was an integral part of the original design of the “company.”

There is, however, a temptation to monetize such ventures that leverage non-material values. For example, Huffington Post invited people to write on its site boasting of “a talent pool of about 9,000 free-of-charge contributors”. Arguably, the site was seen as a way to attain non-materialistic values, but then the site was sold for over $300 million — betraying the spirit of the implied arrangement.

Concluding thoughts

For CPAs to look at a product’s impact in terms of Social Well Being is new ground. However, given how technology can impact us all it is important that we start with bringing awareness and work to improve the well-being of all the stakeholders were are involved with.

The opinions expressed herein are Malik’s own and do not represent that of his employer(s). He does not endorse any of the products, services or other offerings raised within this or other posts. Any such commercial offerings are included solely for illustrative purposes.