By Aaron Kim, Biznology.com
Special to Online Career Tips
In many discussions about driving adoption for social business platforms, the acronym WIIFM (“What’s in it for me”) became a well known jargon to say: unless users take personal advantage from the social platform, they won’t use it at all. A simple Google search for that term reveals 155,000 results, while its less known, more altruistic sibling, WIIFU (“What’s in it for us”), returns a meager 4,980 results as of this writing. WIIFM is so widely used that it became more of a dogma than an argument. But how much of it is actually true? Or better yet, is that an actual make-or-break factor that must drive all your efforts in deploying a social platform? If you dig deep, you may find that, while personal benefits are important for many users, they are far from being a universal answer for driving broad adoption.
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” – the claim that “individuals’ efforts to maximize their own gains in a free market benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions” – has often been used to justify all kinds of selfish acts by individuals and corporations. It’s actually a very elegantly constructed argument, and at the time it was initially stated in the 18th century, it was probably as hard to refute it as it was to defend it. Almost a 100 years later, Darwin published his famous theory, arguing that nature’s evolution simply followed a very similar principle: natural selection via the survival of the fittest. If that was the way of the natural world, nothing more reasonable than applying the same principle to the way we do business. Following suit, many of us tend to associate work life and career paths at large organizations with the proverbial corporate greed stereotype: cut-throat pursuit of personal gain with a complete disregard for others, for the environment, and for future generations.