Plenty of celebrities help with disaster recovery. But Andrés’ style is different. As Fast Company writes: “Andrés’s spontaneity makes him unique. Through his prolific use of social media, his lack of filter, and his impulse to go where the action is, Andrés is pioneering a rapid-response model of leadership. This is no fully vetted corporate social responsibility effort. It’s one man acting on instinct, adjusting on the fly, and observing as things tend to fall into place behind him.”[79]
Andrés’ approach is emblematic of the Good Speed trend. Today, everyday heroes who have the desire to do good are finding ways to make it happen faster and with greater impact–often using little more than the force of their personality to inspire people and spontaneously make things happen.
One way these individual heroes can scale their efforts is through “microdonations,” small donations between $0.25 and $10 made online or via mobile apps. Platforms like Roundup or Good Street have sprung up to offer easy—and instant—ways for people to make such donations, simply by using their mobile devices or computers. For years, DonorsChoose.org has offered this capability by allowing teachers to post projects to the site and individual donors to fund them directly. Today, voice- activated assistants like Alexa are making it even more seamless by letting people easily make donations to the causes they care about simply by saying that they would like to do so out loud.
Technologies that facilitate microdonations have the potential to transform how people give. Not only do they make it easier for people to spontaneously give and make an impact (regardless of the size of their wallets), but because they often send prompts to people encouraging them to make microdonations in the moment, they can make giving a habit.
Immediate Impact through Everyday Spending & Investing
In the past, it was hard for consumers to know exactly how the companies they were buying from or investing in were actually doing business. Were these companies taking care of the environment? Were they mistreating their workers in Third-World countries or supporting dictatorial governments?
Today, this information is much more widely available. Not only can consumers determine which organizations they want to support, they can also make real-time and long-term spending decisions based on this information.
And they are doing so in droves. For example, more individuals are engaging in what is widely known as “ESG” investing, the practice of making investment decisions by looking at a combination of environmental, social and governance factors. By reviewing everything from how an organization is responding to climate change to their treatment of workers and animals, people can selectively support the companies that share their values and concerns for social and environmental issues.
It has also become easier to measure how your spending impacts the world around you—and make necessary changes in your investment and spending mix so it better reflects your values. Aspiration is one example of a new checking-account app that measures and scores the environmental and ethical practices of over 5,000 companies. The app compares users’ spending habits against these companies to generate an “Aspiration Impact Measurement” (AIM) score. The score effectively quantifies the impact someone is making in the world based upon what she spends.
What’s interesting about ESG investing and apps like Aspiration is that they allow individuals to measure the impact of their choices and “bake in” support for the causes they care about in real time. They allow each of us to do good almost instantly with every transaction and investment decision we make.
Doing Good Fast by Reducing Waste
This past year, the public declared war against the plastic straw. The inspiration for this movement was widely credited to video marine biologist Christine Figgener and her team filmed removing a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose. As Figgener told Time in an interview, “Definitely that was an object that passed through human hands and made its way to the ocean.”[80]
Seattle banned plastic straws in July, Starbucks is phasing them out over the next couple of years, and McDonalds announced that they will no longer provide them in their U.K. and Ireland locations. But none of these efforts would have happened had it not been for public outcry against plastic straws and people demanding that companies reduce plastic waste by not making them available. Very few societal shifts that will have an impact on our planet have taken hold of the public consciousness quite so quickly as the campaign against plastic straws.
Why did this backlash against a common item grow so quickly? For one thing, straws are rarely necessary, and most people feel that they are fairly easy to do without. While some people like them, when they were presented with the facts about their negative impact on the environment, many were willing to immediately change their everyday behavior to reduce waste. (It didn’t hurt that any retail establishment that bans and stops stocking them would stand to save money by doing so).
Another way individuals are responding with urgency to reduce waste is through “upcycling:” creatively reusing items that might otherwise be thrown away. The market for secondhand goods from Japan, for example, has been exploding in the last few years.[81] After Japanese consumers clean out their belongings, these are collected and exported to other Southeast Asian destinations for resale. Reusing has become so popular than even apps are getting in on it.
Both Olio and Too Good to Go are apps dedicated to the unique mission of helping restaurants and individuals share their leftover food with their neighbors in real time to avoid waste and to help feed each other.
This idea of doing good individually is certainly not new, but what is different today is the speed with which a new idea can take off and shift our beliefs and behaviors in a relatively short time. This is Good Speed, and judging from the examples we have explored in this section, the ideal situation may involve a change that is relatively easy for people to make—and one that enjoys widespread support from enterprise.
Why It Matters
As consumers increasingly demand that organizations demonstrate corporate social responsibility, more innovation around this non-obvious trend of Good Speed can provide a powerful way to make a bigger impact in the world and generate greater loyalty with customers in the process.
Good Speed also builds on the fact that the past decade has been marked by an ongoing shift toward impatience. We now expect everything to get delivered faster, companies to respond to our complaints in real time, ride-sharing cars to pick us up within minutes, and people to respond to our text messages instantly. While it is easy to blame our on-demand economy for the obsessive tendencies, it encourages within each us, this trend suggests there’s a silver lining in this shift: brands and organizations that can deliver good faster can be big winners.
The companies investing in socially-responsible practices, the startups creating world-changing innovations, and the consumers who are increasingly voting with their wallets are all making good happen faster. Rosetto was right. Given the urgency with which environmental and societal problems are threatening our well-being (and sometimes our very existence), the Good Speed trend is, indeed, cause for “militant optimism,” as he suggested.
How to Use This Trend
Work in Phases–When it comes to tackling big problems, sometimes the best way to achieve ongoing results is to separate the task into phases. While Boyan Slat may be trying to clean the entire ocean, he is starting with one pilot program in a small geographic area and taking it from there. While today, we expect results faster, this doesn’t mean we need to try to do everything at once. Organizations that employ steady, ongoing efforts to develop their own non-obvious ways of innovating faster while achieving their results in phases will be the surest winners in the future.
Seek Strategic Collaborations–One of the most powerful examples of corporations actively reducing waste is the alliance between Starbucks and McDonald’s—two huge players who are willing to team up to create a more sustainable coffee cup. Ask yourself, who are your ideal partners, and how might
you team up with them to do good faster?
17
Overwealthy
What’s the Trend?
Growing income inequality leadsto more guilt among the affluent, leading them to seek more waysto give back.
In her 2018 documentary Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenberg offers a sobering picture of our troubled obsession with wealth and its complicated consequences. From the story of the couple who gives up on the overly ambitious project to build the world’s largest house to the strange rise of elective plastic surgery for dogs, the film documents the spending excesses of the extremely wealthy with unusual candor.
The documentary also tries to answer the question of what motivates the desire for so much wealth in the first place, and what that desire means for our society. In a revealing moment, a hedge fund manager tells Greenberg, “I do believe it’s un-American to say you can make too much money.” In another, Greenberg asks German financier Florian Homm—charged with defrauding investors of more than $200 million—“Does Harvard Business School teach you to be a good person?” Laughing deeply, Homm replies, “No, they teach you to rule the world.”[82] Like many of the financiers accused of fraud or precipitating the financial crash in 2008, he generally escaped severe punishment. After serving his short 14-month sentence, he is now a free man, living in Germany.
The comments of the hedge fund manager and Homm expose a winner-take-all mindset that seems common among the Wall Street financial elite. It’s the mindset that might be behind growing income inequality around the world. According to the World Inequality Report, income inequality has risen in every region across the world since 1980. The growth in inequality has been fastest in the U.S. and parts of Asia. In India, for example, Financial Times journalist James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj, notes that the top one percent of the elite ruling class owns nearly 60 percent of the wealth of the entire country.
Greenberg’s documentary certainly paints a portrait of a wealthy elite that is completely out of touch with the rest of the world. But the reality is more complicated. Several months before Generation Wealth was released, sociologist Rachel Sherman published a book entitled Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, in which she interviewed a group of affluent New Yorkers—parents in their 50s who were in the midst of costly home renovations—to find out what they would think and say about their wealth. Without exception, she found that her subjects were deeply conflicted about it.
Why People Struggle with Being Wealthy
In a review of the book, Businessweek journalist Drake Bennet explains that many of them went to “great lengths to downplay” their wealth. “Getting rich is an American religion; being rich is clearly more problematic,” he writes. “The people Sherman interviewed tend to define themselves not through consumption, conspicuous or otherwise, but as workers…doing work—any work—is important because it allows these people to feel on some level that they deserve their fortune.”[83]
The reluctance to be defined by their wealth presents an interesting counterbalance to the consumption excess captured by Greenberg in her documentary. It seems modern wealth is creating two divergent but powerful mindsets. The first is a winner-take-all mentality symbolized by the worst of the Wall Street elite. They see the world as one that is rightly ruled by those with money, and they work to hoard as much of it as they can for themselves. This group would likely never see themselves as Overwealthy.
Remember, this is a group that does not believe you can ever accumulate too much wealth.
The second is a more enlightened mindset. It is embraced by people who want to enjoy their wealth, but feel moral discomfort about how to handle it; particularly the possibility that it (and they) may be contributing to a widening inequity among the classes. To feel good about their privileged lifestyle, they create a narrative in which they convince themselves that their wealth is justified because of how hard they worked to acquire it. They spend freely on “indulgences” and give to causes at a higher pace.
It is this latter group of individuals that we primarily describe with the trend Overwealthy—a term that aims to describe the growing number of people who accumulate wealth readily, yet frequently struggle with how to be wealthy and feel morally comfortable with having all that they have.
Though the term Overwealthy may seem to cast a negative judgement on those who have wealth, our intent isn’t to criticize people who have money—or even those who seek it. Instead, this trend focuses on understanding what happens when a relatively small number of people control the vast majority of wealth and proactively seek ways to feel better about it.
Extreme Luxury and Why It Works
To better understand how the Overwealthy make peace with their wealth and spending, let’s take a look at how luxury retailers and service providers are creating products to cater to these conflicted, well-heeled consumers. Some companies today are creating products specially tailored for those who have money to spend, even when it comes to items that border on the ridiculous. For example, the Gläce Luxury Ice Company sells tasteless ice that has been “hand-carved” from large purified blocks, guaranteeing that it won’t affect the taste or drinking experience of expensive cocktails and spirits.
At just over $300 for a bag of 50 ice cubes, it promises customers “minimum dilution and maximum cooling,” and is promoted to “connoisseurs and collectors of rare and delicious fine spirits.”
In Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Pres, renowned department store Le Bon Marché is investing heavily in a renovation of its top floor. Once completed, the new space will not house another high-end boutique for women’s dresses. Instead, it will be dedicated entirely to high-end luxury children’s clothing.
During a recent business trip to Tokyo, I witnessed this exploding market in action firsthand: while visiting a Bape store, I watched the parents of a two-year-old pay just over $300 for a simple screen-printed Bape-branded kids’ t-shirt.
According to Euromonitor, the global childrenswear market is currently worth $1.4 billion. Thanks to the biological fact that children outgrow most clothes quickly, there is consistent demand, and the segment is growing fast. Fflur Roberts, head of luxury goods for Euromonitor, recently told Monocle magazine that “Growth in childrenswear is outpacing both men’s and women’s fashion in terms of retail sales.” Famous luxury brands like Balenciaga, Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta and Dior are just a handful of the many high-end brands developing luxury clothing for kids.
It’s not just parents who are spending money on luxuries for their loved ones. In Japan, as more couples decide not to have children (or to delay having them), they are pouring their parental instincts, devotion, and money into their dogs, instead. As Takaaki Fukuyama, a lecturer at Yamazaki University of Animal Health Technology explains, “Japanese people want to spoil their dogs, and also love to be fawned over by their dogs.”
One sign of this shift is the popularity of competitive grooming. At the Japan International Dog Show, the Annual National Trimming Competition—where the country’s top “trimmers” grow their dog’s hair for three months and then style it in various creative cuts—is a huge deal. And it captures perfectly the extravagant tastes of pet owners who are willing to invest lots of money to have their dogs perfectly coiffed, including coloring their hair or fur. Around the country, plenty of specialized grooming schools, spas, and stores selling all kinds of accessories have sprung up to cater to the devoted owners of these pampered pets.
What can the rise of extreme luxury spending on products like “hand-carved ice” or luxury dog grooming or expensive toddler fashion teach retailers, product developers, marketers, and any of us who have something we are trying to promote? It is common among the Overwealthy to describe spending on these types of unnecessary extravagances as rare indulgences or signs of a connoisseur mindset.
Of course, most people would never spend $300 on ice cubes, but a real whiskey enthusiast is a different story. When you are a dedicated enthusiast, the spending is easily j
ustified. The Overwealthy might even describe it as a passion–one that they have most certainly earned the right to have because of how hard they worked to earn their money in the first place.
Extreme Giving
At the same time that we observe the Overwealthy readily spending on extravagant luxuries, we also see them making ambitious declarations about wanting to save the world. These declarations are the product of a combination of guilt and the sense of duty they feel as they struggle to find ways to do something good with their money besides spending it. Uncomfortable with their economic status, they seek out ways to contribute to society by using their wealth for positive means.
One extreme manifestation of this, for example, is the Giving Pledge. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are leading the charge to create a club of billionaires who pledge to donate more than 50 percent of their net worth to charitable causes within their lifetimes or beyond. Just a few years ago, the club had close to a dozen members. Today, over 175 billionaires have taken the pledge, with more joining each year.
Another example of people’s desire to use their wealth for positive means is the disparity in philanthropic tendencies between the richest of the Overwealthy and others when it comes to alumni giving to universities. A recent survey by Marts & Lundy, a fundraising consulting firm, found that in 2017 “mega-gifts”—those exceeding $10 million—topped $6 billion in total for the first time. Those donors made 194 mega-gifts in 2017, which was also a new high.
Meanwhile, donations from younger alumni or from a wider donor base have been shrinking year after year. One possible reason for this decline, Inside Philanthropy contributing writer Mike Scutari explains, might be these donors’ tendency toward “effective altruism,” an approach to giving that emphasizes, among other things, measuring the impact of philanthropic giving in terms of “lives saved per dollar.”[84]
Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 17