Blockchain & Millennials: A Relationship of Trust and Transparency?

Anyone paying attention to the latest news from financial markets would agree that blockchain has been welcomed as the next “big thing” by many professionals due to the new opportunities it presents in terms of business scenarios.

Blockchain comes second only to the invention of the web, experts claim, in its disruptive power which seems to be reshaping every aspect of human activity, spanning from business to law to entrepreneurship with society, at large, ending up being assimilated confirming that blockchain is a real game changer which, sooner or later, will revolutionize also the way we all think.

Finding its roots in the anarchic computing subculture that emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, researchers refer to the rise of Blockchain as the end of the managerial capitalism era since the decentralization it brings to the system will be able to resolve pertinent issues like the principal-agent dilemma which jeopardizes business performance. 

The innovative nature of blockchain resides in the fact that it acts as a digital form of structuring data which enables the sharing of a digital ledger (book-of-records) across a verified computer network without the need for a central authority with transparency and trust being key to the functioning of the system it creates between peers.

As a survey on millennials points out, this “loyalty challenge” is driven by a variety of factors. For example, one of the pivotal findings of the research is that they feel that most businesses have no ambition beyond profit, and there are distinct differences in what they believe the purpose of business should be and what they perceive it to be.  As a consequence of this, they tend to be loyal just to their personal values, a study in the Harvard Business Review confirms this, with 71% of American millennials that are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, ending to be job hoppers. This may imply that, in addition to career opportunities and growth, millennials look for ethical companies, as supported by research in the Journal for Education in Business. In particular,  the incorporation of social responsibility into a company’s strategic plans seems to play a crucial role in the ability to attract and retain Millennials as employees. 

Millennials argue that this is true not only from an employment perspective but a general consumer perspective in distrust of advertising and a desire for authenticity in brands before purchasing a product. Thus, with loyalty assumed to be the backbone of every successful business both from a producer and a consumer point of view, it is quintessential for companies to be mindful of this gap.  but how? 

One way to proceed as discussed earlier, is in codifying, for example, a smart contract to be placed on the blockchain so that decisions, progresses, or even incentives should be transparent and reached by consensus, as Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott argue in their book Blockchain Revolution. They contend that the fundamental idea here is that the blockchain economy extends beyond mere technology and it has to do with the need for a new understanding of management systems. Putting this in their own words, “there is an inclusive principle according to which economy works better when it works for everyone, which means creating platforms for distributed capitalism, not just a “redistributed” one”. 

Read the whole article on Crowd Valley News.