This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Happiness has become serious business.

Harvard Business Review devoted an entire issue to happiness earlier this year. Britain’s Prime Minister sparked debate by suggesting the country measure its own happiness. Studies abound on who’s happier: conservatives or liberals, men or women, working or stay-at-home moms, the rich or the not-so-rich.

Just last week, one commentator even noted that happiness—when viewed as a goal instead of the serendipitous result of a life well lived—seems to be making many Americans miserable.

There's certainly something to that: You can’t force it. Happiness happens. And yet it is wonderful to see all this attention being paid to an emotion that I have long believed is an important force in business.

I've focused most of my 35-year career at Bain & Company on helping organizations earn superior loyalty—most recently through the creation of the Net Promoter Score^® (NPS^®). That’s the score—on a zero to 10 scale—of how likely people would be to recommend a company’s product or services to a friend. If they say 9 or 10, they’re promoters—the most loyal, and therefore valuable, customers.

When I was conceiving NPS a decade ago, I even considered calling it the Net Happiness Score, but I feared a hard-nosed business world would overlook the proven connection between loyalty and a company’s profitable growth if the name sounded fluffy.

Times have changed: "If you figure out how to make employees happy and make customers happy, then the business just kind of takes care of itself," says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. "It’s just about delivering happiness."

Of course, if you are asked "What makes you happy?" your first thought isn't likely to be the company you buy your shoes from. Instead, you’ll probably mention people you love—your family, your friends, the people that you want to be happy, too.

But that, in a nutshell, is the intersection of loyalty and happiness. If you have a great experience with a company or its products, or if you work for a company that really does make you happy, you’ll want to share that with the people you care about so they can have the same experience.

I can't think of a better way to measure a person's loyalty to a company—and believe me, I've looked—than to ask if their experience with that company made them happy enough to want to share it with the people they love.

And that's why seeing happiness take its rightful place in serious business discussions really makes me…well, you know.