The most interesting and cutting-edge business conferences of the year will be The WorldBlu Forum on organizational democracy.

It’s in DC on October 26-29, and the participants will all be leaders under 40. Organizational democracy is one of the most crucial concepts organizations must learn to suceed in the future. The current trend clearly shows, that organizations that get this live, thrive and develop. Not to mention the fact that the people who work there have a lot more fun :o)

Among the speakers are:
Mart Laar – former prime minister of Estonia and a man who knows intimately what democracy is about
Peter Block – author of two of my favourite business books
Mads Kjaer – CEO of Denmarks best workplace
Alexander Kjerulf – Hey, that’s me

I just KNOW it will rock, and I can’t wait for october to come around. You can register for the conference here.

1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576286213544862270526046281890
244970720720418939113748475408807538689175212663386222…

Doesn’t look like much does it? What if I told you, that this number is significant in such varied circumstances as:
* The construction of pentagons
* The number of spirals in sunflowers
* The construction of sea-shells
* Fractals

Spooky, huh?

The number is called variously the golden mean, the golden section number, the golden ratio or simply phi (pronounced fee), and in the book The Golden Ratio – The story of phi, the world’s most astonishing number, Mario Livio explains the history and relevance of this number. He looks at many phenomena that are definitely linked to this number (such as the ones mentioned above) and dismisses some which are waaaay more speculative – such as phi appearing in the proportions of the cheops pyramids and in Mona Lisa.

Basically, phi is the ratio you get, if you divide a line in two different lengths so that the ratio between the shorter and the longer piece is identical to the ratio between the longer piece and the whole line. This ratio is 1.618033… It is not only an irrational number (ie. one that can’t be written as a fraction of two integers), but it is in a sense the most irrational of all irrational numbers. Here’s a more in-depth description.

It takes a rare writer to write an interesting book about math, but Livio pulls it of magnificently, pulling together the history, the math, the beauty and the weeeeeird properties of phi.

And here’s phi to 20.000 decimal places.

Solange de Santis is a journalist who’d never held a blue collar job in her life. She wondered what it would be like, so she took such a job. For a year and a half! Now that’s commitment.

But it’s also something more. What drove her was partly curiosity about a different work environment and the desire to show that she could overcome a completely new set of challenges – but her book Life on the line which describes her experience also shows that there is more to it. The blue collar life has an attraction that shines through almost every page of the book. It may be rough, dirty, physically demanding and underpaid. But it is also challenging, giving and lets you meet many fascinating people.

Solange got a job at a GM van factory that was slated to close 18 months in the future, and this added to the intensity and relevance of the experience. What happened to the 2700 people working at the GM Scarborough is happening again and again in companies all over the world.

And if there is one lesson, that I take from the book, it is that the stereotypical view of factory workers is dead wrong. Many if the people she meets are dedicated, hard working, highly skilled and creative. But the way they work offers them no opportunity to use those sides of themselves. They’re locked in a tight battle between management and unions that actually has them cheering when production stops, giving them an unexpected break. This is not what they’re naturally like – it’s a reaction instilled in them by an inhuman system.

Solange made it through some very tough times (especially at the beginning) and I have the deepest admiration for her, for having stuck with it. The resulting book is fascinating – I almost couldn’t put it down, I constantly had to know what would happen next. It’s also a fascinating glimpse of a different work environment that most white collar workers will never see for themselves. Managers would gain immensely from reading the book to get a view of management seen “from below”.

The book is especially relevant for our work in the Happy At Work Project, because most of our customers so far have been white collar companies. This begs the question: Will the same methods work for blue collar workers? And after having read Solange’s book I remain convinced that they will. The difference between the white and blue collar people is much smaller than we think. And in the end we all have the same ambition for work: That it will make us happy!

It’s late friday night at the end of a long, hot summer week. As I push on the next liner, feeling my neck and shoulders ache, I spot one of the trainers and his buddy tiptoeing behind the parts racks with a truly magnificent weapon, a slingshot made of rubber tubing that’s so big one man holds the ends above his head and the other pulls back the cradle…

Not so long ago I was a boss and would have been considerably less amused. Now, picking up the 151st window, I watch with delight as they fire off another water balloon and it travels a good seventy-five feet down the aisle, splattering on the painted concrete floor. I am a prisoner of the line, and I am completely free, free of anyone’s expectations beyond the correct installation of this window.
- Solange de Santis

Solange de Santis is a journalist who took a job in a GM car plant to try blue collar work life. She described her experience in the book Life on the line.

I’m back from a 3 week trip to the US and the Bahamas, and with all the stuff we managed to cram into the trip, it feels like we’ve been gone for 3 months. No kidding. One reason is probably, is that we had 4 distinctly different sections of the trip. They were:
1: 2 days in Manhattan.
2 days is about as much Manhattan as I can take in one go, and after that we were all New York’ed out. We walked all over midtown, saw two Broadway shows, found a great cheap Sushi place of Bleecker and happened by chance to be on Times Square as they were announcing Michael Jacksons innocence. As for the Broadway shows: Slava’s Snow Show is a wonderful, poetic, funny, touching clown show with some great special effects in a theatre just off Union Sqaure. See it if you get a chance!

2: The Bahamas
We flew down on JetBlue for only 99$ a person. Amazing! I attended Roosevelt Finlaysons conference on Festival in the workplace, and Patricia lazed by the pool (a divison of labour that suits us perfectly). The conference rocked and I met some very interesting people there, including Peter Block, the author of two of my favourite books: The answer to how is yes and Freedom and accountability at work.

3: Washington DC
Visiting a city is so much nicer, when you know somebody there, and I have the great fortune of having a friend in DC. Traci Fenton lives in a wonderful house on 14th street a few miles outside central DC, and let us stay in the guest room for as long as we wanted. Traci is putting together a conference on democratic organizations in october at which I will speak, and seeing her plans for the event I just know it will be great. We also went tubing on a lake in Manassas and did DC as tourists.

4: Touring
I want you to imagine a Roller Coaster that goes like this: You accelerate from 0 to a 190 Kph horizontally in 4 seconds. You go 130 meters straight up. You go over the top and then go 130 meters straight down. The you break, the entire ride having lasted 22 seconds. That’s Top Thrill Dragster, and we did it. 3 times. It rawks! For the last week we rented a car which turned out to be a Ford Mustang – niiiiice. We started by driving down to Williamsburg and seeing Busch Gardens there – which was OK. Then we drove to Cedar Point in Ohio and that seriously rocks. They have some of the tallest and fastest roller coasters on earth, including Top Thrill Dragster. All I can say is, that the extra wait to sit in the front row is totally worth it. We also drove around Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a couple of days, and I startled the people in a small bookstore in Andover NJ by buying 23 business books.

You can see the best pictures from the trip here.

It’s great to be getting back into gear in Copenhagen and enjoying the quiet summertime in the Happy at work project, before we hit what I just know will be a very busy and exciting autumn.

Just to make it more exciting, we’re planning an international conference/forum on happiness at work in september – more news will follow very soon.

During my recent vacation in the US it struck me how cool it would be, if Jon Stewart (host of The Today Show) ran for president. Of course I’m not the first one to think of it, so here’s an article explaining why that would be a great thing.

And here’s a petiton you can sign.