The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • Book review: Bird by bird

    I’ve just added Anne Lamott to my “List of People I’d Really Like To Meet”. Having just read her book Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life, I think she’s a nice person, interesting to be around and very wise.

    The book contains many, many tips for the aspiring writer. Not on the technical stuff, like how to put the words together or how to sell your finished book to a publisher, but more on how to live as a writer. She makes the excellent point, that a writer’s main ambition should not be to be published but to write, since that is what a writer does most of the time.
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  • Me on TV

    Just before I went on vacation I was interviewed on national TV on the “Good Morning Denmark” show. The topic was how to be happy at work when you return from vacation. It went very well, and you can see the entire interview here. It’s in danish, of course.

  • Autumn poem

    The other day while I was driving home, I looked into the gutter and saw yellow leaves. Autumn’s here, and here’s a fitting poem which I found in Anne Lamott’s beautiful book “bird by bird”.

    Above me, wind does its best
    to blow leaves off the Aspen
    tree a month too soon. No use,
    wind, all you succeed in doing
    is making music, the noise
    of failure growing beautiful.
    – Bill Holm

    Here’s the author’s own background for the poem.

  • Quote

    Problems worthy of attack,
    prove their worth by hitting back.

    – Piet Hein

  • Open Space on Open Space

    As part of my holidays I spent three days at the OSonOS, which is the annual conference for Open Space practitioners. For those who don’t know Open Space Technology here’s an excellent intro. To me it is quite simply an incredibly efficient meeting form, which treats people as adults capable of making their own choices.

    It was an excellent conference. I loved meeting people from all over the world, and I really enjoyed getting deeper into Open Space. And the venue was fantastic. It was held at Bramstrup a little south of Odense in a barn. It may sound weird, but the place was beautiful and worked perfectly for our needs. Meals were taken in the old cow stables and the food was equally excellent. If you’re planning some large meeting in Denmark, consider Bramstrup as your venue.

    As always Open Space worked its magic, and the sessions we had were productive, constructive, interesting and lots of fun. You can see the entire report from the conference. I hosted these two sessions: Short OS meetings and Freedom and OS.

  • Book review: Learned optimism

    Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.

    But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
    * Optimists lead better lives
    * Optimists live longer
    * Optimists are healthier
    * Optimists do better at work and in school
    * Optimists have fewer depressions
    * Optimists have more friends and better social lives

    And did you know that:
    * The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
    * The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
    * An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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  • I’m back

    Today is my first work day after a long and excellent holiday, and MAN it’s good to be back.

    Here are a few highlights from our holiday:
    * Travelling through Germany, Holland and Denmark without once having to show our passports.
    * Goliath and Colossos.
    * Amsterdam by bicycle .
    * Helping an old man push his ice-cream-cart-scooter up a hill that it couldn’t climb and getting two ice creams for it.
    * The small twisty roads in the Harz region of Germany
    * Getting in a mile-long traffic jam on a German highway and just riding our motorcycles throught the gaps between stalled cars.
    * Portuguese tapas in Amsterdam.

    By the way, I kicked of my first working day with giving a speech to 12 employees from Novo about happiness at work, and it went extremely well! In short, I’m back and I’m flying! And thanks to guest blogger Carsten for his blog entry.

  • Good Work Project

    Okay, here is a little guest blogger entry.

    I saw Alexander this weekend at the countryside and he looked extremely well, tanned and happy – even without work ;-) Especially in volleyball and inventing games with the kids his karma shone.

    Ok, I am the friend that Alexander has mentioned in other entries and I am proud to write on his site.

    The sharing I would like to do here is to share a website about “The Good Work Project”. The guys behind this are no less than Howard Gardner (inventor of the Multiple Intelligences), Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (inventor of the concept of “Flow” and William Damon (probably inventor of something cool as well).

    Through its various studies, The Good Work project, researches how leading professionals carry out work that is of high quality and socially responsible. Exciting….

    If you want to know more about this, then go to: www.goodworkproject.org

    Cheers out there!

    Carsten Ohm

    www.flowgame.net

    www.pioneersofchange.net

  • 50 (count’em) book reviews

    I’m now up to 50 (count’em) book reviews on the site. I promised myself I’d make it before my holiday and I have. I even saved my favourite book (Cryptonomicon) for review number 50. See ya in september!

  • Book review: Cryptonomicon

    Okay, here’s a novel in which the central themes are cryptology (making and breaking codes), nerds and world war II. Sounds boring, huh? But Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an amazing work and it’s 900 pages do not contain a single boring passage.

    The story is amazingly complex and has as many as five parallel tales set either during world war ii or today. Nerds, marines, scientists and one very strange priest from a mysterious order, all involved in plots and counter-plots that span more than 50 years.
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