The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • In the media

    My main project (happiness at work) has come to the attention of the media. It’s actually a little too soon for my taste, I’d have liked to have more results before we “go public” but hey, it’s nice that people are interested.

    Yesterday we were mentioned in Denmarks largest newspaper, in an article about how best to start work after a vacation. This is what I wrote about in an earlier post.

    And today I was live on national TV (on Good morning Denmark), being interviewed by Michael Meyerheim. I’ll try to convert it to a digital format and post it on the site.
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  • Kufunda, the learning village

    Yesterday Carsten Ohm invited people over for a friendly gathering and to meet Marianne Knuth who was back from Zimbabwe for a short while. Marianne has created Kufunda which is “a learning initiative in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, aimed at the creation of locally rooted solutions to community self-reliance challenges, through the use of people’s own imagination, collaboration and resources.”

    I was amazed and inspired by the vision and personal commitment of these people (particularly Marianne) to carry out a project like this in such an unstable region of the world. I invite you to check out their website and to consider how you might contribute!

    And as I wrote about in an earlier post, this is the way to help people: Passing on skills and tools, without creating a dependency on the helper.

  • Meditation at work

    Businessweek have an article on medation in the workplace. Vice president Dave Jakubowski of Internet service provider United Online recently turned to a mat and 60 minutes of silence a day, and says
    “I’m in business, and I need results. It’s amazing. I’m able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than trying to fight through it. And I make fewer mistakes.”

    Via slashdot.

  • Tips for returning from a vacation

    The summer holidays are ending and as you or your colleagues return to work, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the best way to ease back into your job. Sometimes it seems as if all the energy you’ve gained on your vacation disappears very quickly, so here’s some tips on how to keep that good mood a little longer.

    There are tips both for people who are returning from vacations and for their co-workers.
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  • Most read posts in june

    These are the mosts popular posts in june:

    Psychological test
    Selling fish in Seattle – and having fun
    Possibly the best music video ever
    Generosity in action
    Book review: The fifth discipline
    How Denmark won the 1992 european soccer championship
    Hosting
    Book review: Getting to yes
    100 things about me
    Cool name wanted

    Note that these are all long posts, ie. posts that have a “more…” link and their own page. Short posts are usually read straight from the front page and therefore do not appear in the server statistics.

  • Guru meditation

    Full marks to Tveskov for knowing the answer to a previous question, and for the additional explanation.

    I’ve heard a different legend of the origin of guru meditation: It is said that the developers were playing with a new input device which was a balancing board that you stood on, and by leaning over you could control for example a game. And one of the uses was to try and stand still on the board, as if you were meditating. Hence guru meditation.

    But I like Bjarnes version better.

  • Politics and the internet

    The future of politics is currently being shaped by the Howard Dean presidential campaign in the US: The results of self-organizing are not only more people, but more ideas about how to do local politics. The idea of sending 30,000 letters to Iowa at the last Dean Meetup came from the grassroots, and that has been reported. What hasn?t been reported is that most of the Dean flyers that people are passing out at farmers markets and summer fairs around the country are put together by grassroots organizers working through the Net. Independently of the official campaign, a Seattle group thinks of a flyer idea, which a New York group designs, which they circulate through the Dean listservs, which gets stapled to a Bulletin Board in Missouri by a group of Dean supporters who met through the Internet. A Georgia group designs ?Dean Cards,? which are now spreading around the country.

    This is from a post to Lawrence Lessigs blog where Dean Howard’s been guest blogging. Kinda makes me want to be american so I could vote for him.

  • Pride on the job

    Once again an excellent article from Fast Company on the importance on pride at work.

    There`s one thing I’d like to add, namely that you can’t “do pride”. Pride is not a practice, it is the result of one or more practices. The article even shows some of these practices like caring for employees, focus on learning, including employees in decisions and focus on long term results. Here’s the list of practices, that I believe promote pride and happiness at work.

  • Book review: Small world

    It is hardly news anymore, but there is a definite shift going on in science. Where the focus used to be almost exlusively on reductionism ie. an effort to understand the world by looking at ever smaller pieces and trying to understand them separately, now more and more attention is spent on the relations between objects.

    Mark Buchanans book small world, uncovering nature’s hidden networks covers one part of this “new” science namely the discoveries in networks that have come very recently in many different areas. So what exactly is the common theme between the internet, fireflies in Thailand, neurons in our brains and the social networks that we’re all part of?
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  • Book review: The tipping point

    Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.

    This is how Malcolm Gladwell ends his book The tipping point, subtitled “how little things can make a big difference”. Throughout the book Gladwell examines the circumstances in which large scale change can be brought about by a small effort. From the explosive succes og Hush Puppies (a brand of shoes) to a wave of suicides that plagued Micronesia. From the success of Sesame Street to a syphilis epidemic in Boston in the 90’s.

    Gladwell argues that this sort of change is much more common than we usually acknowledge, and that it is possible because of three factors, the three rules of the tipping point.
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