The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • What get’s measured get’s done: True or False?

    I’ve heard it often: What get’s measured get’s done. It’s especially popular among proponents of Balanced Scorecards and similar management tools.

    I think it’s wrong. Click more and I’ll tell you why I think so.

    Well first of all, what does the statement mean? Most often it’s used as a reason to measure performance in your organization, so it has several meanings:
    1: If you want to make sure that something is done, you need to measure it.
    2: You can adequately measure results
    3: You can know the state of your organization through measurements

    I disagree. It’s not that measurements in an organization are superfluous – it’s just never the whole truth.

    Here’s why I disagree with the statement:
    If you only accept the results that you can measure (and most people who tout the statement do), then the statement becomes a tautology and thus is meaningless. It then says in effect that “What get’s measured is what we have measured”. So (and this is pretty funny) this statement only makes sense, if you accept the existence of non-measured results.

    And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity.

    Let’s say a project comes in on time and on budget. You can (and probably will measure that, as well you should). Maybe that project cost one of the key workers her marriage. Will that be measured? No! Is it important? Well, when she resigns in three months, it will be!

    So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!

  • Book review: Change

    When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless? This is the focus of this book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.

    The book is based on the authors’ experiences with brief therapy. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, which tries to uncover the “deeper” causes of problems, brief therapy focuses on solving peoples current problems. Why spend years of therapy going back to the hypothetical root cause of some problem, when what you really need to do, is get rid of the issue now. And even IF you find the cause of the problem, you still haven’t solved it.

    The authors claim to have helped 80% of their clients in 4 sessions or less!
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  • Quote

    I don’t know whether my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they come along, I’ve had a lot of extra time to enjoy life.
    – Harpo Marx

  • Book review: The naked ape

    The naked ape is a classic. It’s about humans, but it’s written by a zoologist, who treats us as just another type of ape.

    The premise is this: If you took the skin of one of each species of primate and examined them closely, there’s one that would stick out – the human. We’re not covered in hair, hence the naked ape. He then goes on to describe the myriad ways in which we resemble apes, physically, psycologically, socially, sexually, etc. It’s brilliant stuff.

    It reminds me of a question asked in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: What animal would you be, if you were an animal? Answer: You already are an animal.

  • Book review: The art of systems thinking

    Systems thinking is the key to understanding many of the problems that we face today as individuals and organizations. Peter Senge defined it as one of five key disciplines necessary to create a learning organization, but systems thinking is useful far beyond that.

    This book, subtitled “Essential skills for creativity and problem solving”, is a thorough introduction to the field.
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  • Exercise

    Check out this quote from an article in Fast Company:

    A nine-month study of 80 executives found that those who worked out regularly improved their fitness by 22% and demonstrated a 70% improvement in their ability to make complex decisions as compared with non-exercisers.

    A couple of days ago, there was a doctor on TV talking about the health benefits of regular exercise. The danish state will allow doctors to prescribe exercise the way they describe medication. Among others, exercise is good against heart disease, colon cancer and osteoporosis. The more you exercise, the more it works and here’s the clincher: There are NO negative side effects of exercise.

    Any medicine out there (and I do mean ANY) has side effects. Exercise doesn’t. In a time where doctors warn that so many things can be bad for you, I think that’s kinda interesting. So exercise already!

  • Free books

    A lot of people talk content. Baen are delivering, and have been for a couple of years. And oh yeah – successfully! Most of their books are available on paper or as ebooks, and in many cases you can read the first few chapters for free.

    In the Baen Free Library you can find free books by some of their authors, to read on your PC or Palm. Be sure to read the opening rant by Eric Flint, it’s informative and funny.
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  • Quote

    Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
    always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
    there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
    and splendid plans:

    The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

    All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never
    have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising
    in one’s favor all manners of unforeseen incidents and material assistance,
    which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

    – William Murray (Member of Scottish expedition to Mount Everest)

  • Book review: Det gener

    Tor Nørretranders has written an excellent book about generosity. It has gotten a decent amount of media exposure since it came out, mostly due to some (literally) sexy catchphrases.

    But the book has merit far beyond easy catchphrases. Humans are generous, artistic, flamboyant, playful individualists. And what’s more, we’re the happiest when we can be all of that. Why?
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  • Infocom adventures

    I used to love playing the Infocom adventure games on my Commodore 64. Yes, they had no graphics and no sound. But they did have excellent text and the cleverest, most infuriating puzzles. Also the games had an excellent parser, that could even understand input like “Put the x in the y using z” (hot stuff back then, when many adventure games only accepted input formatted like “verb noun”).

    There’s also a lot of humour in there. One of the games had you running around a maze of walls (actually many of them did). In this case if you got desperate enough to try “listen to the wall” the game came back with “Ah, a Pink Floyd Fan.”

    My absolute favourite is Planetfall where you’re a lonely ensign third class from the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein, stranded on a deserted planet. You need to find a way home, before you run out of food and water. Click more to see an example of the kind of things I relly liked about the Infocom games.
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