The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • TietoEnator buys Enterprise Systems

    It’s official, Enterprise Systems has been sold to TietoEnator.

    It’s a little ironic that this deal is finalized almost exactly 5 years after we started the company. It’s also a little sad, but I truly believe that this is the best option for Enterprise to develop. TE can give the company resources and strategic direction that we could never have found on our own.

    I can look back on a great time, building a great company. We (meaning not only the founders but every single ES employee) created a company where people had fun, were committed, learned and developed as people – all the while making lots of money.

    I already left the company a few months back, so I will not be a part of ES’ future in TE. I wish the guys (and the one gal) the best of luck, I know they’ll all do great. They’re the smartest, nicest, cleverest, most sympathetic people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and I’m sure that exciting stuff is waiting for them!

  • Word of the day: Affluenza

    Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. 4. A television program that could change your life.

  • Exercise: Faster or slower

    Is faster always better? Try this exercise, and see what you think.

    Let’s say that you want to optimize some process to save time.

    In many activities, you can take all the fun out of it if you hurry too much. For example, I used to be a hell-bent skier. This happens when you’re living in flat, snow-less Demark, and you only have the chance to ski for one week every year. By god, I wanted the most skiing I could possibly get! So I got up really early every morning, I took almost no breaks (except for a short lunch break), and I generally drove myself and everybody around me to exhaustion and desperation. Then on a trip a couple of years ago, I learned that by relaxing a little, taking a lot of breaks, I’d get less skiing done, but I’d enjoy it a hell of a lot more. Say 20% less skiing, 80% more fun! And I’ve found that this equation holds in many other activities.

    So, what is it that happens when you try do something faster? Odds are, that beyond a certain point, the faster you do it, the less you enjoy it. Maybe it’s just more fun when you do it slowly. Alternatively, you may become stressed because you’re not doing it as fast as you’d like.

    So this is the exercise: Find a process or action you’d like to optimize (it can be anything really, your morning drive to work, your evening meal or something you do at work), and then try to do it faster or slower. Keep a journal where you log the time it took and how you liked the experience. Then try to see if there’s a connection, and try to see if there’s an optimal “hurry level”, that doesn’t eliminate the fun.

  • Book review: Faster

    Time is the one totally democratic resource. No matter who you are, a day still only has 24 hours.

    But these days, everything seems to go faster. We try to cram more and more into every day, and we’ve come to hate and fear periods of inaction, especially those we don’t choose for ourselves.
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  • Conference

    I spent monday and tuesday attending a conference on mental health in the workspace. Topics ranged from stress and depression to motivation and creativity. The speakers were psychologists, business managers, scientists and even a priest (Johannes M?llehave).

    The quality of the individual sessions varied, but overall the conference was good. I am left with the impression that mental health in the workspace is now being taken seriously. 15-20 years ago companies started improving the physical working conditions, and huge progress has been made in this area. Mental health, however, has long been a taboo, in private life and especially at work.

    Therefore it was very refreshing to hear Jytte Hilden (ex-minister and current cultural director of the Royal Library) talk openly about her 3 bouts with depression. The latest happened a couple of years back, and when she needed 2 months off from work to deal with it, the Royal Library gave her that. She also did something I admire deeply: Before leaving, she assembled her staff, and told them exactly what was going to happen. She believes that this made it easier for her to come back after the 2 months, than if people had been told a cover story.

    It was also very interesting to hear Niels Due Jensen the CEO of Grundfoss (the worlds second largest producer of pumps with 11.000 employees worldwide). He talked about how Grundfoss fight stress in their employees, and how they try to help seriously ill employees. It was clear to see, that this is a company that cares for it’s people, above and beyond the bottom line.

    However, I have one major concern about the way the issues of mental health at work are being handled. In most cases it’s a matter of trying to avoid something. Companies are fighting stress, they have programs against smoking and drinking or they are trying to prevent employee burnout. These are fine and essential pursuits, but looking only at what you are to avoid os not enough in my opinion. You could in theory create a workspace where nobody suffered from stress, burnout etc., but that does not automatically make it a great place to work.

    I think we should try to define the qualities that we DO want present in our work, and try to envision a way of working together that will give people a positive work life. It’s more fun to create a future when you base it on something you want, than when you base it something you want to avoid!

  • Doonesbury on blogs

    Ouch!

  • Possibly the best music video ever

    Team up Fatboy Slim, Spike Jonze and Christopher Walken and what do you get? My favourite music video. It’s weird and beautiful, and Christopher Walken even choreographed his own dance moves.

    Trivia about Christopher Walken from imdb: “Manages to insert a little dance number into all of his roles, no matter how small, scripted or not”. I’d never thought of that, but yeah – there’s the wedding dance in “deer hunter”, there’s the tango scene in “scent of a woman” and some truly amazing dance scenes in “pennies from heaven”. Though I don’t seem to recall him dancing in “pulp fiction”..?

  • Book review: The marriage of sense and soul

    Science gives us truth. Religion gives us meaning. We need both. In this book Ken Wilber argues that we need a world view that unifies science and religion/spirituality, which is hardly news. What was new (to me at least), is that he claims that such a world view is possible, without distorting the essential nature of the two.
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  • Yay, books

    My latest order from Amazon just arrived. Some 15 titles from Margaret Wheatley, Peter Senge, Harrison Owen and many others. We’re talking a combined 40 cm. of shelf-space on the soul and spirit at work, systems thinking, self-organization, physical thinking, learning and much, much more. Seeing all those books waiting to be read is exhilarating and intimidating.

  • How Denmark won the 1992 european soccer championship

    TV2 Zulu (ubertrendy danish TV channel) has just finished showing all of Denmarks games from that glorious summer ten years ago, and it brings back to mind one of the most unlikely tales in sports history.

    Denmark went into the tournament as rank outsiders. We didn’t even qualify, we were just called in to make up the numbers after Yugoslavia was banned because of the civil war in the balkans. While the other teams had had months to prepare, the announcement that Denmark would participate instead of Yugoslavia came ten days(!) before the start of the tournament.

    Denmarks best international result until then had been a place among the best 16 in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico (unless you go back to -56 where we won an olympic silver medal).

    And yet we won in -92! Always with the smallest possible margins, always with luck on our side, never doing more than the minimum requirements, and yet eliminating teams like England and Holland, to finally beat Germany 2-0 in the final. Ask any dane above the age of 18, and he or she will probably be able to tell you what they were doing on that day.

    And how did we do it? The most important reason was a good team, with few strong individualists. The danish team seemed to fight for each other, every player backing up his team-mates. Luck played into it, and we had plenty of it that summer. We had so much luck, that it couldn’t just be a coincidence. Also, we were the outsiders. We had nothing to lose and everything to win. We went in to every game with no expectations. It would have been irrational to expect anything of the team under the circumstances. And yet we won. Might there be a lesson here?

    And if you’ll excuse me, I will now lean back in my chair for a moment, think back on those days, and enjoy that irrational, beautiful, warm, glowing feeling I always get when I’m reminded of it – even now ten years later.