Category: Accolades

WorldBlu, an American company dedicated to promote democracy in the workplace, have just released their annual list of the world’s most democratic workplaces – and we’re on it.

On this year’s list you’ll see companies like Davita, Groupon, Hulu and many other great companies who have based their organizations on freedom and democracy instead of command and control.

If you scroll through the list, you will find our company sandwiched between WD-40 and Zappos.com. That’s what I call a place of honor :o) You can see the entire list here.

This marks first year that you’ll find any Danish companies on the list, and you’ll find no less than three! Apart from us, there’s also our good friends at Podio, makers of the coolest collaboration software I know and Valtech, a large IT consulting company.

The reason why we run our company democratically is simple: Democracy makes people happy and happy people do a better job. Because we run democratically, we are much better at fulfilling our vision of making many more people happy at work around the world.

I’ll talk more about this at WorldBlu Live in San Francisco in May, where I’ll be speaking along with many fascinating and cool people. I have been to every single one of these and they are the very best business conferences I’ve been to. They even beat the TED conference for the sheer energy, inspiration and cool people you meet. You should sign up for the WorldBlu Live conference right now or you will miss out on something amazing.

How about you? Is your workplace democratic? Are you involved in making decisions that impact youWould you like it to be?

Yaaaay: HR World has named me one of 2007’s top HR bloggers.

The funny thing is, I don’t consider this to be an HR blog – but it’s obvious that happiness at work is if interest to HR professionals. I mean, the ultimate goal of HR has to be to make employees happy at work, right?

Some previous accolades for the blog:

• I’m a cool friend of Tom Peters
• Kim & Jason’s Adultitis Antidote Award
• One in a million blogger

So not only was my blog celebrated as an antidote for Adultitis – yet another accolade has been bestowed on me: I’m now one of Tom Peter’s cool friends. Other cool friends of Tom’s include Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Ze Frank and Dan Pink, all of whom are now in great company. Mine :o)

There’s an excellent interview with yours truly up on tompeters.com, which manages to both cover a lot of ground (it gets faaaaairly philosophical at times – in a good way) while at the same time giving a pretty good overview of my thinking on happiness at work. This is mostly due to the excellent questions asked Erik Hansen who conducted the interview.

The interview is introduced with these words:

According to our new Cool Friend Alex Kjerulf, the Scandinavian languages have a word, arbejdsglæde, that means “work happiness” whereas the Japanese have the word karoshi, meaning “death by overwork” (We’re hoping you feel particularly Scandinavian today).

So if you’re feeling Scandinavian today too, why not go read the interview.