The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

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The very best from the site

  • My lazy life

    Some books get you thinking and Fred Gratzon’s The lazy Way to Success definitely did that to me. Damn you, Fred!

    I have seen the light. I now realize that my ingrained laziness has not only been one of the major forces shaping my life, it’s been a boost to almost every important area of my life.

    Lazy me
    Me, doing what I do best: Nothing.

    Here are some random thoughts on how laziness has helped me in my university studies, in my work in IT, in leadership and in entrepreneurship.

    The lazy student

    When I started studying at the University of Southern Denmark (I graduated with a masters in computer science in 1994), I was always envious of the over-achievers. You know them – they’re the people who are always prepared for today’s lecture, have done their homework and never need to do any last-minute, aaaaargh-exams-are-only-two-weeks-away studying. Like I did. Every. single. semester.

    I used to beat myself up for not being like them, but in the end I accepted, that I’m just not that person. The final realization came to me while I was writing my masters thesis (on virtual sensors for robots, if anyone wants to know), and I discovered that some days I can’t write. I literally can’t put two words together and have anything meaningful come out. I can frustrate myself nearly to death trying, but I won’t get anywhere.

    And other days, writing is totally effortless and both the quantity and the quality of the output is high. I am in fact having one of those days today, I can’t seem to stop writing. What I realized was that this is me. It’s the way I work, and I have go with that.

    So I adopted the lazy approach to writing, which is that I write whenever I feel like it. And my output on a writing day easily outweighs the x days where I didn’t get any writing done.

    Incidentally, the thesis still got done on time and it got me an A. So there!

    The lazy developer

    Masters degree in hand I went on to become an IT consultant and developer, and I quickly learned this: If I’m programming something and it feels like work, I haven’t found the right solution yet. When the right solution presents itself, the task becomes fun and easy. I also get to admire the beauty of an efficient, simple solution.

    Good code is a pleasure to maintain, tweak and refactor. Bad code is hard work. Also laziness means only doing things once, instead of repeating yourself all over the place – another hallmark of good code.

    The lazy leader

    After my IT days I went on to leadership and learned this: If leading people feels like hard work, you’re most definitely not doing it right. The lazy leader adapts his leadership style to the people around him to the point where it feels like he’s doing almost no work and people are leading themselves. I refer you to this classic Lao Tzu quote as proof that this notion is more than 2500 years old.

    When I spoke at the Turkish Management Center’s HR conference in Turkey, one of the other speakers was Semco’s CEO Ricardo Semler. He said in his presentation that Semco recently celebrated the 10th. anniversary of Ricardo not deciding anything in the company. It started when he took 18 months out to travel the world, and discovered that the company ran just fine without him. If that ain’t laziness on a very high plane, I don’t know what is and you can read all about it in Ricardo’s excellent book The Seven-Day Weekend.

    The lazy entrepreneur

    As an entreprenur, my approach has been this: Start a lot of small projects and see which ones grab me. Rather than try to analyze my way to an answer to which opportunity is the best/will make me the most money/will be the most fun, I float a lot of ideas in a lot of places. Some happen, most don’t. The ones that happen are by definition the right ones, and they are always fun to work on. Always.

    Conclusion

    It’s common to think that success only comes with hard work, but I’ve found the opposite to be true for me. In my case, success has come from NOT working hard, and my laziness has definitely done me a lot of good. The only difficult part has been to let go of the traditional work ethic and accept my laziness. To work with it instead of against it.

    Will the lazy approach work for you? Maybe not. Maybe you get more success from working long and hard, from putting your nose to the grindstone and applying yourself. But if you’ve never tried the lazy approach, how can you know that that doesn’t work even better? Give it a shot, you might like it!

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  • Book review: The Lazy Way to Success

    The Lazy Way to SuccessFred Gratzon’s book The Lazy Way to Success is a joyous, thoughtful and provocative celebration of the notion that work should, above all, not feel like work.

    If your job is a struggle, if you must constantly put your nose to the grindstone, knuckle under and get it over with – you’re not doing it right. Or you’re doing the wrong job and should get out of it with all haste.

    And Gratzon should know. Though he graduated sine laude whatsoever as an art major in 1968 and was the original long-haired hippy dropout, he’s started two wildly succesful businesses. The second one, Telegroup, grew to 1100 employees with $400 million in annual sales. All this without ever doing a single day’s work.

    His credentials established, what does Fred want us to know about laziness as a tool to success? The three major messages must be these:

    1. The notion that success comes from hard work is wrong and is corroding people and businesses
    2. Laziness is not about doing nothing, it’s about only doing what you like to do
    3. If you “follow your bliss” (as Joseph Campbell put it) success will follow. In fact, if you follow your bliss, you’re already succesful no matter what the outcome

    Fred has this to say on the traditional work ethic:

    “I put in 16 hours a day of hard work,” is a typical boast from a poster boy for this twisted, snore-inducing mentality. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with hard work and long hours per se. If you don’t mind sacrificing your health, your family life, the rest of your life, and your spiritual evolution and you are willing to settle for a pedestrian achievement (snore), there is nothing wrong with working long hours. In this light, hard work has its own level of merit and satisfaction.
    …
    I will readily concede that if you achieve something in one hour, you will achieve two somethings in two hours. If your desiring limit is 16 somethings, then you have the mindless formula. But what if you want a million somethings? Then you need a new math.

    The basis of that new math is this pure, simple and elegant truth – success is INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL to hard work. That means, as effort and hard work become less, success becomes more. As you move towards effortlessness, success moves towards infinity.

    The book itself is absolutely beautiful with very funny illustrations throughout by Lawrence Sheaff. The tone is informal and irreverent but the book does not shy away from a few deep, complicated topics.

    I bought my copy directly from the website and it came with an inscription from Fred that said “Wishing you effortless success”.

    Thank you Fred, what more could I wish for. And is there really any other kind?

    One thought that struck me repeatedly while reading the boook, is that what Fred calls laziness is nearly identical to what I call happiness at work. Many of his principles and ideas are very close to what we teach, which just validates my thinking that happiness at work is not just a nice thing in itself, it’s the best path to business success.

    I never rate the books I review, because I only review books I really, really like. And The Lazy Way gets my very highest non-rating :o)

    Also read this great interview with Fred Gratzon and of course his blog.

  • How NOT to lead geeks

    Tie and T-shirt

    When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike, it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks.

    The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions.

    Some people conclude that geeks hate managers and are impossible to lead. The expression “managing geeks is like herding cats” is sometimes used, but that’s just plain wrong. The fact is that IT people hate bad management and have even less tolerance for it than most other kinds of employees.

    So where does it go wrong? I started out as a geek and later became a leader and an IT company founder so I’ve been lucky enough to have tried both camps. Here are the top 10 mistakes I’ve seen managers make when leading geeks:
    (more…)

  • Don’t fight stress. Promote peace.

    Stress, stress, stress.

    A recent Danish study showed that 62% of all danish employees have felt stressed at work in the last month and 15% have had to report in sick at some point because of stress. The Danish ministry of work states that up to a quarter of all absenteeism is due to stress.

    Stress is a serious problem that costs businesses a lot of money and, even worse, can ruin employees’ lives. However, the typical solutions used to combat stress don’t work – in fact they often make matters worse.

    The typical solution is, of course, the stress management training. Typical content includes:

    • What is stress
    • Symptoms of stress
    • Health implications of stress
    • How to fight stress

    This will typically be presented by a stress consultant. In Denmark that consultant may even come from the unfortunately named Center for Stress (shouldn’t that be against stress?).

    Are you getting it? Stress, stress, stress, stress and more stress. If I wasn’t stressed before, I certainly will be now. In fact, one study indicated that employees who attend stress management training become more stressed.

    You know how people react when they read about some exotic disease? Suddenly they’re convinced they have all the symptoms and that they in fact suffer from dengue fever. When presented with a long list of symptons of stress, people can easily convince themselves that “Wow I must be really stressed too.”

    What’s needed is a fundamental shift in approach – you do not fight stress by talking about stress. that just stresses people more. You fight stress by talking about peace and calm instead. That’s the solution to stress: To give employees tools to stay calm in a busy work environment.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s three simple steps to calm at work

    Forget about stress for a moment. What can you do to stay calm even when things are moving fast at work? Here are three simple steps that anyone in any position can use.

    Examine when you stay calm
    StonesExamine previous situations at work where you were busy but calm. What happened? What allowed you to stay calm? How can you use this in future busy situations?

    Stop and feel
    Once a day, take five minutes to stop what you’re doing and notice how you’re doing. The greatest danger is stealth stress, where you get a little more stressed day by day but never notice it because it sneaks up on you in small increments.

    The antidote: Take five minutes every day to do the following:

    1. Go to a place where there are no phones, computers and interruptions. The bathroom works in a pinch.
    2. Sit down, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Take deep, slow breaths.
    3. Pull back your attention from wherever it was and focus on yourself.
    4. Ask yourself the following questions:
      • What is my body feeling? Notice any good feeling or any tension or pain.
      • How am I feeling? Happy, sad, stressed, angry, energized, tired?
      • What am I thinking? What occupies your thoughts?

    You don’t need to do anything about it while you’re sitting there. Don’t expect any solutions to come to you. Just sit there and notice what’s going on in your body, emotions and thoughts.

    Enjoy your achievements
    Appreciate the amount of work you do, and don’t berate yourself over the tasks you don’t manage. It’s a fact of work today, that there’s always more work. You will never clear your desk and if you do, more work will find you. So you must remember to feel good about the work you do and not beat yourself up over the tasks you haven’t yet finished.

    These three tips can be used by anyone in any job. They take very little time and effort and can help employees keep their cool even in the busiest work environments. Try them out!

  • Thank you for coming to work. Now scram!

    Most modern countries are seeing a steady rise in the amount of time people spend at work. There is some evidence, however, that this trend contributes neither to the bottom line nor to our overall well-being.

    Way out

    Esther Derby euthanizes the idea that long hours are a sign of employee commitment. She cites some alternative reasons people stay late at the office, including:

    • One woman’s marriage was disintegrating and she stayed late to avoid tension at home.
    • Another woman was using company assets to run a side business… and it was easier to hide it when people weren’t around.
    • Two people who were having an affair stayed late at work to be together.

    Via Jason Yip’s excellent blog.

    As for productivity, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in one of her books mentions an IT copany that were in big financial trouble. Rather than lay some people off they switched to a 30-hour work week and a corresponding pay cut, and experienced no reduction in production. They did the exact same amount of work in 30 hours a week as in 40.

    When the company righted itself each employee could choose to return to the original work schedule and pay or remain at 30 hours a week. They all chose to keep the short work week. Read the whole amazing story here.

    A recent Danish study found that 90% of managers who worked 30-37 hours a week were satisfied with their work-life balance. Among managers working more than 48 hours a week, that percentage dropped to 46. The consequence: More stress, less job satisfaction and an increased risk that they will leave the company.

    We’ve long known that reasonable working hours are one of the most important factors determining whether people are happy at work (and in life). Long working hours are not a sign if commitment and may not even contribute to business productivity.

    Therefore businesses should stop encouraging (implicitly and explicitly) long work hours and start rewarding the people who go home on time. They’re good for business.

  • 5 easy steps to better sales meetings

    Sale
    (sign from a Copenhagen shoe shop)

    I got sick and tired of sales people at one point. There seems to be some unspoken agreement among them that all sales meetings must run like this:

    1. Boring company presentation, including their org chart and last 5 years financial statements.
    2. A pre-planned presentation of all their products, including some that could never, ever interest me.
    3. 5 minutes at the end for them to try to figure out what I would like to buy. Which’ll be nothing.

    There’s gotta be a better way! And there is. Sales meetings don’t have to be an unpleasant affair in which pushy salespeople use every trick in the book to convince reluctant customers to buy their stuff.

    I developed a better format for The Happy at Work Project for two reasons:First of all, with our name and our products we were forced to come up with a way to make sales meetings fun, or we would have lost all credibility right there. (If you’ve never heard of us, we do workshops, presentations, conferences and board games to make people happy at work).

    Secondly I’ve tried being the victim target potential customer of many traditional sales pitches, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting that experience on potential, unsuspecting customers.

    When using the meeting format described below, I have repeatedly seen clients switch from a defensive, arms-crossed, you-can’t-trick-me-into-buying- nothing-buster posture to a relaxed, positive atmosphere where they’re asking me interested questions – rather than me trying to ram information down their throats. Simply speaking, sales meetings become fun.

    Here’s how I do it.

    1: You’re not there to sell

    First of all, we don’t call them sales meetings, we call them customer meetings. This is not just semantics, the point truly isn’t selling – the point is to meet a potential customer, to learn about that customer and to let them learn about what you can offer.

    You’re not there to sell – you’re there to help the customer make a wise decision (this idea is courtesy of my Iowan friend Mike Wagner). Of course you’re there in the first place because you believe in the quality of your products/services and you believe the customer needs what you can deliver. If this isn’t so, why did you approach this customer at all?

    And that is the fundamental difference: Is selling a matter of salesman vs. customer or is it a matter of working together. Our meeting format creates a setting where seller and buyer work together to create value for both.

    2: Frame the meeting

    I very briefly introduce myself and my company, and then take a little time to frame the meeting.

    Time: All our meetings are planned for a 1 hour duration, but I still always start by fixing the time frame, saying “I’d planned to finish no later than X o’clock. Is that OK?” Sometimes the customer will say, “That’s fine I have a meeting right after” and then I always offer to end our meeting 5 minutes early.

    Content: Then I explain that in my experience, the meetings go better if I can spend some time asking about them first. I can talk for a long time about our products, but if I don’t know something about the customer, I may not say anything that’s relevant to them. Then I ask if that’s OK.

    Agreeing to these things up front puts the customer in charge of the whole process. While you will of course be running the meeting, you do so with their full consent.

    3: Ask a lot of good questions

    This meeting is not about you. It’s about the customer. We have a list of good questions to ask, and the first question is always this: “What made you take time for this meeting?”

    This is an amazing question, because it goes right to the root of why you’re talking to that customer. We’re all busy people, and there’s a reason this person has taken an hour out to talk to you. The entire point of the meeting is to find that reason. So why not ask up front?

    Also, our last question “What benefits could your organization achieve, if people were happier at work???? is crucial, because right there, the customer will supply you with all the selling points. Substitute your own argument instead of “happier at work” here.

    Asking questions is important, because successful customer meetings are the ones where the customer does most of the talking. Also, this means that whether or not the meeting results in a sale, you will still walk away with new knowledge.

    4: Present your offerings on 1 (one) page

    We then present one sheet of paper that describes our work and our products. Yes, that’s right, one single, solitary sheet.

    At this point many customers are expecting (or dreading) a 20-slide corporate PowerPoint presentation, and they’re unfailingly relieved and happy when I pull out just this one piece of paper and explain our offerings based on that.

    “But my products will never fit on one page” I hear you cry. Oh, yeah? Well if you can’t describe yourself and your products simply enough to fit on one page, then you’re not ready to talk to potential customers yet. They deserve that level of clarity and simplicity.

    Our presentation focuses on what we do, i.e. the actual products and services we can deliver – and very little on who we are. The paper also contains a short description of how we work and some (great) customer quotes.

    Of course, having just learned a lot about the customer, it’s easy for met to connect our offerings to their business and to focus more on products they can use. It becomes a targeted presentation, tailored to that specific customer – and boy, do they ever appreciate that.

    Remember to constantly stop and ask the customer “How does that sound?” or similar. Don’t go into your entire spiel and then ask at the end. You might ask after every product: “How could you apply this in your business?”

    5: Wrap up the meeting

    We always end the meeting a few minutes before the agreed time. This shows respect for the customer’s time, and avoids that fidgety few minutes at the end where the customer is subconsciously wondering whether the meeting will end in time for her to make her next meeting/appointment.

    There seems to be an unstated belief among sales people that long meetings = good meetings. That the longer you can keep the meeting going, the more interested the customer must be. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

    At the end of the meeting, we ask:
    “How did you like the meeting? Did you get all the information you need????
    “Would you like to be added to our mailing list so you get our newsletter????
    “How would you like me to follow up on the meeting? Should I call you in X weeks????

    This ensures customer commitment on whatever follow-up we decide on.

    Step 2 takes just a couple of minutes, while step 3 (asking about the customer) should take about 25 minutes of a one hour meeting. You then have 20 minutes to present your products and let the customer ask questions about them and 5 minutes to end the meeting.

    If you find yourself dreading sales meetings or find yourself uncomfortable in a traditional salesman role, give this method a shot. Not only will you enjoy meeting customers this way – you’ll also sell more.

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  • eXtreme Projects

    eXtreme Programming is a process used to structure software development projects. It is radically different from more traditional methods, in that it defers more of the detailed planning till later in the project. Most traditional methods try to answer all the big questions up front. This makes it less susceptible to changes that occur during the project – something that can otherwise seriously disrupt software projects.

    eXtreme Programming, or XP, is based on a set of principles that at first may seem awkward and counter-intuitive, but which actually support each other nicely, resulting in a process that is:

    • More efficient
    • More predictable
    • More flexible
    • More fun

    Since I switched from the IT business to making people happy at work, I’ve used some of the XP principles in many other situations, where they have proved to work just as well. Here is my list of which XP principles translate to non-IT projects, and how to utilize them:

    Frequent small releases

    Rather than spending a long time building up to one huge release, find a way to divide your project into several smaller releases. This means that your product makes contact with the real world sooner, and allows you to better incorporate feedback from actual customers/users. in XP, you want to release something every 2-3 weeks, which is certainly preferable to working on a project for 6 months, delivering it to the customer and THEN learning that it doesn’t fulfill their needs. And don’t tell me this never happens.

    Iteration planning

    This means breaking the current goals down into tasks that are small enough to be accomplished in 1-3 days. Based on these estimates, the teams decides which tasks to include for the next deliverable. This means that the work immediately ahead gets broken down into small, manageable pieces and you can easliy track progress.

    Move people around

    Rather than assigning fixed roles to each person, let people switch roles. This enhances knowledge sharing and learning and also helps avoid information bottlenecks. XP also lets people choose for themselves which part of the project they want to work on.

    Daily stand-up meetings

    You’ll be amazed how much faster meetings go, when people can’t sleep in their chairs. in XP projects every day starts with a stand-up meeting to coordinate the days work.

    The customer is always available

    That way you don’t have to guess what the customer wants/intends/needs. You can easily and quickly ask.

    Pair programming (or pair work)

    This means that no work is done by one person alone – each and every task is tackled by at least two people. This may seem inefficient at first, but experience shows that people do better work when working together and it also enhances cross-training and team-work.

    Simplicity

    Choose the simplest solution that could possibly work. Don’t get fancy when simple will do.

    Create spike solutions

    If you’re faced with a difficult choice, don’t analyse it to death, trying to look for the right solution. Instead create spike solutions – quick tests that allow you to try various possible solutions out. This gives you fast, specific, real-life data to let you choose and helps avoid paralysis by analysis.

    Collective code ownership (or collective project ownership)

    Everybody owns the whole project. This helps avoid bottlenecks and that unpleasant situation where people feel that they own a part of the project and seem reluctant to share knowledge or accept criticism on their “property”.

    No overtime

    Period!

    I believe that these principles can be applied to many kinds of projects and I have done so myself with considerable success. Are they always applicable? No. Read the XP entry on when to apply XP for some inspiration on when to use XP – and when not to.

  • The story so far

    Roosevelt Finlayson (of the Festival in the Workplace) called me from the Bahamas yesterday to catch up. During our talk we discussed my future plans (among many other things) and he challenged me to document the process I’m currently going through. That’s a great idea and what better place to do it than right here on the blog.

    And what better way to start than by telling the story so far. So here it is, the story of the geek who:

    • Co-Founded a very different kind of IT-company
    • Went from trying to grok tech to trying to grok people
    • Left IT and found his calling
    • Founded possibly the world’s strangest company/organisation/movement
    • Gave 3 years of his life to make people happy at work
    • Worked for free for 3 years, and calls at i huge success :o)
    • Is now leaving this project and has no idea what’s next

    (more…)

  • Top 10 happy workplaces

    In a comment to an earlier post about Chief Happiness Officers Kristian asked me for my Top 10 list of companies that make for happy employees. So without further ado, here’s my Top 10 happy companies list:
    10. jetBlue – for emphasizing fun
    9. Irma – for putting people first (in danish)
    8. Pixar – for the cool offices (in danish, bottom of the page)
    7. Patagonia – for being cool about surfing on company time
    6. Pike Place Fish – for throwing fish around
    5. IKEA Denmark – for giving their lowest paid employees a 20% pay hike
    4. ServiceGruppen – for listening and learning (in danish)
    3. Southwest Airlines – for emphasizing love
    2. Kjaer Group – for loving cars, people and life

    And the number one company to be happy at:
    1. Any company where YOU yourself are willing to make a difference and make yourself and others happy.

  • Chief Happiness Officer

    Just as every company needs a CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, etc., I believe every company should have a CHO – a Chief Happiness Officer. Most businesses today are not competitive if they can’t keep their employees happy since happy people tend to:

    • Work more efficiently
    • Learn faster
    • Give better service
    • Produce better quality
    • Take fewer sick days
    • Function better in teams

    In fact, I challenge you to name just one area in which unhappy employees outperform happy ones. One!

    The economy is critical to the business, so the CFO is in charge of that. Information systems are too, hence the CIO. So put a CHO in charge of happiness. Somebody who cares for people and recognizes that work today is one of the most important factors contributing to (or detracting from) people’s happiness.