The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Change

How to create positive and effective change at work and in life.

  • Social entrepreneurship

    Thomas found this excellent article on social entrepreneurship, ie. the pursuit of a social mission using business-like methods.

    According to the article, the characteristics of social entrepreneurs are:
    * Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
    * Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
    * Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
    * Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
    * Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

    Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. This is exactly the territory I find myself exploring with the happy at work project. Yes, we operate as a business, charging companies for our services, but we’re not in it for the money, wa want to make people happy at work. It’s nice to see that someone has put some thought into this area, and I certainly recognize much of the thinking in the article.

  • Quote

    Change that is deeply effective and positive presents a paradoxical challenge. On the one hand, there needs to be an appreciation and acceptance of how things are in the here and now. On the other hand, there needs to be an active intention to make things better. Nothing needs to change, and everything can improve. This is the way to avoid the two extremist traps of activist’s frustration or pessimistic complacency.

    – Patch Adams

    I’m reading Gesundheit by Patch Adams , a combination autobiography and explanation of his lifes work, the creation of the Gesundheit Institute. This is a marvellous book. I keep wanting to jump to he PC and put quotes from it online, and when I read this one I couldn’t contain myself. Patch cuts straight to one of the deepest paradoxes surrounding change in a clear, concise and well formulated way. My hat’s off to this man.

  • Forget everything you know about change!

    Jim Collins, the author of Built to last and Good to great examines our peceptions of how change in orgnizations happens, and finds that most of our current thinking is dead wrong. This is one of the best and most insightful articles I’ve read in a loooong time. A teaser:

    I want to give you a lobotomy about change. I want you to forget everything you’ve ever learned about what it takes to create great results. I want you to realize that nearly all operating prescriptions for creating large-scale corporate change are nothing but myths.
    …
    Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken. All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation — as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.

    The key to succesful change: Put “Who” before “What”. Read the article at (where else) Fast Company.

  • Peace

    The last session I attended at the PoP conference was about the question “Why aren’t we already peaceful.” Paul posted it, and frankly I’m not really sure if he was seriously pondering the question himself, or if he maybe posted it because he thought it was a question we needed to look at.

    Anyway, the discussion steadily circled around to the fact that in order for you to be at peace, you must start with yourself. If you expect peace to be some external, perfect and permanent state that you will attain once all war, conflict and suffering has disappeared from the plant, then you will never be peaceful. If you want to be at peace, you must find a way to be so in the presence of all these things.

    Here’s my answer: You will be at peace, when you believe that the world is exactly as it should be. This doesn’t mean that you can’t work to improve things, it just means that you acknowledge and appreciate the world for what it is right now. When you believe that you can be peaceful, and when you’re peaceful, you can work much more effectively to change the world.

  • Muddling through

    Harrison Owen just finished his opening talk here at the Practice of Peace conference, and todays topic centered around “muddling through” – the idea that for 14 billion years the universe has moved towards higher and higher levels of complexity with no central planning involved. It’s not perfect, but it’s amazing that we’re around to complaing about how bad it all is.

    And that got me thinking about something I’ve heard people saying previously, namely that “the good is the enemy of the perfect.” In other words, that accepting a good solution prevents you from finding the perfect solution. Frankly, that’s just not right. It’s the other way around: The search for the perfect solution often keeps us from achieving a good solution. Instead of perfection, we could go for perfectly allright.

    Researching this on the net, I just discovered that Voltaire is with me on this one :o) Here’s to muddling through, 14 billion years of it so far.

  • Dust devils

    I found this quote from my favourite book, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, on Chris Corrigans website.

    Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vanish — but then you’d look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.

    (more…)

  • Quote

    So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

    – Vaclav Havel in Summer Meditations

  • Death and grief

    From an article in Fast Company:
    Philosopher and consultant Peter Koestenbaum spends his days exploring truly big questions that have never sounded more relevant. Here, he reflects on what the shock of death teaches us about leadership — and how to move forward without forgetting.

    For another way to view it, check out Harrison Owen’s concept of griefwork, which is the process that we as humans go through every time we encounter change. There’s a brief description here, and more in his book Expanding our now.

  • Autumn poem

    The other day while I was driving home, I looked into the gutter and saw yellow leaves. Autumn’s here, and here’s a fitting poem which I found in Anne Lamott’s beautiful book “bird by bird”.

    Above me, wind does its best
    to blow leaves off the Aspen
    tree a month too soon. No use,
    wind, all you succeed in doing
    is making music, the noise
    of failure growing beautiful.
    – Bill Holm

    Here’s the author’s own background for the poem.

  • 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.