How to be happy at work
I’m speaking at an HR conference in Istanbul next month, a leading turkish newspaper wanted to do an interview by email about happiness at work. They sent me some great questions, which I answered as best I could. The best part about great questions is that they leave you and the questioner wiser.
Below are the questions and my answers, which contain some of our basic thoughts on happiness at work.
Really cool quote:
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.
– Mark Twain
It’s nice to know, that there’s still time to goof around at Google:
Not long ago, I walked by the desk of software engineer JJ Furman, and saw that he had made an interesting addition to his desk: a large blob of Silly Putty, about the size of a grapefruit. Intrigued, I asked how he’d gotten so much of the stuff. The answer? A bulk order directly from the manufacturer! Of course.
I knew then that I wanted some, and it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t the only one. So I set out to place a really, really big bulk order. An email went out to cohorts. Their orders came in. Three weeks later, I had an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty delivered to my desk.
I honestly believe that this is a sign of a healthy company, when employees have the creativity, freedom and time to do stuff like that.
Of course, this begs the question: What happens if you drop a 25 kg. ball of silly putty from a height of 20 meters. MAN, I love the internet :o)
Solange de Santi’s excellent book Life on the Line about her experience of working under cover (she’s a journalist) for 18 months in a GM van plant gave me the sense that car factories are noisy, dirty, dangerous places.
Apparently they don’t have to be – they can also be amazing, beautiful, friendly, ergonomic and high-tech. Check out these amazing pictures from the Volkswagen plant in Dresden. I think I could live comfortably and in high style inside that building :o)
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:
The Imagination Lab Foundation is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and operating from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Its raison d’étre is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. The Foundation’s underlying philosophy is to value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity.
Go visit them and be sure to check out their amazing collection of articles. Grrrreat stuff!
What is the christmas office party like, when you work for the Happy at Work Project? Well, it might go a little like this:
I’ll be speaking at the 11th. human resources conference in Istanbul on February 22nd and 23rd 2006. The conference has a very interesting theme called Manifesto: A Fresh Look into Organisations, People and Leadership. The themes are:
* Discovering successful organizations with unconventional management approaches in place
* Exploring complexity science and its relationship to organisations
* Bringing a different look into organisational development, human capital management and work culture
* Changing our minds about our firms: human corporations, companies as living systems, adaptive enterprise
* Redefining leadership
Sounds cool to me :o)
Creating Passionate Users is the best blog I’ve found recently, and Kathy Sierra’s post on how not to use PowerPoint is very funny and smart.
Sometimes the best presentation is… no presentation. Ditch the slides completely. Put the projector in the closet, roll the screen back up, and turn the damn lights back on!
Especially if the slides are bullet points. Or worse… paragraphs.
…
The second you dim the lights and go into “presentation mode” is the moment you move from a two-way conversation to a one-way lecture/broadcast. It’s hard to be interactive when you’re behind your laptop, at a podium, watching your slides on the small screen.
Read it!
An excerpt from Get Back In Th Box, Douglas Rushkoff’s new book:
In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It’s a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It’s a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation.
And this play begins at work….
I’m getting that book. Now.
And speaking of play: Researchers have identified at least 317 games that dolphins play:
When Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill were snorkeling among some rough-toothed dolphins off the coast of Honduras last year, they saw an intriguing game among the animals.
Two adults and a youngster were passing a plastic bag back and forth, as in a game of catch, the two researchers wrote in the October issue of the research journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
A pantropical spotted dolphin (Stenella attenuata) skips on its tail over the water. No one knows why dolphins do this, but some scientists say it could be for fun. When the adults passed it to the youth, they did so more carefully than to each other, releasing it just in front of the youth?s mouth, as if to make it easier to catch.
After years of studying dolphins at play, Kuczaj and his colleagues have reached some surprising conclusions: dolphin games show remarkable cooperation and creativity. Dolphins seem to deliberately make their games difficult, possibly in order to learn from them. And such pastimes may play a key role in the development of culture and in evolution?both among dolphins and other species, including humans.
Both of these links come via Boingboing.
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