The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • I got a gig in Istanbul

    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)

  • Death to PowerPoint

    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!

  • Renaissance play

    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.

  • Sharing the reins

    John Abrams, President of South Mountain Company, tells the story of how the company became employee-owned:

    In 1987 I sold my business, South Mountain Company, to my employees (and myself)… Shared ownership and control is our method at South Mountain. “Every employee, an owner” is our intention. More than half of our thirty employees are full owners. Each time another comes in, and each time a new management invention encourages more voices to be heard, we move steadily toward the goals of democracy, fairness, and transparency.

    Among the advantages: Commitment, effectiveness, productivity. Read the whole story here.

  • Happiness and the bottom line

    Was there ever really any doubt:

    [Result of a] study of more than 7,500 workers: companies whose workers are highly committed to their employers and have confidence in their top management deliver dramatically higher returns to shareholders.

    Well, duh! This point is so obvious to me, that it’s actually difficult for me to argue it. Like defending the benefits of oxygen in the atmosphere or the wetness of water.

    Full article here

  • Leadership darwinism

    In the case where a board can’t figure out to depose self-obsessed, autocratic and power-hungry managers, we’ll probably se in the future that these leaders will in principle be deposed by their own employees, who will leave for better workplaces with better leaders and leadership values, that create a better space for the employees’ personal goals and life visions to unfold.

    This will leave the managers who use hierarchical leadership, control systems and autocratic leadership values without significant access to getting employees. Ie. a leadership with no followers, which is both pathetic and useless.
    – Alfred Josefsen, CEO of Irma

    Right on, Alfred – you tell’em :o)

    There will be two kinds of darwinism operating against bad managers:
    1) Employee selection: Employees will leave bad managers behind and gravitate towards better leaders.
    2) Marketplace selection: Companies with autocratic old-school management are less efficient, and will loose market share to better-run organizations. In the end they’ll die out altogether.

    If I had stock in a company, and wanted to make money out of those stocks, I’d ask the board of directors two questions:
    1) What are you doing to make the people in the organization happy?
    2) How are you training leaders to make themselves and others happy?

  • Business – New school

    David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the hottest names in IT right now. He’s been developing something called Ruby on Rails, which is a tool for developing web applications. Now Denmark has become too small for David, and he’s left for Chicago, better to work with his compatriots at 37signals, one of the most admired software shops right now.

    The evening before he left, he gave a presentation in Copenhagen to a small crowd of techies, bloggers, business people and others. I was there and I was blown away by this guy. Not only is he a good developer, he also has an amazing sense for how a business can also be designed. And he’s 26 years old. Interestingly, his software design principles are the same as his business design principles, making his philosophy consistent and credible. Here are the main points I took away from his presentation:

    Solve the next problem
    Whether you’re working on software or building a business, this means that you should tackle the issues that matter right now. Don’t solve the problems you think will appear in 6 months – they probably won’t, you see. Solve the next problem, and then the next. In six months time, you will have plenty of stuff to work on, but it won’t be what you thought six months ago.

    Solve your own problems
    When you work on something that you yourself need, you’re much more efficient. Rather than working on something that some remote client will use, attack issues that are important to you.

    Do as little as possible – or slightly less
    The complexity of any system does not grow proportianl to the size of the system – it grows exponentially. Making a system twice as large makes it waaay more that twise as complex. Therefore, make your system as simple as possible, or maybe even a little simpler.

    And if I may be allowed to brag for a moment here: This is exactly how we work on the Happy At Work Project. Here are a few of our maxims, that I might add:

    Try stuff
    Rather than analyzing a given choice to death, make a quick decision and try it out. If it doesn’t work, try something else.

    Relax
    It’ll all work out. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t work too hard. Take plenty of breaks and do lots of different stuff to stimulate your mind.

    The best of luck to David in Chicago – I’m sure he’ll do famously.

  • German IT outfit bans whining

    This may not be the best way to go about it:

    German IT outfit Nutzwerk Ltd has come up with the perfect solution to whining in the workplace – it’s made cheerfulness a contractual obligation. What’s more, Manager Thomas Kuwatsch has declared that those who don’t measure up to the prescribed level of jollity in the morning should stay at home until they cheer up.

    Full story in The Register. Funny. I think there’s actually something to this: Give people the right to stay home, if they don’t feel happy, though outlawing grumpiness is probably a bad idea. It’ll only drive it underground where it’s harder to deal with. It may even amplify the complaining.

  • Best speech ever

    Yesterday I gave one of the best speeches I’ve ever given on happiness at work to Junior Chambers Copenhagen. What made it good? This I think:
    1: I opened up the speech by showing them my prepared notes (on little cue-cards)
    2: I then made a display of tearing them up and throwing them away
    3: And then I had the audience call out suggestions for topics they’d like to hear about

    It also doesn’t hurt if you have an attentive, interested and active crowd listening.

  • Quote

    Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves.
    – Soichiro Honda, founder of (surprise) Honda

    Via Metacool via Mike Wagner.