The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Living vs. blogging

    I haven’t been blogging much lately, and the reason is simple: I’m too busy living to write about living :o)

    The happy at work project is going so well, that it’s taking up all my time right now, I could fill page after page with all the good stuff that’s happening for us right now, but in brief:
    * The “happy at work” game is finished – and we immediately sold the first 10 copies.
    * We’ve moved into our new offices – they rock!
    * We’re planning yet another Happy at Work Conference – June 2nd at Basecamp.
    * We’re meeting new friends, partners and customers everywhere we go.
    * We hired Mette Nygaard Olsen to work full time.
    * There’s a new Happy at Work Website coming real soon now.
    * We just agreed on our biggest contract so far with a huge international customer.

    Phew! I think this will be a very interesting year :o)

  • Coffee in the office… or office in the coffee house?

    Wired has an article on a company that use a coffee house as their office:

    Delicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, a program for cataloging collections of books, movies and games. The software is selling like hot cakes and has garnered rave reviews and awards, yet the company’s headquarters is a Seattle coffee house.

    As well as creamy lattes, the coffee shop offers wireless internet access and big, bench-like tables that several people can gather around. Often, Delicious Monster’s entire seven-person staff will work there.

    “Zoka is pretty much their office,” said Reid Hickman, a Zoka barista. “It’s a pretty good deal. They hang out here all day and they often get lunch and dinner here. They take good care of us.”

    This is yet another interesting blurring of what is and isn’t work. Or of where work can or can’t be performed. Expect more of this kind of thing.

  • Speaking of toys

    I’ve gotta have a Mac mini. I mean, just look at it.

  • Office toys

    Yep, office toys. I want’em. I want’em all.

  • Book review: Happy mondays

    Work is good. Work gives our lives meaning, and if we choose to work a lot, well, we’re probably happier for it.

    Work is important. You would never accept a romantic relationship that was “sort of OK” or stay with a spouse who is “you know, nothing special, but I’m used to him/her”. So why should you accept anything less than true fullfilment on the job?

    Work is changing. From long-term commitment and slowly and predictably climbing the career-ladder to a gold watch after 25 years of faithful service to rapid job changes, lateral career moves, free agents and entreprenurism.

    And this is all good.

    This is basically the point of Richard Reeves’ book Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work. You’d be hard pressed to find an author more determinedly and forcefully optimistic about the changing work environment, and I think his book is an important and valid contribution to our efforts to construct the future of work.

    My long-distance friend Mike Wagner put me onto this book, and I was very glad to read it – especially as a counter-weight to The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett, which looks at the exact same phenomena and basically concludes that it’s all bad – as you may have guessed from the title.
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  • Skunk works

    Ron Avitzur was working on a project at Apple, when the project was cancelled and he was fired in 1993. What does a real geek do facing unemployment and the terrible notion of having worked on a project for a year only to see it go to waste? Well, a real geek keeps sneaking into the building, working for free, enlisting various other people and ends up creating a piece of woftware that ships on 20 mio. Apple computers. Here’s Ron’s summation:

    I view the events as an experiment in subverting power structures. I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.

    It’s the wonderful, funny story of Ron’s illicit work for free for Apple, of his many scrapes with bureaucracy and security and not least of the generosity of all the people who decided to help, and it demonstrates once and for all that salary isn’t the motivator we think it is. Read the whole story here.

  • Book review: Appreciative Inquiry Handbook

    If you’re interested in Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook by David L. Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jacqueline M. Starvos is the book to read, because:
    * It’s edited by the foremost AI people on the planet
    * It’s relevant to every level of AI user from novice to expert
    * It covers both the theory and the practice of AI
    * It’s clear, readable and very thorough
    * You can read it as a book or use it as the ultimate AI reference

    If you don’t know AI already, you should consider looking into it – it’s one of the two most important tools I know of for creating positive organizational change (the other being Open Space Technology).

    There’s more on AI here and here.

  • Book review: Catch!

    Almost anybody who works with HR, organizational development, motivation or similar areas has heard of the Pike Place Fish Market. This is basically a fish shop, that one day decided to be world famous. As the owner tells it:
    The first step for us at Pike Place Fish was to decide who we wanted to be. In the words of John Yokoyama:?In one of our early Pike Place Fish meetings with Jim (our coach from bizFutures), we began an inquiry into “who do we want to be? We wanted to create a new future for ourselves. One of the young kids working for me said, ?Hey! Let’s be World Famous!? At first I thought, ?World Famous?what a stupid thing to say!? But the more we talked about it, the more we all got excited about being World Famous. So we committed to it. We added ?World Famous? to our logo and had it printed on our shipping boxes.

    This got picked up by some consultants, who created the Fish! concept, including a video and a series of books. But now, the Pike Place Fishmongers have told their own story in their own words, in the book Catch!: A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness by Cyndi Crother. And their version ain’t bad either.
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  • Doing nothing

    From Quitting the Paint Factory, a beautiful essay by Mark Slouka, from the November 2004 issue of Harpers Magazine.

    When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a wind-blown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

    Via Boingboing.

  • Book review: Microserfs

    In Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a bunch of geeks working at Microsoft (hence the title of the book), decide to change their predictable, stable, profitable yet somehow unfulfilling lives in Seattle for a leap into the unknown, starting their own company in California.

    Some things remain the same: They still work way too much. They’re still geeks. They still obsess about small things, as geeks do. But something starts to change. They get lives. The fundamental isolation made possible by the corporate lifestyle at Microsoft is replaced by confusion, frustration, identity crisis, dating disasters, jealousy – but also by friendship, community, loyalty, trust and most of all love.
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