The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Book review: The dance of change

    Whew!

    I’ve finally finished Peter Senge’s trilogy on learning organizations. After The fifth discipline and The fifth discipline fieldbook, comes The dance of change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in a Learning Organisation.

    The first book lays the theoretical foundation, and introduces the five disciplines which Peter Senge believes are the key to creating learning organizations. They are personal mastery, systems thinking, shared vision, team learning and mental models. The second book contains practical tips on how to implement each of the five disciplines. By now we’re already past the 1000-page mark.

    The dance of change brings the tally up another 550 pages, and deals with the challenges that all change initiatives in organizations meet. The link between change and learning permeates the book. You can’t turn an organization into a learning organization without changing. Conversely, any strategic change in a company, that doesn’t contain learning in some form is probably doomed. So change is learning and learning is change.
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  • Quote

    People don’t burn out because they’re trying to solve problems. People burn out because they’ve been trying to solve the same problem over and over and over.
    – Susan Scott

  • Book review: The living company

    I always thought that the really big companies were immortal. That once an organization attained a certain size, it would last forever, barring some catastrophic event or weird fluke. But it turns out, that the average life span of Fortune 500 companies is under 50 years!

    Arie de Geus pioneered a study at Shell that uncovered this fact, and looked at companies that have lasted a long time, and “The living company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business” summarizes the characteristics of these organizations. The most important fact that sets them apart: They are not in business only for the money!

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  • Po Bronson: What Should I Do with My Life?

    Po Bronson (the author of “The nudist on the late shift“) takes on the most fundamental question “What Should I Do with My Life?” in his new book. There’s an article on it in Fast Company, and it’s excellent stuff.

    Here’s a teaser:
    Instead of focusing on what’s next, let’s get back to what’s first. The previous era of business was defined by the question, Where’s the opportunity? I’m convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that’s right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations.
    …
    [People] thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are — and connecting that to work that they truly love ( and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined ).

    Yes! Thank you Mr. Bronson. Some of these thoughts lie at the center of my project (projekt arbejdsgl?de), and it’s beatiful to see a writer with his clout popularizing the same thoughts.

    However, I do have one observation to add.
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  • Anger management

    There’s a new series on TV2 about anger management. It turns out that in most cases where we danes are hopping mad inside, we try hard to maintain a calm exterior.

    Which got me thinking: Might this also be going on at work..?
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  • Book review: The fifth discipline fieldbook

    The fifth discipline by Peter Senge is probably the most influential book on learning organizations. It laid the theoretical groundwork for creating learning organizations by defining five essential skills: Systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning.

    The Fifth discipline fieldbook follows up on the theory, and offers a wealth of methods and tools to strenghten the practice of the disciplines. It also contains lots of case stories from many different companies.

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  • Book review: Change

    When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless? This is the focus of this book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.

    The book is based on the authors’ experiences with brief therapy. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, which tries to uncover the “deeper” causes of problems, brief therapy focuses on solving peoples current problems. Why spend years of therapy going back to the hypothetical root cause of some problem, when what you really need to do, is get rid of the issue now. And even IF you find the cause of the problem, you still haven’t solved it.

    The authors claim to have helped 80% of their clients in 4 sessions or less!
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  • Exercise

    Check out this quote from an article in Fast Company:

    A nine-month study of 80 executives found that those who worked out regularly improved their fitness by 22% and demonstrated a 70% improvement in their ability to make complex decisions as compared with non-exercisers.

    A couple of days ago, there was a doctor on TV talking about the health benefits of regular exercise. The danish state will allow doctors to prescribe exercise the way they describe medication. Among others, exercise is good against heart disease, colon cancer and osteoporosis. The more you exercise, the more it works and here’s the clincher: There are NO negative side effects of exercise.

    Any medicine out there (and I do mean ANY) has side effects. Exercise doesn’t. In a time where doctors warn that so many things can be bad for you, I think that’s kinda interesting. So exercise already!

  • Book review: Birth of the Chaordic Age

    This is one of Dee Hock’s favourite tricks to play on an audience. “How many of you recognize this?” he asks, holding out his own Visa card. Every hand in the room goes up. “Now,” Hock says, “how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?” Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.

    Dee Hock is the mastermind behind Visa and this book is part autobiography, part introduction to Dee’s thoughts on complexity theory and part social manifesto.
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  • Book review: An unused intelligence

    There are many different theories about learning, but not a single one of them states, that the best way to learn, is to sit passively on a chair, while a teacher talks about the subject in question. No theory ever in the history of the world has claimed it, and yet this is how schools, colleges, universities, business training and countless other learning concepts operate.

    This book subtitled “Physical thinking for 21st century leadership” marks a departure from that school of thought and describes a way to ground learning in the body.
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