The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Book review: Nuts!

    Nuts!, Southwest Airlines crazy recipe for business and personal success is the story of Southwest Airlines. Lars Pind told me about this book, and I have to agree: It’s a joy to read about a company that values freedom, creativity, people and, yes, love.

    If your driving principles are love and fun, can you still make a profit in todays harsh business world? Well, here’s a few stats on Southwest:

    • They’re the only airline in America who have had a profit every year since 1973
    • They’ve grown from 3 planes and 250 employees in 1973 to 200 planes and 25.000 employees in 2002
    • They service twice as many customers pr. employee as any other airline
    • They have never mass-fired employees
    • They have the highest customer ratings

    So there!
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  • Quote

    Rational structures of control inhibit creativity. Managing as if people had souls requires that we de-mechanize management and instill it with the diversity and depth of our own humanity. The point is to respect people and allow them to make the fullest contribution they can. We need more reflection in business not more strategizing. Meditation takes thinking even further because it allows for the wisdom of the heart to interweave with the knowledge of the head.
    – John Dalla Costa

  • Book review: Getting to yes

    This is the classic book about negotiating, from way back in 1980. I like the book, because it stresses a positive mode of negotation. A mode that is based on honesty, integrity, fairness and mutual understanding.

    The basic view is, that in a negotiation, the two extreme positions are hard and soft. Hard negotiators are adversaries, soft negotiators want to be friends. And between these two poles stands the principled negotiator, who ses himself and the other side as problem solvers. A very constructive view.
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  • An honest company

    Imagine a company that practices total, uncompromising honesty in their advertising. If they have a great product they’ll say so. And if they’re trying to sell you something mediocre, they’ll tell you that too. They might actively warn you along the lines of “Don’t expect good service from these people” or “The product here is nothing to write home about”, or even “If you have any complaints talk to Benny. If he breaks down crying, ignore it, it’s just a trick he uses.”

    Do you think a company like that could possibly survive?

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  • 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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