The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

  • Manifesto for growth

    I’m currently putting together a two-hour session on change. One of the hot topics in management today is change management, and I would argue that you can’t manage change if you don’t understand change. So I’m looking at change from a lot of different angles right now: Science, philosophy, common sense, psychology, biology etc…

    And then somebody pointed me towards Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and while I may not agree with all of it, it certainly stimulated my thinking on growth. And of course growth and change are, if not identical, then at least related. Here’s my favourite bit from the manifesto:
    2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you?ll never have real growth.

  • Corporate Culture and Spirituality Conference

    Corporate culture and spirituality may look like strange bedfellows, but with the increasing awareness in businesses today on the importance of fostering personal development and excellence on the job, a spiritual focus is not a surprising development.

    Spirituality can be many things to many people, but to me it is a tool to get to know yourself, to improve your understanding of the world and to become happier. And these aims make a lot of sense at work.

    That’s why I think the 2004 conference on Corporate Culture and Spirituality looks very interesting. It’s held this year in Bangalore, India, and aims to:
    * Challenge the general perception about business & spirituality as dichotomous areas
    * Enhance the value and efficacy of conventional management practices by partnering with spirituality
    * Evolve a larger joint-role for corporate and spiritual leaders in addressing complex global issues like terrorism, corruption and poverty
    * Develop business models that create and sustain inspirational communication and bonds within organizations

    Which sounds pretty good to me. With sessions like “Maximizing Ethics and Profits”, “Persevering Excellence amidst the Chaos of Change” and “The Bottom Line, a Perspective in Time” it looks like the conference is firmly anchored in the current needs of organizations worldwide.

    The conference was held for the first time last year and was a great success. In 2003 it was mostly attended by indian business leaders, this year the focus will be more international. The conference fee is 700 euros, which isn’t too steep for a 3 day conference aimed at top executives.

    I’m going to Goa, India in September for the Open Space on Open Space conferece, and now it looks like I’ll have to seriously consider going to India twice in two months.

  • Going to Goa

    I just signed up for the 12th. international OSonOS (Open Space on Open Space) conference. Last year it was right here in Denmark but this year it’s in Goa, forcing me to travel to India’s most famous vacation spot. Dammit! I’ll have to take Patricia along, just to share the burden :o)

    I wrote a little about the 2003 OSonOS in Denmark here.

  • Open Space Status and future

    Harrison Owen wrote a brilliant summation on OST on the open space mailing list, which covers the origins, history and current status of Open Space Technology.

    The ending contains a wonderful challenge to all of us who know and use open space, and has certainly started med thinking about what the next step will be. Here is the entire text.
    (more…)

  • Metrics

    It’s nice to see that Fast Company agrees with me on the values and pitfalls of metrics :o)

    Here’s a current Fast Company article on the “what gets measured gets done” thinking.
    And here’s one I wrote a while back, and a more recent one.

    Fast Company:
    In fact, the jobs that are most effectively reduced to single quantities are the ones that are the most one dimensional. The broader a person’s responsibilities, the more complex and subjective the evaluation. Measures become more ambiguous. There are more stakeholders with a wider range of needs. Evaluations come at specific points in time, but there are always short-term versus long-term tradeoffs. In the face of such complexity, do you want to motivate only what is measurable?

    Me:
    And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity… So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!

  • Psycopathic corporations

    The Corporation is a Canadian documentary released last year, which has an interesting premise: Under current law, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person?

    Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a ?person? in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

    Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation?s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

    I like the premise, and as Noam Chomsky says in the movie, you must distinguish between the system and the individual. It is perfectly likely, that most individuals in a corporation can be nice, thoughtful, compassionate people, yet the resulting system shows behaviour that is selfish, greedy and short-sighted.

    While this behaviour is certainly prevalent in some corporations, I think that more and more organizations are starting to realize, that this way of doing business is not sustainable, and are making positive changes.

    I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the offices of IKEA in Denmark, to interview them for my book on happiness at work. About 8 months ago, they gave their entire check-out staff a 20% pay raise. They did this partly in recognition of the fact that these people have one of the hardest jobs in IKEA while getting the least amount of money, and partly because they think it will make them money in the long run. This is very far from psycopathic behaviour. It shows a creativity and maturity, based on the realization that there is no inherent oppostion between making money and doing good.

    Sample clip here.

  • Quote

    We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.

    – Margaret Wheatley in A Simpler Way

  • The law of two feet

    Inspired by a question on the OSlist (the Open Space mailing list), I wrote the following observations on the law of two feet. The law of two feet states, that in Open Space meetings, any time you feel that you’re not learning and not contributing, you can use your two feet to go somewhere else.

    This of course stands in startk contrast to many other kinds of gatherings, where it is considered impolite, counter-productive or rude to leave in the middle of a session.

    The question was:
    The Law of Two Feet gives you the chance to “step out” of those situations, which seem to be awkward and problematic but if you are brave enough and stay there, maybe you can solve your problems. Isn’t it dangerous to step out of each situation which we find at first sight uncomfortable or boring. Maybe it is just the temptation to escape and avoid something.

    I’ve struggled with exactly this dilemma. If people leave at the first sign of trouble, will they grow and learn? The funny thing is, that stating the law of two feet does NOT induce people to just up and go at the first hint of conflict. Paradoxically, people are probably more likely to stay, and definitely more open and constructive when they know that it is OK to leave – even if they don’t use that option. Being in a difficult situation is made infinitely worse, if you know that you can’t get out of it.

    Also, stating that people are free to leave, is no more than stating a fact. OS participants can get up and go any time they choose – I mean nobody’s tied them to their chairs. In fact this is true of any kind of meeting. There is nothing holding you in your chair, other than your own decision to not get up and leave. So acknowledging the fact that you’re free to go brings us a little closer to how things are, brings us more in tune with reality, than saying “You have to stay for the entire session”.

    This is one of those paradoxical situations, where you actually achieve the opposite of what you might think, ie. where reminding people of their freedom to leave, probably makes it more likely that they stay :o)

  • Coffee, tea or … a chat with the airline CEO?

    Inc. Magazine has an article about JetBlue CEO David Neeleman, who regularly puts in a stint on one of his flights, serving and meeting his customers.

    As we sat there, buckling our seat belts and checking out the televisions in front of us, a middle-aged man with slightly graying hair stood up in the front of the plane. He had on the long apron that JetBlue flight attendants wear, with his name stitched into it. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Dave Neeleman, and I’m the CEO of JetBlue. I’m here to serve you this evening, and I’m looking forward to meeting each of you before we land.”

    This is waaaaay cool. He’s meeting his customers and his employees first-hand. He’s out there sensing and reinforcing company culture. And most of all, to me at least, he’s showing humility. He demonstrates that he’s not above his employees and his customers by serving them.

    Every CEO of every company anywhere, needs to consider doing something like this!

  • Motivation games

    Yahoo has a whole section on Work/Life health with some interesting stuff in it. I especially enjoyed some of the games describes in this article.