Category: Links

My good friend Traci Fenton has an excellent op-ed piece in the paper today on democracy in the workplace. From the article:

Command and control ways (as in, “do what you’re told because I’m the boss and I know best”) of the Industrial Age are dead. A Democratic Age demands a democratic approach to business that engages employees fully, taps their reservoir of talent, builds on their strengths, and rewards them in the process.

She cites W.L. Gore, Semco, Whole Foods, GE Durham and Great Harvest as great examples of successful, democratic companies.

I believe that democracy and involving employees in decisions is one of the very best ways to make them happy at work. People want to be involved and become happy, motivated and committed when they are allowed to help shape a company’s future.

You can read more about Traci and her work with freedom-based organizations on her company website www.worldblu.com.

Mark Hurst emailed me some apetizers for the upcoming EureGEL conference.

1. Seth Godin talks about broken things at GEL06.
2. Jimmy Wales explains Wikipedia at GEL05

I can’t wait to go – GEL looks excellent!

Oneopenwindow is a pretty cool project which aims to collect lots of videos of people telling cool stories and sharing their knowledge.

My absolute favorite video on the site so far is Brad Blanton explaining how to achieve enlightenement in three minutes. Guaranteed. Though the site is in danish, this video is in english and you can find the link at the bottom of the front page. It’s hilarious – check it out!

You can also find 12 short videos of me telling stories about happy companies (in danish).

And over on youtube there’s a video of me doing a 6-minute peach-kucha presentation on happiness at work at Reboot8 (in english).

Slow leadership is an excellent blog and a great way to increase happiness at work. The latest post is about The Cycle of Respect vs. The Cycle of Contempt..

The new Adam Sandler movie about a guy who gets a remote control that controls life inspired Stephen Shapiro of Goal Free Living to ask: What Is Your Slow Motion to Fast Forward Ratio.

Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. Even though we have the highest taxes. In your face, Steve Forbes :o)

The idea that working more does not necessarily mean achieving more, and that we need to end the cult of overwork, seems to be cropping up all over the place these days.

Here are a few great, recent sightings.

Fred Gratzon lists the Top 10 signs you’re made to be an entrepreneur, including “You are unemployable” and “You have the uncanny ability to get other people to do all the work”.

In Spend less time working, get more done Adam Wiggins follows up on my post on why seat time does not equal productivity. Excellent!

Impact of overtime on productivity is on overwork in software development, but applies to all fields.
A common effect of putting teams under pressure is that they will reduce their concentration on quality and focus instead on “just banging out code”. They’ll hunker down, stop helping each other so much, reduce testing, reduce refactoring, and generally revert to just coding.

Interview with vacation advocate Joe Robinson
What is a gross national product when you don’t have a life? A few years ago, the Norwegians found that they were 14 percent more productive than we [Americans] are. So they elected to take more time off.

Tom Hodgkinson tears apart some recent bad business books
The books under review recommend all sorts of immoral actions. In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch’s Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover – despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate.