The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Speaking

My speaking gigs

  • East meets west

    Sri Sri Ravi ShankarWhat happens when a group of western top executives meets a genuine Indian guru?

    I have absolutely no idea, but next week we’re finding out.

    Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of The Art of Living Foundation is coming to Copenhagen and I came up with the idea of setting up this east-meets-west-event, which will focus on two questions:

    1. What can modern businesses learn from spiritual knowledge and practice
    2. How can spirituality make business leaders better

    There are only five seats left for the event, so if you’re an executive and you’re in Copenhagen on July 6, here’s your chance to meet and learn from a man who is the spiritual leader of hundreds of thousands of people al over the world.

    The practical details: Thursday July 6 3:30-5:30 PM at the Copenhagen Marriot Hotel. Registration is 2.000 kr. Contact me to sign up.

  • Happy at work in prisons

    I’m back from the FutureCamp event with the Danish Prison Service and I am exhausted. After 48 gruelling but fun hours, the director of the service could take home an catalogue of a dozen ideas which had been fleshed out and about 50 more that were still hanging in the air.

    The theme was to make the prison service a great place to work. Currently, this is how they see themselves:

    1. People don’t stay long in their jobs
    2. People feeling overworked and stressed
    3. Absenteeism is high
    4. There is little trust and communication between managers and employees
    5. Prison wardens don’t talk to case workers, case workers don’t talk to IT people and nobody talks to the central administration

    Which doesn’t really seem too different from many other workplaces. Of course, working with prisoners does give this workplace some unique challenges, but it also give employees an incentive to stick together and support each other.

    The camp had 40 participants from the prison service, from many different departments and from all levels of the hierarchy. I was called in as an outside expert to participate in the process. Participants were divided into six groups, each of which focused on a specific topic, eg. leadership, relations with inmates, relations with colleagues. I was placed in the group that worked on IT in the prison service, probably because of my background in IT.

    The process itself was quite impressive with illustrators, facilitators, a camera man to film everything and produce movies on the fly and various suprises along the way.

    And what happened was the same things that always happens when you put people together in an inspiring process around an important topic: People got creative. And they got to talking. And they got fired up. I love it when that happens and it’s great to be a part of.

    My favorite part of the whole event happened on the morning of the second day, where they brought in a gospel singer and his keyboard to get everybody up and singing. Now, I’m not much of a singer, but suddenly I found myself hollering with the best of them :o) That was great fun and energized the whole room.

    So what am I taking away from this event:

    1. Give people a chance to talk and magical stuff happens
    2. People ARE creative, anybody saying differently is lying
    3. A lot of ideas can be created and worked on in 48 hours

    I’m also left with a lingering suspicion, that making the event such a huge production makes it more difficult to take home the spirit and the lessons of the event. If it had been more like real work-life, the results would be more easily transferable – which is what we’re really after. *cough* Open Space Technology *cough*.

  • Making Danish prisons a happy place … to work

    I’ll be away from the blog for the rest of the week. I’ve been hired by the Danish Prison and Probation Service to participate in a project to make the prisons a better place to work.

    This is actually pretty cool: They’re working from the assumption that the best way to create better functioning prisons is to make them better workplaces, so people enjoy their work there. I agree :o)

    I’ll let you know how it goes – have a great week and week-end!

  • Pecha Kucha

    Guy Dickinson introduced a new format at reboot8: Pecha Kucha.

    It’s insane.

    And it rocks.

    Here’s the deal: A number of people do a presentation on any topic, consisiting of 20 slides each of which is shown for only 20 seconds. Somebody else times it and advances slides while you present your topic in only a little over 6 minutes.

    This wasn’t on the official program, Guy added it himself during the conference, and this is precisely why reboot rocks – smart, passionate people contributing great stuff not originally part of the plan.

    Anyway, I read about this Pecha Kucha thing and went “hmmmm, that sounds like a new challenge” (regardless of my normal resistance to PowerPoint slides). Mind you: I decided to do it 1 hour before the session started, so I had to furry and cut down a previous “Happy At Work” presentation and figure out what to say.

    When my turn came I was really nervous, which I normally never am before presenting. But remember: Adrenaline makes fun things even more fun! And it went great!

    The 5 presentations shown were wildly different (from “The power of small” to “10 things to do with the palm of your hand”) but each was interesting and managed to give you an actual feel for the topic in a very short time.

    It was also fun to see people put themselves on the line and try something new. There was an element of risk and “will they pull it off” that gave a certain nerve and immediacy to the whole session.

    Thank you to Guy for introducing the format to reboot, I have a feeling it will be back for reboot9.

    UPDATE: You can download my slides here.

  • Busy week

    I’ve got a busy schedule this week so expect sporadic blogging at most for the next few days :o)

    Wednesday I’m facilitating two sessions at Samtalerne, a conference about conversations and how they apply to the business world.

    Thursday and friday is of course time for Reboot8. I will present a session called Let’s take back politics thursday june 1 at 17:45. If you’re coming to Reboot, please join me for a talk about how we can create true democracy using simple, already proven technologies and processes.

  • Reboot democracy interview

    Reboot politicsI’m speaking at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen on june 1-2. My topic is how we can reboot democracy, which is absolutely necessary because I believe politics is broken.

    Leading up to the conference, I was interviewed by podcaster extraordinaire Nicole Simon. We had a great chat about politics, why people don’t care for it and what it would take to get us all involved in creating the future of the world (main keyword: It has to be fun!).

    You can find the podcast here.

  • CC-licensed PowerPoint-Free Zone logo

    PowerPoint-Free ZoneI’m with Edward Tufte and Kathy Sierra on this one. I never use PowerPoint in my presentations because it:

    • Limits interaction and spontaneity
    • Focuses people’s attention on the slides rather than on what’s happening in the room
    • Often requires dim, snooze-inducing lighting

    There are great uses of PowerPoint too, but why risk it when doing your presentations “live” makes them:

    • More fun
    • More interactive and dynamic
    • More interesting

    So a while back we got our excellent designer to create a cool logo to celebrate the fact that out presentations are 100% PowerPoint-free zones.

    We’re now releasing this logo under a Creative Commons license, so go ahead and use it if you want to go PowerPoint-free too.

    The logo is available in Danish, Swedish and English and the CC license allows you to change it to your language if you’d like to.

    Get the logo here:

    PowerPoint-Free Zone PowerPoint-Free Zone PowerPoint-Free Zone
    English
    jpg | tif    		 Danish
    jpg | tif    		 Swedish
    jpg | tif

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

  • Wellness

    This Saturday (May 20) I’ll be speaking on motivation at a wellness convention arranged by Scandinavia’s largest fitness chain SATS. You may not know this, but in my spare time I teach aerobics at two SATS gyms in Copenhagen. Yes, it’s true, I get paid to exercise :o)

    The topic is “motivation to exercise”, but what I’ll say really applies to all aspects of life and not just to getting and staying physically fit.

    Attending the wellness convention is free, so if you’re in Aarhus on saturday swing by Turbinehallen (the venue) – my presentation is from 2-3 PM. All the practical details can be found here.

    The Wonderful Girlfriend works outAnd speaking of wellness, the wonderful girlfriend and I just started a blog about wellness. She is also a part-time aerobics instructor, and it dawned on us that between us we know a lot about exercise, good eating, yoga, mental wellness, fun and just plain enjoying life. That’s what we’ll be writing about – check it out.

    Hey: Wellness at work! That might be an interesting topic!

  • Conversations / samtalerne – May 31

    The Cluetrain Manifesto reminds us that:

    • Markets are conversations.
    • The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
    • Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

    Since the manifesto was published in 1999, we have seen the rise of weblogs, discussion groups, wiki sites, chat rooms, podcasts and social networking sites, just to mention a few technologies currently enabling conversations.

    But how are businesses harnessing conversations?

    As part of the Reboot conference, there will be an excellent 1-day event in Copenhagen on May 31st called Samtalerne (the conversations). I will most definitely be there, and so will

    • Doc searls (co-author of the Cluetrain manifesto)
    • Robert Scoble who blogs for Microsoft
    • Euan Semple who introduced net conversations to the BBC
    • Anette Hartvig, CEO of Aarstiderne who renamed their customer service department “Conversations”

    as well as many other very interesting people. Should make for some great… conversations :o)

  • Wanted: Innovation exercises

    BinocularsI may be doing an innovation workshop next week and I’m looking for some new, great exercises to do with the participants. Do you know any good ones?

    I’m especially interested in short, fun activites that either get the creative juices flowing or make an important point about innovation and creativity. Your help will be much appreciated!