There are many metaphors for the workplace. A company can be like a ship, sailing uncharted seas. Some workplaces aim to be like a family. Many organizations want to be like well-oiled machines.

The most traditional metaphor, that unfortunately still informs much of our thinking, is the company as a military unit with lines of command, enemies, battles and strategic objectives.

Metaphors have power. If you see your workplace and career through a certain lense it will affect your thinking and your decision-making.

Now Henriette Weber of Toothless Tiger has come up with the coolest metaphor I have ever seen for a business: The company as a rockband.

Click here to download her awesome free e-book which explains the idea in detail. It’s a quick, fun and fascinating read.

Our company is already a lot like a rock band. We do drugs, trash hotel rooms and drink tons of alcohol. And don’t even get me started on the groupies.

JUST KIDDING!! It’s more that:

• We allow ourselves to be different.
• We do work that we and our clients think is really cool.
• We inspire people with what we do and who we are.
• We have a great time and give our audience a great time.

What about you? Is your workplace like a rock band? Do you get to feel like a rock star on the job? Does what you do create admiring fans?

Or is there a different more apt metaphor for your workplace? Write a comment, I’d love to know what you think.

Related posts

• 10 seeeeeeeeriously cool workplaces.
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work.
• Death to job titles.

Cat Sacdalan, a graphics designer, was unhappy at work. Not only that, her father had been sick, and the fact that she’d been working at home a lot to be with him didn’t sit well with some of her co-workers.

Cat wrote me that:

For 8 months I’ve been postponing my resignation. I’m guilty of some of those top 10 bad excuses. It’s amazing; it’s like you wrote down everything I felt (and more).

I finally decided to quit when, last week, my boss told me that people have come up to him, complaining that I shouldn’t be compensated for working outside the office. My boss says he appreciates my work but he wants to get rid of the complainers by heeding their request.

So Cat quit. And this is how she quit:

It takes guts to quit and even more guts to quit in crayon. I love it!

You can see more of Cat’s work here.

Related posts

• Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.
• How do you know when to quit?
• Never stay in a bad job. Fix it or leave.

Happy at work in Philly

The whole company (all 4 of us) were in Philadelphia for the ippa conference on Positive Psychology and we had a blast.

This was the world’s leading conference on the topic with tons of speakers and 1500 attendees and we got to see all the big-wigs in the field, including Seligman, Zimbardo, Cooperrider, Csikszentmihalyi and Diener. Both Dieners in fact :o)

My personal favorite of all the sessions was Ed Diener, who had the most new findings to offer AND was also an excellent speaker – something of a rarity at this very academic event.

Here are some of the best quotes from the event, taken from my twitter stream:

“Awe is what moves us forward.”
– David Cooperrider quoting Joseph Conrad.

“Business must be a force for good in the world.”
– David Cooperrider.

“Homeless people in India and USA missed the Maslow memo.” (Meaning they can be happy even in a bad situation.)
– Robert Biswas-Diener

“Being healthy makes you happy and vice versa, but the link from happiness to health is twice as strong.”
– Ruut veenhoven

“Puritanism is the dreaded suspicion that someone somewhere is happy.”
– Sir Richard Layard quoting H.L. Mencken

“To flourish in life, aim for at least 3 positive emotions for every negative one.”
– Barbara Frederickson

“The top 2 motives for murder are… 1) love, 2) work.”
– Michael Frese

“Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they’re at an 8 instead of 9 or 10.”
– Ed Diener

“It’s a myth that lottery winners are no happier after they win the money or that quadriplegics are no unhappier after their accident – your circumstances do matter!”
– Ed Diener

“You look a little down – go do something nice for someone else.”
– Martin Seligman

Follow me on twitter.

Clare over at “Thoughts from the C train” tells the story of one seeeeeeriously abusive customer:

I got called that one time. Swear. Say it: Phenomenal Cesspool of Incompetence. It’s brilliant! I mean seriously, who can come up with that shit? Well I’ll tell you who . . . kind of.

A little background. I’m a career banker, and I’ve always been on the operations side. Kind of a nuts and bolts of banking girl. I’ve also always managed people, which means the ugly situations get elevated to me.

Once I had a customer who would send absolutely hideous messages through the internet banking department. Let’s say, for example, he could not get his updated balance at three in the morning because we had not yet finished processing. This would throw him into a Rage so Fearsome that the email he sent would kind of burn your eyes out of your head. He never called, he never showed up to any branch, he would just send these awful messages from the safety of his little computer in the wee hours of the morning. Yes, coward.

Go read the whole story – it just shows how important it is to fire customers who are not good for your business.

Related posts

• Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong.
• The time I learned to say “No” at work.
• Fire that client.

In just 9 hours we (the whole company, ie. all 4 of us) fly to America to attend the ippa World Congress on Positive Psychology. After that we have some time in New York to meet with cool people and take in the city.

2009 has been amazing so far and there is much to celebrate – and a trip like this is a great way to do it.

And remember, celebrating your victories is really, really important:

Though of course it is possible to overdo it :o)

Try it yourself: Go to google, type in “my job is ” and look at the suggestions. Here’s what I got:

Yikes!

I don’t mean to be hasty here, but maybe – just maybe – there’s room for improvement in some workplaces :o)

Related posts

• Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.
• How to know it’s time to quit.
• Top 10 signs you’re not happy at work.
• Google loves Denmark.

Today I spoke about happiness at work and innovation at the FutureNext conference in Copenhagen. This event was arranged in part by the internationally famous Danish business leader Lars Kolind.

After my presentation, Lars was kind enough to give me his honest opinion of it:

Thanks, Lars – I’m blushing here :o)

Related posts

• Harvard Business School study: Happy employees are more creative.
• 3 reasons why happy workplaces change and innovate more effextively.
• The Feel Factor – why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel.

One of the most popular posts on this blog is still the one about how not to manage geeks, which lays out the top 1o mistakes managers make in leading tech people. The post has been translated into several other languages, and now you can also read it in German: Wie man Geeks NICHT führen sollte.

A great big thank you to Peter Köves for the translation!

Here are the other translations of the post:

• Portuguese: Como NÃO liderar geeks, translated by Cesar Cardoso.
• Spanish: Como NO liderar geeks, translated by Matías Agustín Bellone.
• Italian: Come NON dirigere i geek, translated by Marco Bertola.
• Persian translation by Nasser Ghanemzadeh: Part 1, Part 2.
• Danish: Hvordan man ikke leder nørder, translated by Flemming Laugaard.

The London Sunday Times had an article yesterday about happiness at work and why it’s great to like your job. They’re asking many different experts in the field, and I’m quoted as well:

The biggest single step that individuals can take is to choose to be happy, said Alex Kjerulf, chief happiness officer at the Happy at Work Consultancy and the author of Happy Hour is 9-5. “Rather than settling for a job that’s not too bad, say to yourself ‘I want to be happy at work’,” he said. “You can be happy as a bus driver, as a mortuary worker, as a doctor . . . but a lot of people don’t seem to want to be.”

There’s lots more – read the entire article here.