The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Is your boss a prison warden or a party host?

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    Prison vs. Party

    Here’s a scary tale from the real world:

    When I was just starting out as a legal secretary, I worked for two lawyers who I referred to as Good Boss and Evil Boss.

    Evil boss would never look for a file – he would yell for me to immediately find a particular FILE – which would be on his desk where he kept all of his working files.

    In addition he would go through my in-box after I had left the office and rearrange the stack, move his work up and add new post-it notes with different deadline dates.

    Three drafts to any document was the absolute minimum, and he often wanted to see the previous drafts for him to check my work. Consequently, my wastepaper basket was very organized.

    Source

    The old leadership style of “I’m the boss, you must do whatever I say” is being challenged by a different style which is more about supporting people to let them create results.

    While the old leadership style reminds me mostly of a prison warden, exercising absolute power over his wards, the new leadership role is completely different. It’s about making people like their jobs. It’s about realizing that people are in fact free to leave at any time.

    In short, the new leadership style reminds me much more of the host of a party. Here’s how the two roles compare:
    (more…)

  • Quote

    For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

    – Aristotle

    After spending a week with great people like Traci Fenton, Roosevelt Finlayson, Kareem Mayan, Geneve Stewart and many, many others, this quote comes to mind.

  • Is THAT what I loook like when I speak?

    Me?

    No wonder people are always laughing at my presentations :o)

    This was taken at EuroGEL by Gene Driskell who besides being a great photographer is also an amazingly nice person, so I can’t even blame him, dammit! Check out Gene’s pictures from EuroGEL – they’re that good.

  • Ask the CHO: Fighting the cult of overwork in upper management

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    Ask the CHOStan has some questions about the cult of overwork:

    1) When/where did the cult of overwork start? Or has business/marketing/office work always been a race towards more & more hours?

    2) Upper management at our company work 6+ days a week, have sacrificed their family lives for the past 15 years to build the company, and in general are not a fun bunch. Is it worth trying to change the corporate culture one step at a time, or should we just give up?

    Thanks for the great questions, Stan. Here’s what I think.
    (more…)

  • Happy at work blogs

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    Happy ducks (and blogs)Here are my favorite blogs that talk about happiness at work. Enjoy!

    The Lazy Way to Success
    Excellent blog by Fred Gratzon on why hard work is overrated and laziness is a much better path to success.

    Creating passionate users
    One of the best blogs out there in any category, and many of Kathy Sierra’s ideas on creating passionate users apply equally to creating passionate workplaces.

    Work Matters
    Great thinking from Bob Sutton on leadership and organization.

    The Play Ethic
    About play at work and in schools.

    Bernie deKoven’s FunLog
    A great, great blog about play.

    Slow Leadership
    Excellent thinking on a much healthier and sounder form of leadership.

    WorldBlu
    Traci Fenton’s groundbreaking thinking on democracy in the workplace.

    Anecdote
    This company works with stories to create change and seem to keep one eye on happiness at all times.

    Happiness & Public Policy
    On happiness in society in general.

    Have I missed any? Write a comment if you know a good blog about happiness at work!

    UPDATE:
    Added Here We Are. Now What?
    Terry Seamon blogs on leadership, work, change and more.

    Also added The Performance & Talent Management Blog
    Max Goldman’s great blog at successfactors.com.

    And I can’t believe I forgot Make it great
    Where Phil Gerbyshak challenges us all to make it a great day rather than merely a good one!

  • Top 10 tips for productive, creative, fun writing

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    Writing unchained
    Well whaddaya know: It’s only been three months since I wrote and posted the first chapter of the happy at work book and now the whole book is done (minus one chapter which is almost done).

    I’m having trouble believing it myself: Not only did I write a book in three months, I’ve also taken a holiday in that time, worked on other projects and done a serious amount of blogging. This means I actually wrote the book in twenty writing days, writing only before lunch.

    So how’d I do it? Well the answer is obvious isn’t it? Clear goals, hard work, perseverance, sticking to it, eliminating distractions and writing no matter what, right?

    Wrong.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong. I tried that. Didn’t work. So I tried the exact opposite and that worked.

    Here are my top 10 tips for fun, creative and productive writing, which can be applied to blogging, writing a book, an article, a report at work, a thesis, a term paper or any other major writing project.
    (more…)

  • Monday Tip: How was your weekend?

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    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsYour mission, should you choose to accept it, is reaaaaally simple this monday: Ask at least three people how their weekend was.

    Follow up and ask a few more questions, like “What did you do?”, “How was it” or whatever comes naturally. Spend a couple of minutes and take an active interest in their weekend.

    This simple action shows that you care about your co-workers beyond just the work they do and helps you create lasting, positive relationships at work.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

    Previous monday tips.

  • Friday links

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    Why happiness is overrated. It can only be a matter of time before companies appoint happiness action officers whose job it will be to patrol workstations with a clipboard: “Jenkins – cheer up or it’s a remedial, wellbeing residential workshop for you. Smith – happy enough!” (via). Heh!

    Microsoft made two training videos with renowned business consultant David Brent (played of course by Ricky Gervais of The Office). Hilarious!
    Video 1 – Video 2. (Via Mathias Vestergaard).
    This is actually a great and entertaining way to get the message remembered – I might even be able to recite the Microsoft values now :o)

    But the funniest fake corporate videos are still the Reebok commercials featuring Terry Tate.

    10 things you could do this friday afternoon. I like number 8-10.

    Oh, the dangers of being self-employed.

  • Off to EuroGEL

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    Today is EuroGEL and I’m really looking forward to the whole day.

    I’ve spent the last couple of days hanging with my friends from the US and Bahamas who have come to Copenhagen. Yesterday we had our pre-EuroGEL presentation which went just great. 35 people turned up for a presentation on festivals, happiness and democracy in the workplace. Thamk you to Joachim Oschlag for live-blogging it (in danish). And thank you to Thomas Davidsen of OneOpenWindow for filming it. Video from the event will follow.

    We also met with Jesper Just Jensen of LEGO Serious Play, a strategic process that uses LEGOs to develop and capture people’s ideas. Later we met with Mads Kjaer, the CEO of Kjaer Group who told about his new company which aims to eradicate poverty in Africa by making it extremely easy for you and me to invest in Africa. That’s invest – not aid. I like it.

    I apologize for my absence from the site these past few days. Fortunately I set up some blog posts ahead of time, so that’s what you’ve been seeing since tuesday. I’m still reading (and loving) everybody’s comments and will respond as soon as things turn a little less hectic round here.

  • More complaining

    All of this talk about complaining reminds of the old joke about a man from Eastern Germany who had applied for permission to emigrate to Western Germany. He was interviewed by a government official who couldn’t quite understand why he would want to move.

    “Why exactly do you want to move to the west. You have a nice appartment…”

    “I can’t complain.”

    “And you finally received that car you’ve been applying for.”

    “I can’t complain.”

    “And you have a nice job at the shoe factory.”

    “I can’t complain.”

    “So why do you want to move to the west?”

    “Because there I can complain.”

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