The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Jerks at work – and five ways to deal with them

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    Guard dog

    CEO Hal Rosenbluth was once about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

    His solution was genius: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here he showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

    And he did not get the job.

    (From Hal Rosenbluth’s excellent book The Customer Comes Second).

    Jerks at work and how to lose them

    Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The vast majority of people in any given business are nice. They’re helpful, sympathetic, likable and quite simply good people. Only a tiny, tiny minority are consistently unpleasant or abrasive.

    You sometimes hear in business that “nice guys finish last” ie. that in a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog (hence the picture above) business climate you need to be something of a jerk to get results. Consequently people with difficult or abrasive personalities are tolerated (or even celebrated) in many organizations because “they may not be likeable but they get results”.

    I beg to differ. Jerks have no place in the modern business world and cause much more damage than they’re worth. This is not a matter of namby-pamby, soft-shoe “why can’t we all be nice” thinking; it comes down to the fact that jerks are bad for the bottom line! Luckily, many people and companies are starting to realize this and are doing something about it.

    This blogpost presents five different anti-jerk approaches that every workplace might consider.
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  • An entire people who refuse to bust their butts

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    Lazy dogCaterina Fake has been reading a new book called Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell and loved it. She quotes this passage from the book which talks about the difference between work and play:

    The Kpelle people of Liberia, to name one, scarcely make the distinction at all, allowing for a difference between arduous “forest work” and lighter “town work” but generally avoiding all work that can’t be done playfully, amid song and dance and jest. It’s not that they’re slackers. On the contrary: Diligent rice farmers, they organize their lives around the constant activity of cultivation. But when government advisors pressured them to switch from dry rice farming to more productive paddy-based methods, they resisted–not because they had no interest in making more money, but because they had no interest in working joylessly. The techniques of paddy-rice farming might be more efficient, the anthropologist David Lancy has explained, but they would reduce the Kpelle’s daily activity to “just plain work”, bereft of “the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance” that makes Kpelle work worth doing.

    An entire people who are happy at work and refuse to bust their collective butts – excellent! This makes a great followup to Fred Gratzon’s refusal to bust his butt.

  • Buzzwords galore

    Clue meterOver at jobster.com you can see what it’s like to work for different companies, including this little gem:

    What’s unique about working at Mark Pembrooke?

    Coaching executives and using Six Sigma and Lean tools to empower individuals/teams to develop synergism within an organization, and distinction from the competition.

    Riiiight. The clue-meter is reading zero but the buzzword-o-meter is in the red :o)

    UPDATE: In fact, it was my clue-meter that was reading zero. It was a joke on the site and I totally failed to get it :o) I blame the unusually hot weather in Denmark right now and the fact that after spending two hours in the sun engrossed in Let My People Surf by Yvon Chouinard I’ve now got a tan on one side of my face only. Improperly balanced melanin will do that to you.

  • Quote

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    Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by people who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.

    – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his excellent book Let My People Go Surfing

  • Does he or doesn’t he?

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    Lazy dog

    Some of Fred Gratzon’s readers refuse to believe his claim that he’s the laziest man in North America. If he is, then how could he have created two successful multi-million dollar businesses? Fred’s answer is classic:

    I did not do it with hard work. I did not do it by busting my butt. I did it by having fun – so much fun that people were attracted to that fun. I then picked the most competent attractees to be on my team and off we went. Whatever “hard work??? there might have been, I had long since turned into a game and we had fun “playing??? it.

    Read Fred’s post – it’s excellent.

    That’s a blueprint for happiness at work and success right there! I agree 100% and wrote a post a while back on why laziness is the major force behind my success and happiness. Also read my review of Fred’s brilliant book The Lazy Way To Success.

  • How to make yourself happy at work: Attention, Intention, Action

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    So you want to be happy at work. What should you do?

    There are certainly enough things on the menu. Should you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Or maybe the Getting Things Done system is right for you. You could focus on Personal Excellence or develop Brand You. Is coaching what you need? Or to learn to coach others? Assertiveness? Maybe some anti-stress training. Or some conflict mediation. Career counselling? Or developing your communication skills, your presentation skills or your…

    The options are almost endless and most of them are even pretty good. But it’s better to start somewhere else. With something even simpler. Something more basic.

    The best model I know for creating positive, effective change is attention, intention, action. And in the case of happiness we have to it positively, so the model becomes:

    1. Positive attention – notice what’s already good and what has worked previously
    2. Positive intention – make a positive intention that focuses on what you want more off, not what you want to avoid
    3. Positive action- do something positive to fulfill your intention

    Let’s starts with attention.
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  • Monday tip: Take five

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    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsWork has become quite hectic for most of us. Emails, phone calls, meetings, deadlines, questions, customers all vie for our attention. If we want time for reflection and calm at work we have to create it for ourselves. That’s the point of this Monday Tip.

    Your mission: Take five. At some point during the day, take five uninterrupted, quiet minutes to relax. Here’s how it works:
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  • About the Happy at Work Book

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    About the book

    The book aims to convince you that:

    • Each and every one of us can be happy at work
    • Being happy at work will not only make work more fun, it will also improve your quality of life outside of work and make you more successful
    • Happy businesses are much more efficient than unhappy ones so happiness makes great business sense
    • Happiness at work is not rocket science – what it takes to make yourself and your workplace happy is simple to do

    Structure

    The book is structured around the three basic questions we must remember to ask about any important topic:

    1. What – What is happiness at work anyway
    2. Why – Why does happiness at work matter to you and me and to our workplaces?
    3. How – So, how exactly can we make ourselves and others happy at work. What works, what doesn’t?

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  • Selling by giving

    PresentI was asked by Paul Thornton to contribute to a booklet he’s writing called How to Succeed in Today’s Business World. Paul wanted to know the best piece of business advice I’ve ever received.

    This is what I submitted:
    One day, quite by accident, I found an article on the internet by some crazy Lithuanian guy called Andrius Kulikauskas. As if his name wasn’t strange enough in itself, the article examines what it would mean to give everything away.

    The premise of the article was this:

    I accept the idea that I should give everything away.

    The challenge is to put this into practice. This is a design problem for personal life and social economy. We can venture attempts and draw experience from them.

    My intent is to clarify the problem and offer solutions, especially by documenting ideas that have proven helpful in giving everything away.

    This sparked the idea of selling through giving, and that has been the single most efficient and fun sales tool I have ever tried. In every single sales situation I face, I ask myself this question: What can I give?

    It’s clear that I can’t give everything away. I couldn’t make a living if I did.

    But I repeatedly and reliably find that the more I give away, the more I get back. That my sales results are directly proportional to my generosity.

    Not to mention the fact that approaching any situation with an intent to give is much more fulfilling, natural and fun, making “selling by giving” not only more efficient but also more – dare I say it – giving.

  • Work less achieve more

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    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.

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