WOOO-HOOOOOOO!!!!!! I just posted book review number 100 on the site!!!
I’ve been waiting for a while to find a suitable book for the 100th. review, and that one fit the bill perfectly. It’s one of the happiest books I’ve ever read.
You can see all the book reviews here. Every single book reviewed here is a great read (or I don’t review’em), and they’re mostly about leadership, learning, psychology and of course happiness at work.
Fred Gratzon’s book The Lazy Way to Success is a joyous, thoughtful and provocative celebration of the notion that work should, above all, not feel like work.
If your job is a struggle, if you must constantly put your nose to the grindstone, knuckle under and get it over with – you’re not doing it right. Or you’re doing the wrong job and should get out of it with all haste.
And Gratzon should know. Though he graduated sine laude whatsoever as an art major in 1968 and was the original long-haired hippy dropout, he’s started two wildly succesful businesses. The second one, Telegroup, grew to 1100 employees with $400 million in annual sales. All this without ever doing a single day’s work.
His credentials established, what does Fred want us to know about laziness as a tool to success? The three major messages must be these:
Fred has this to say on the traditional work ethic:
“I put in 16 hours a day of hard work,” is a typical boast from a poster boy for this twisted, snore-inducing mentality. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with hard work and long hours per se. If you don’t mind sacrificing your health, your family life, the rest of your life, and your spiritual evolution and you are willing to settle for a pedestrian achievement (snore), there is nothing wrong with working long hours. In this light, hard work has its own level of merit and satisfaction.
…
I will readily concede that if you achieve something in one hour, you will achieve two somethings in two hours. If your desiring limit is 16 somethings, then you have the mindless formula. But what if you want a million somethings? Then you need a new math.The basis of that new math is this pure, simple and elegant truth – success is INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL to hard work. That means, as effort and hard work become less, success becomes more. As you move towards effortlessness, success moves towards infinity.
The book itself is absolutely beautiful with very funny illustrations throughout by Lawrence Sheaff. The tone is informal and irreverent but the book does not shy away from a few deep, complicated topics.
I bought my copy directly from the website and it came with an inscription from Fred that said “Wishing you effortless success”.
Thank you Fred, what more could I wish for. And is there really any other kind?
One thought that struck me repeatedly while reading the boook, is that what Fred calls laziness is nearly identical to what I call happiness at work. Many of his principles and ideas are very close to what we teach, which just validates my thinking that happiness at work is not just a nice thing in itself, it’s the best path to business success.
I never rate the books I review, because I only review books I really, really like. And The Lazy Way gets my very highest non-rating :o)
Also read this great interview with Fred Gratzon and of course his blog.
Joi Ito learns something about good leadership by playing the World of Warcraft game:
I think that the ever-evolving user interface and communication tools that we are developing might impact the future of management in the real world. My feeling is that what we are doing in WoW represents in many ways the future of real time collaborative teams and leadership in an increasingly ad hoc, always-on, diversity intense and real-time environment.
The race is on: Who will be first to offer management training based on playing WoW :o)
When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike, it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks.
The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions.
Some people conclude that geeks hate managers and are impossible to lead. The expression “managing geeks is like herding cats” is sometimes used, but that’s just plain wrong. The fact is that IT people hate bad management and have even less tolerance for it than most other kinds of employees.
So where does it go wrong? I started out as a geek and later became a leader and an IT company founder so I’ve been lucky enough to have tried both camps. Here are the top 10 mistakes I’ve seen managers make when leading geeks:
(more…)
What do you have to do to find happiness. A great, comprehensive article on the science of being happy.
Wire up the right area of the brain, press a button, and hey presto – you’re happy. Is that as real as “real” happiness?
Can technology cure fear? And should it, even if it could?
A recent Danish study showed that 62% of all danish employees have felt stressed at work in the last month and 15% have had to report in sick at some point because of stress. The Danish ministry of work states that up to a quarter of all absenteeism is due to stress.
Stress is a serious problem that costs businesses a lot of money and, even worse, can ruin employees’ lives. However, the typical solutions used to combat stress don’t work – in fact they often make matters worse.
The typical solution is, of course, the stress management training. Typical content includes:
This will typically be presented by a stress consultant. In Denmark that consultant may even come from the unfortunately named Center for Stress (shouldn’t that be against stress?).
Are you getting it? Stress, stress, stress, stress and more stress. If I wasn’t stressed before, I certainly will be now. In fact, one study indicated that employees who attend stress management training become more stressed.
You know how people react when they read about some exotic disease? Suddenly they’re convinced they have all the symptoms and that they in fact suffer from dengue fever. When presented with a long list of symptons of stress, people can easily convince themselves that “Wow I must be really stressed too.”
What’s needed is a fundamental shift in approach – you do not fight stress by talking about stress. that just stresses people more. You fight stress by talking about peace and calm instead. That’s the solution to stress: To give employees tools to stay calm in a busy work environment.
Forget about stress for a moment. What can you do to stay calm even when things are moving fast at work? Here are three simple steps that anyone in any position can use.
Examine when you stay calm
Examine previous situations at work where you were busy but calm. What happened? What allowed you to stay calm? How can you use this in future busy situations?
Stop and feel
Once a day, take five minutes to stop what you’re doing and notice how you’re doing. The greatest danger is stealth stress, where you get a little more stressed day by day but never notice it because it sneaks up on you in small increments.
The antidote: Take five minutes every day to do the following:
You don’t need to do anything about it while you’re sitting there. Don’t expect any solutions to come to you. Just sit there and notice what’s going on in your body, emotions and thoughts.
Enjoy your achievements
Appreciate the amount of work you do, and don’t berate yourself over the tasks you don’t manage. It’s a fact of work today, that there’s always more work. You will never clear your desk and if you do, more work will find you. So you must remember to feel good about the work you do and not beat yourself up over the tasks you haven’t yet finished.
These three tips can be used by anyone in any job. They take very little time and effort and can help employees keep their cool even in the busiest work environments. Try them out!
Most modern countries are seeing a steady rise in the amount of time people spend at work. There is some evidence, however, that this trend contributes neither to the bottom line nor to our overall well-being.
Esther Derby euthanizes the idea that long hours are a sign of employee commitment. She cites some alternative reasons people stay late at the office, including:
- One woman’s marriage was disintegrating and she stayed late to avoid tension at home.
- Another woman was using company assets to run a side business… and it was easier to hide it when people weren’t around.
- Two people who were having an affair stayed late at work to be together.
Via Jason Yip’s excellent blog.
As for productivity, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in one of her books mentions an IT copany that were in big financial trouble. Rather than lay some people off they switched to a 30-hour work week and a corresponding pay cut, and experienced no reduction in production. They did the exact same amount of work in 30 hours a week as in 40.
When the company righted itself each employee could choose to return to the original work schedule and pay or remain at 30 hours a week. They all chose to keep the short work week. Read the whole amazing story here.
A recent Danish study found that 90% of managers who worked 30-37 hours a week were satisfied with their work-life balance. Among managers working more than 48 hours a week, that percentage dropped to 46. The consequence: More stress, less job satisfaction and an increased risk that they will leave the company.
We’ve long known that reasonable working hours are one of the most important factors determining whether people are happy at work (and in life). Long working hours are not a sign if commitment and may not even contribute to business productivity.
Therefore businesses should stop encouraging (implicitly and explicitly) long work hours and start rewarding the people who go home on time. They’re good for business.
You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do. But when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive. They stop being happy, and that affects the morale of everyone around them.
– Carisa Bianchi
The New Yorker on the history of Happiness. From a caveman to Seligman.
Replace your desk with a treadmill and work out while you work.
Extreme collaboration: 2.500 people play pong against 2.500 other people.
Great interview with Fred Gratzon, the world’s laziest entrepreneur. His book is on it’s way to my to-read-shelf.
Diego Rodriguez agrees with me and identifies happiness at work as the root of innovation.
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