The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • You have time

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    What a weird and wonderful idea: A daily planner spanning not one year but 82 years – the average life expectancy of people in the western world. Look how thick that thing is! So what exactly is it you don’t have time for?

    Via Kottke who went to a design conference and saw a presentation by Stefan Sagmeister on happines and design, which included the following excellent life advice:
    * everything i do always comes back to me
    * trying to look good limits my life
    * everybody thinks they are right
    * money does not make me happy
    * thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now
    * complaining is silly. act or forget
    * having guts always works out for me

  • Worldblu Forum

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    Traci Fenton of Worldblu wrote to remind us all that:

    We’re now about six weeks away from the launch of THE WORLDBLU FORUM in Washington, DC, October 26-29th!

    The theme
    Rewriting the Rules of Business for a Democratic Age

    The big idea
    Organizational democracy and freedom-centered leadership and what it means to YOU

    The take-aways
    HOW organizational democracy can recharge your company
    WHY freedom-centered leadership matters
    WHAT tools and skills you need to outsmart your competition and get in front of the business shift

    The speakers
    Everyone from CEOs to best-selling authors, technology gurus to high-stake revolutionaries, former prime ministers to movie producers (see list)

    The audience
    Dynamic thought-leaders from around the world

    The setting
    Washington, DC?s only five-star hotel, the stunning Mandarin Oriental. Situated in the heart of Washington DC?s monuments and museums, the hotel offers breathtaking views overlooking the Potomac Tidal Basin, Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument. This urban resort features elegantly hip guest rooms, a 10,400-square-foot spa and fitness facility with indoor pool, and the award-winning CityZen and Caf? MoZU restaurant. (I just had lunch at Caf? MoZU last week; it was outstanding.)

    The updated program
    http://worldblu.com/forum/program.html Nutritious and delicious!

    You can register here
    http://worldblu.com/forum/registration.html

    Thanks to everyone for spreading the word. The response has been fantastic and I can?t wait to see you all in October!

    I’m going. Are you going? If you’re going from Denmark, we’re organizing a trip to make it real easy for you.

  • The paradox of hedonism

    Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure. The paradox of hedonism is that, pursuing pleasure or happiness for it’s own sake doesn’t seem to make people happy while pursuing worthwhile goals outside of yourself seems to bring about happiness and pleasure as a side effect.

    Interesting, huh?

  • Play Ethic

    This article by Pat Kane on the play ethic is one of the most inspiring, electrifying and just wonderful manifestos for play, fun and happiness at work. My biggest problem in blogging it was to choose a quote from it because the whole damn thing is eminently quotable. Here’s an appetizer:

    Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take ‘play’ to mean anything idle, wasteful or frivolous. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic’s most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is ‘play’ as the great philosophers understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.

    The play ethic is about having the confidence to be spontaneous, creative and empathetic across every area of you life – in relationships, in the community, in your cultural life, as well as paid employment. It’s about placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world.
    …
    So to call yourself a ‘player’, rather than a ‘worker’, is to immediately widen your conception of who you are and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realising your full human potential; to be active, not passive.

    Now go read the whole thing :o) His book The Play Ethic is on it’s way from Amazon to me.

  • Open source news

    Here’s a batch of Open Source Software news:
    Open Source leader Eric S. Raymond got offered a job at Microsoft. His answer is classic:

    …I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997. You’ve maybe heard about this “open source” thing? You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in. But don’t think I’m trying to destroy your company. Oh, no; I’d be just as determined to do in any other proprietary-software monopoly, and the community I helped found is well on its way to accomplishing that goal.

    Gartner Group says Linux is only 5 years away from mainstream use:

    Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005…

    And governments are starting to get it too:

    In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation. …the spread of open-source software in recent years has probably been the most striking example of the benefits of openly sharing information technology to reduce costs and make it easier for users themselves to innovate.

    Yaaaay!

  • Lingo

    Funny parody of a consulting company website:

    Our creative team will come up with design and marketing ideas you never even thought of. How could you? You don’t have the talent we do. Don’t take it personally. That’s our job. That’s what we do. We do stuff.

    Most consulting companies just provide regular marketing solutions. Not us. We provide groundbreaking solutions. Our marketing solutions are newer than anyone else’s, and they sound better because we give them cool titles like “Global Awareness Paradigms,” and “Market Consciousness Philosophies,” and “Creative Product Re-development Support.”

    When we deliver your new designs and business strategies to you, they’ll be in really snazzy binders that look nice sitting on big, round meeting tables, so you’ll think you got your money’s worth. When your project has been completed, we’ll give you several follow-up phone calls to give the appearance that we even remember who you are or what we sold you.

    From huhcorp.com.

  • Quote

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    Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away

    – Philip K. Dick

    That definition works for me :o)

  • 2 years of Open Source Software

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    About 2 years ago I got myself a new PC, and since then I’ve only use one piece of software that I paid for – and that’s Windows. Every other program on my computer is open source and free, and it has worked perfectly. I haven’t missed Outlook, Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver or any of those other programs I used to use. Instead I’ve been using:

    openoffice.org – Reads and writes Microsoft Office files and works just as well. Contains a Word, Excel and PowerPoint clone all of which have all the features you’ll ever need. And you can save your documents as pdf files.

    Audacity – An excellent program for recording and editing sound. I used it to mix music and to edit an audio book.

    nvu – HTML editor. REALLY easy to use.

    Firefox – The best browser around.

    Thunderbird – A mail program that kicks Outlook’s butt.

    Filezilla – A killer ftp client.

    Azureus – The best bittorrent client around. Has the best user interface of any program I’ve ever seen.

    egroupware – Additionally we use egroupware in The Happy At Work Project to share calendars, adress books and to manage some of our websites.

    Not only is all the software mentioned here free and open source, it’s also available on multiple platforms, so if I decide to switch to a Linux or Apple machine tomorrow, I can continue to use the same programs and to work on the same files.

    So why are you still paying Microsoft and others for software?

  • New Happy At Work Newsletter

    We’ve put out a new edition of the Happy At Work Newsletter, including the story of why it’s all Chet’s fault and how American Airlines have turned a profit for the first time in 5 years – by listening to their people!

    You can sign up for the newsletter here.

  • Book review: Managing to have fun

    True or false: Having fun at work contributes heavily to an organization’s success!

    If you have any doubts about this statement, Managing to have fun by Matt Weinstein may have some arguments to turn your thinking around.

    If you already agree, the book is packed with inspiration, stories and tips to help you have more fun and play more at work.

    In my thinking, fun is just one aspect of making people happy at work, but the good thing about fun is that it is:
    * Cheap
    * Instantaneous
    * Available to everyone

    One of my favourite stories from the book is about Ben&Jerry’s the notoriously anarchistic ice-cream manufacturer started by two Hippies. They (obviously) have no formal, corporate dress-code, so rather than “casual fridays” they sponsor “clash dressing day” where employees put on their worst matching outfits. And one time they sponsored “corporate day”, where everybody came to work in suits, ties, dresses, etc… and loved it :o)

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