The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • 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)

  • Quote

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    If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.
    – Karl Weick

  • 10.000 people watching

    Yesterday we had the annual Ecco Walkathon in Copenhagen, an event where people can sign up to take a walk for charity. They walk 6, 10 or 15 km. and for every km, every person walks Ecco (shoe maker) donates 5 kr. (a little under a dollar) to a charity of their choice. It’s a wonderful combination of exercise, party and charity drawing in around 20.000 people.

    And Maria Hartung (a fellow instructor from the SATS fitness chain) and I volunteered to do the warm-up. For 10 minutes. Twice. In front of 10.000 people each time.

    Let me tell you: I was nervous. I teach aerobics three times a week to 20-30 people. I’ve performed shows in front of 200-300. But this was a couple of orders of magnitude larger. So going on stage was a challenge. And a blast. MAN it rocks, being on stage in front of such a large audience.

    The first time we went on, I snapped a picture, so this is what 10.000 people look like from the stage and this is what it looked like from the crowd.

    Being up there, the buzz is incredible, the adrenaline pumps and you get this enormous rush. I want to be a rock star in my next life :o) But most of all, I want that large an audience again. Soon.

  • 1000 movies

    I have now rated 1000 movies on imdb. That site probably knows more about my movie preferences than I do :o)

  • Bacteria are open source

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    The traditional view of evolution says that genes are passed along from ancestor to offspring. This view is currently being expanded to include horizontal gene transfer.

    Horizontal gene transfer is any process in which an organism transfers genetic material (i.e. DNA) to another cell that is not its offspring. By contrast, vertical transfer occurs when an organism receives genetic material from its ancestor, e.g. its parent or a species from which it evolved. Most thinking in genetics has focussed on the more prevalent vertical transfer, but there is a recent awareness that horizontal gene transfer is a significant phenomenon.

    Horizontal gene transfer is common among bacteria, even very distantly-related ones. For example, this process is thought to be a significant cause of increased drug resistance; when one bacterial cell acquires resistance, it can quickly transfer the resistance genes to many species.

    Who knew that bacterie were open source :o)

    Why is this interesting? It provides yet another example of cooperation in nature – yet another reason to believe that nature does not favour the strong, tough and ruthless, that quite to the contrary, nature favours those who can and do cooperate.

    And so does the business world.

  • Quote

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    The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

    – Niels Bohr

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