The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • American Airlines make money – by listening to employees

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    American Airlines turned a profit last quarter, because of a new management style which works with employees to cut costs rather than treating employees and unions as its enemies. A few examples:

    Two American Airlines mechanics didn’t like having to toss out $200 drill bits once they got dull. So they rigged up some old machine parts – a vacuum-cleaner belt and a motor from a science project – and built “Thumping Ralph.” It’s essentially a drill-bit sharpener that allows them to get more use out of each bit. The savings, according to the company: as much as $300,000 a year.

    And it was a group of pilots who realized that they could taxi just as safely with one engine as with two. That was instituted as policy has helped cut American’s fuel consumption even as prices have continued to rise to record levels.

    And now they’ve posted a profit (albeit a small one) for the first time in 5 years. Read the whole story.

  • 1 bullet

    Craig Nathanson tells this very moving story:

    Early one morning, Robert awoke, made his wife of 41 years some banana bread, took out the garbage and called to cancel a doctors appointment scheduled for the next day. He wrote a note to remind his wife to pick up the dry cleaning. All things considered, it seemed like a normal day.

    Robert had ?retired? four years earlier after nearly 40 years doing what he loved in the banking industry. After retirement, his life took a challenging turn.

    While he remained friendly and encouraging to others on the outside, on the inside he was suffering a deepening depression. After retirement, Robert couldn?t find anything to replace the meaning and fulfillment that work provided him. And this void was slowly killing him.

    So on that ?normal? morning, Robert cleaned up the kitchen after finishing baking his wife the banana bread. Then he drove himself to the parking lot of the bank where he had worked all those years. After carefully parking and locking his car, he walked into a local store and handed a note to the clerk behind the counter. Then he walked outside and shot himself in the head. He ended his life with one bullet at 1pm on a blazing sunny day.

    Robert was my dad.

    Craig Nathanson is The Vocational Coach and focuses on how people in mid-life can do what they love at work. That’s happiness at work right there. I admire his courage in telling this story so that others may learn from it, and it’s great to see some advice and tools specifically for people in mid-life.

  • Chief Happiness Officer

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    Just as every company needs a CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, etc., I believe every company should have a CHO – a Chief Happiness Officer. Most businesses today are not competitive if they can’t keep their employees happy since happy people tend to:

    • Work more efficiently
    • Learn faster
    • Give better service
    • Produce better quality
    • Take fewer sick days
    • Function better in teams

    In fact, I challenge you to name just one area in which unhappy employees outperform happy ones. One!

    The economy is critical to the business, so the CFO is in charge of that. Information systems are too, hence the CIO. So put a CHO in charge of happiness. Somebody who cares for people and recognizes that work today is one of the most important factors contributing to (or detracting from) people’s happiness.

  • Book review: Join me

    Danny Wallace started a cult by accident. He placed an add in the newspaper saying simply “Join me. Send a passport sized photograph to…”. And people did. Now he only had one problem: People were kinda curious to see what they’d joined, and he still had no idea himself.

    In Join Me, The true story of a man who started a cult by accident, Danny Wallace tells that story and it makes for a great read as the movement starts humbly and then goes on to make many people happy and Danny a minor celebrity in Belgium.

    This book left me feeling glad that a weird guy like Danny is out there, expanding the realm of what is possible, making the world a better place and telling his story in such an entertaining way.

  • Real debate

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    When I saw that Rick Santorum (one of the more conservative conservatives) was going to be the guest on The Daily Show plugging his new book my first reaction was a heartfelt Whaaaaaa..?

    What did play out was a rarity on TV: A real debate between two people who obviously disagree, but who are interested in understanding each others views – and can even laugh about their disagreements. For once we saw a debate that wasn’t about beating the other person into admitting that he’s wrong (like that ever happens) but about true civilised discourse. Santorums views became clear for everyone to see, and we’re each free to decide if we agree. I disagree totally with Santorum, but that doesn’t mean that I want to see the guy attacked on TV.

    See the interview here.

  • Book review: Getting to peace

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    In the midst of a firefight in the rice paddies between American soldiers and the Viet Cong early in the Vietnam War, six monks walked towards the line of fire. “They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through,” remembers David Busch, one of the American soldiers. “It was really strange, because nobody shot at’em. And after they walked over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least no that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.”

    War is in our nature. And so is peace.

    In Getting to Peace, Transforming Conflict At Home, At Work, And in the World, William Ury (who also co-wrote Getting To Yes, the most widely read book on negotiating) examines what we can do to bring about peace.

    First he lays to rest the notion that human nature is warlike. If you look back at the entire period in which humans have existed, you will find that for the first 2.5 million years, there is very little evidence that humans fought wars. War seems to have come into fashion only in the last 10.000 years or so. And what caused war to become a part of how humans deal with conflict? In a word: Agriculture. Before that humans were nomadic hunter/gatherers and fighting wars made very little sense. There was food enough for everybody and no fixed land ownership to fight over. Only with the advent of fixed settlements and agriculture did we get something to fight over. Interestingly, with the advent of the information society, agriculture is losing it’s importance and we’re now back to a situation where it makes little sense to fight over land, because true valuse is created elsewhere – namely in the heads of people.

    Ury also reframes conflict as having three sides. There’re two opposing parts, but there’s also always the third side. The third side can be family, colleagues, friends in smaller conflicts. Or it can be nations, political parties, the media or the U.N. in large scale conflict. The third side has the opportunity and even the responsibility to prevent conflict where possible and to contain or stop it otherwise.

    Finally he outlines 10 different roles that the third side can assume, including bridge-builder, mediator, witness and peacekeeper. In the story above from the Vietnam War, the monks functioned simply as witnesses. They took no overt action, but there presence alone sufficed to stop the fighting.

    The main message of this book is one of hope. Conflict on all scales can be prevented or stopped using the tools Ury presents, and this is amply illustrated with many stories. There are things that each of us can do to get to peace, and reading this book is a great place to start.

  • Urgent questions

    * Has anyone had to cut off their tongue because it frozen to a flagpole?
    * DRIED PIDGEON MANURE IF IT MAKES CONTACT WITH YOUR EYE, WILL CAUSE YOU TO GO BLIND?
    * I just read a blurb that pre-packaged foods can cause people to turn gay because of too much estrogen. If I was only allowed one question for snopes, I would ask if this is true. Is it?
    * I’ve heard that it is impossible to take a lightbulb out of your mouth once one puts it in, without either breaking the bulb or dislocating the jaw. Do you know if this is true? I’m counting on you – my husband is really curious, and I don’t want to have to drive him to the hospital…

    These are just a few of the sillier email questions sent to snopes.com, the primary web reference for urban legends. They exhaustively research many of the legends and myths making the rounds on the net and post a “True”, “False” or “Undetermined” status for each.

    Here are a few of my favourites. See if you can guess which are true or false before you look it up:
    * Japanese thieves send a ‘thank you’ note to a bank after robbing it.
    * Consumers need to be cautious that water boiled in a microwave oven can suddenly “explode.”
    * Golfer is poisoned by chewing on his tee.
    * Eating carrots results in improved vision.

  • Real security

    As usual, Bruce Schneier is a voice of sanity and reason in matters of security. Read his take on random bag searches on the NY subway and racial profiling in security checks. He basically believes that neither will increase security noticeably. This quote had me nodding agreement:

    If we are going to increase security against terrorism, the young Arab males living in our country are precisely the people we want on our side. Discriminating against them in the name of security is not going to make them more likely to help.

    I’ve been thinking, that security is not about making terrorist attacks impossible – it’s about creating a world where people are less likely to want to commit them. Imagine a society where security is so tight that it is impossible to detonate a bomb on public transportation, no matter how clever or determined you are. How good would security have to be? How Orwellian? How much freedom could be allowed in this society?

    There’s a trade-off between security and freedom and Bruce Schneier’s is the clearest and most reasonable voice pointing this out.

  • Fun at Southwest Airlines

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    SouthwestRonald Culberson visited Southwest Airline’s people department and came away with some really great stories including this one:

    …a senior executive spent a day working at the ticket counter and with the ground crew to have a better understanding of their roles.

    While she was helping direct a plane to the gate using those long orange directional devices, one of the seasoned ground crew members told her to rotate her wrists in a circular manner.

    When she did this, the plane did a 360 degree turn! She began to scream thinking she had sent a confusing signal to the pilot.

    In reality, the ground crew had contacted the pilot and told them they had a “greeny” directing the plane and that they wanted to have some fun with her. The pilot enthusiastically agreed to play along. Very cool.

    That has to be one scary moment – when something you do makes a fully loaded airline jet pirouet right in front of you.

  • Book review: Freakonomics

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    In the 80’s crime rose sharply in the US. Instances of murder, robberies, muggings all went up in the big cities. Experts were crying doom, predicting that it could only get worse. Then it got better. Not just a little, but a lot. The question is Why?

    Giuliani took credit for cleaning up New York City. The police took credit for having more people and better methods. Politicians took credit for passing tougher laws. But the real credit, according to Steven D. Levitt lies with Roe vs. Wade, the supreme court decision from 1973 that made abortion legal all over the US. Because abortion was now legal, many young, poor, single, uneducated mothers chose that option rather than having children – children with the exact background most likely to lead to a criminal future.

    This is just one of the claims put forward in the book Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The book’s motto might be “It’s all in the numbers – if you can get them”. There is no one common theme to the book, in which Levitt uses economic and statistical tools to look at areas such as The Ku Klux Klan, cheating in Sumo wrestling and why your real estate agent isn’t really interested in getting you the highest possible price on the house you’re selling.

    Rather the book’s central message is how far you can go by looking at the numbers – and that you must keep an open mind to some of the startling and counter-intuitive realizations that might bring you. Reading this book is an unbroken string of Aha-experiences, where common sense thinking is shown to be just plain wrong.

    Levitt is by all acounts a brilliant young economist, who hasn’t yet been tied into one field. A more senior economist is quoted in the book as saying “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine”. And anyone with the creativity and open-mindedness to look into the correlation between crime and abortion as explained above (not to mention the guts to take the controversy it has generated) certatinly seems to fit that bill.

    This has got to be the most entertaining and eye-opening book on economics I’ve ever read. Can you apply anything from the book directly to your endeavours? Probably not. But it gave me a sense that the world is more complex than common sense would dictate. And that by looking at what is actually going on, rather that just running on the usual assumption, you can actually get a better, more accurate understanding og the world – one that is simple in its complexity. As illustrated in this quote.

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