The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Book review: Rethinking life & death

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    This book had, and still has, me thinking hard. What is life? What is death? Are some lives worth more than others? When is it ethically correct to take innocent human life? I found myself having to reconsider all my previous answers to these questions, and while I still can’t get my mind around the radical new ethic that Singer proposes in the last part of the book (also the most provocative part), I can definitely see that the man and the book has a point. The book WILL make you rethink life & death, it’s very well written, very clearly thought out, very well presented and (astonishingly for a philosophical work) highly readable.

    It used to be obvious when a person was alive or dead, but as so often happens, new technology forces us to reevaluate existing ethics. TO mention just a few examples, respirators (invented right here in Copenhagen) allow us to keep people alive who would otherwise have died; we can now freeze eggs, sperm cells and even embryos and revive them later; and the increasing succes rate of organ transplants create an impetus to take organs from a still living body – thus killing the donor.

    In Rethinking Life & Death, The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, philosopher Peter Singer offers a wildly fascinating look at current medical practices in western society, and demonstrates how they already violate our traditional, judeo-christian based ethic of “the sanctity of life”, which states that human life is sacred, and that consequently it is always wrong to kill innocent human beings. At its most extreme, this ethic holds that abortion is murder, euthanasia is murder (even with the patient’s consent), and we can never allow a human to die even in the case of brain death or people in persistent vegetatice states (where the cortex, the seat of consiousness, has been destroyed).

    Singer offers countless reasons why the belief that human life is sacrosanct leads to absurd choices, and succesfully demonstrates that even those who promote that view don’t follow it.
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  • In the depths of the organization

    I’m reading some of the new books that I just got from Amazon, and one of them opens with this insight:

    It’s impossible to manage or even know what’s going on in the depths of the organization. I mean, each of us can fool ourselves into thinking we’re smart and running a tight ship. But really the best we can do is create a context and hope that things emerge in a positive way, and this is tough because you can’t really see the impact your decisions have on people. So you just kind of hope what you want to happen is happening and the sound confident when telling others.
    – Anonymous executive vice president quoted in The Hidden Power of Social Networks.

    This is probably a widely shared sentiment, yet some people still think that leadership is just a matter of controlling an organization, setting goals and following up, knowing your metrics and following your strategy. I’m fairly certain that the VP quoted above knows all of these methods and uses them and he still feels in the dark about what really goes on “in the depths of the organization (a wonderful expression that – made me think of the dangerous depths of some wild jungle). The issue is not whether we can or cannot control the organization (though I reamin convinced that it is impossible). The issue is that we shouldn’t even try to. Any organization that is centrally controlled is bound to be highly ineffecient and (what’s worse) absolutely no fun to work in.

    So leadership is not about control. Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, was asked how he controls his organization. His answer is classic:

    Control: Never had it, don’t want it.

  • Book review: Appreciative Inquiry Handbook

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    If you’re interested in Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook by David L. Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jacqueline M. Starvos is the book to read, because:
    * It’s edited by the foremost AI people on the planet
    * It’s relevant to every level of AI user from novice to expert
    * It covers both the theory and the practice of AI
    * It’s clear, readable and very thorough
    * You can read it as a book or use it as the ultimate AI reference

    If you don’t know AI already, you should consider looking into it – it’s one of the two most important tools I know of for creating positive organizational change (the other being Open Space Technology).

    There’s more on AI here and here.

  • Book review: Catch!

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    Almost anybody who works with HR, organizational development, motivation or similar areas has heard of the Pike Place Fish Market. This is basically a fish shop, that one day decided to be world famous. As the owner tells it:
    The first step for us at Pike Place Fish was to decide who we wanted to be. In the words of John Yokoyama:?In one of our early Pike Place Fish meetings with Jim (our coach from bizFutures), we began an inquiry into “who do we want to be? We wanted to create a new future for ourselves. One of the young kids working for me said, ?Hey! Let’s be World Famous!? At first I thought, ?World Famous?what a stupid thing to say!? But the more we talked about it, the more we all got excited about being World Famous. So we committed to it. We added ?World Famous? to our logo and had it printed on our shipping boxes.

    This got picked up by some consultants, who created the Fish! concept, including a video and a series of books. But now, the Pike Place Fishmongers have told their own story in their own words, in the book Catch!: A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness by Cyndi Crother. And their version ain’t bad either.
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  • Doing nothing

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    From Quitting the Paint Factory, a beautiful essay by Mark Slouka, from the November 2004 issue of Harpers Magazine.

    When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a wind-blown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

    Via Boingboing.

  • Yaaay, books

    Ten new books just arrived from Amazon, and I can’t wait to read’em. The ones I really look forward to reading are:
    * The other path – why terrorism can’t be countered militarily, but only by economic means.
    * The hidden power of social networks – why your network on the job matters.
    * The seven-day weekend – Ricardo Semler on the way they do business at Semco.
    * Punished by rewards – why raises, praise, and gold stars don’t work.

    Expect a slew of reviews soon. We just packed the TV away in a closet again, which has upped my reading rate to the usual 2-3 books a week. Upcoming reviews:
    * Appreciative Inquiry Handbook – The ultimate AI resource.
    * Catch! – The Pike Place Fishmongers tell their own story.

  • Book review: The confusion

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    I’ve gotta come clean here: I’m a huge fan of Neal Stephensons work, so when I heard that he’d written not one book, but a series of three books each around 900 pages long, I was thrilled. Then I read the first one (Quicksilver), and to be perfectly honest, I was bored. I felt it had it’s moments, but that it would’ve been twice as good if it had been half as long. I started on the second book in the series (The Confusion) , and ground to halt about 200 pages into it. Too boring. I really wanted to like Quicksilver though, so I wrote this luke-warm review of it. Man, was I ever wrong! :o)

    A couple of months ago, I decided to re-read Quicksilver, and what a change that made. Suddenly I got it. I found that in my eagerness to devour that book, I’d missed most of it. You see, these books are subtle. They contain so much good stuff, but it’s not all out in the open – you may have to work for it. On re-reading Quicksilver I really got into it, and suddenly, 900 pages seemed just right. Especially when there are two more book in the series, and the second one is even better.

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  • Book review: Microserfs

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    In Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a bunch of geeks working at Microsoft (hence the title of the book), decide to change their predictable, stable, profitable yet somehow unfulfilling lives in Seattle for a leap into the unknown, starting their own company in California.

    Some things remain the same: They still work way too much. They’re still geeks. They still obsess about small things, as geeks do. But something starts to change. They get lives. The fundamental isolation made possible by the corporate lifestyle at Microsoft is replaced by confusion, frustration, identity crisis, dating disasters, jealousy – but also by friendship, community, loyalty, trust and most of all love.
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  • Book review: The corrosion of character

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    I disagree with almost everything in Richard Sennett’s book The corrosion of character, and I still think it’s hugely important and very much worth reading. Confused? Read on.

    Sennett looks at the working conditions in the new flexible economy, and he sees a lot of problems. People no longer work at the same company or the same job for long stretches of time. They switch jobs or switch teams or change fields or even become consultants :o). There’s no predictability, no long-term commitment, no long-term relations with co-workers and bosses, no loyalty, more confusion, etc. Most of all, the new work environment makes it more difficult to find and maintain a narrative of your work life. Previously, when people could focus on their careers, you had that as a measure and as the backbone for that narrative. Today, where the fixed path of a career has been replaced with a crazy quilt of job changes that can be up, down, sideways or just plain jumps-into-the-unknown it becomes much more difficult to find meaning and to find yourself in your work.
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  • The next media economy

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how we buy and consume media (music, movies, TV, books, news, video games, sports, etc.) and though it’s a far cry from the regular topics on this blog, and I’m pretty sure that none of this is new, here’s my take.

    You see, it’s a pretty important question. For one thing, the media industry is huge. We spend a LOT of money on entertainment. But even more importantly, media of various kinds is where we get most of our stories. Much of our perception of the world is shaped by the media we access and how we access them. So media matters.

    The big shift that we’re seeing right now is of course due to the internet. All media are increasingly being freed from physical constraints. You no longer need the physical CD, DVD, TV antenna or paper book. You can get it all on one device: Your computer. I know, I know, it’s completely obvious, but bear with me.

    I can’t say exactly what the next media business model will look like, but I still think we can say some things about it. This is kinda like one of those mathematical proofs, where we don’t know the actual solution yet, but we can still say some things about it. So I predict that any future media economy will have to live up to the following criteria in order to achieve success:

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