The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Quote

    The First Law of Mentat: A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it, and flow with it.
    – From Dune by Frank Herbert.

    Dune is one of my favourite novels. I read it for the first time when I was 15, and I must’ve read it at least 10 more times since. It has a depth that reveals new details even after many re-re-re-readings. Frank Herbert has created a weird and wonderful world in intricate detail: Technology, religion, politics, ecology, warfare, history and much, much more are all described in a way that is elegant, subtle and above all believable. It’s a world resting in a long-standing precarious balance between mutually opposing forces – a balance which is upset once and for all. There are more Dune-quotes here.

  • Wikipedia: Coolest tool on the net

    Of course there’s no way you could engage thousands of people world-wide in creating a comprehensive, up-to-date, on-line encyclopedia. If you simply opened up the system, so anybody could contribute to any subject, it would be completely impossible to protect the system against vandalism, jokes and random errors. Such an encyclopedia could never work.

    Except it does: The Wikipedia may be the coolest application of the internet so far. I use it constantly and I find it to be incredibly comprehensive. But don’t take my word for it.

  • Open Source

    Here’s another testament to the power of Open Source development. Sourceforge (home to 80.000+ Open Source Software projects) interviews the people behind Azureus, the project of the month, and check out this quote:

    What has been your biggest surprise?

    Olivier: When I started this project, I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world, at least not as a developer. My biggest surprise was to see how much support you can get, and how people can involve themselves into your project.

    Alon: The incredible community involvement that Open Source seems to bring. Besides the core developers, many other people donate their valuable time to submit patches, test code, write documentation, do translations, provide tech support, express their thoughts and recommendations, and even donate money. People love to get involved. Azureus was my first experience in Open Source development, and I’ve been very impressed with the process as a whole.

    The Open Source movement is based on the assumption that people want to be involved and are willing to give freely of their time. The currency in Open Source is not money but rather peer recognition and a sense of accomplishment, and I’m sure that as a model, it will be at least as succesful as the corporate model we’re currently familiar with.

    And why limit it to software development? I’m sure that wherever you can set up a similar system, you can get people to contribute in the same way. We’re doing just that with the Happy At Work Project, where all our intellectual source code is Open Source – we’ll give it away to anyone who wants to use it, and hope that they’ll make it even better.

  • Open Space World Map

    I’m on the map. Go see, and click on Denmark.

    Michael Pannwitz rocks for being behind such a cool tool.

  • Moral imagination

    I found a very interesting article on Using Moral Imagination for irreplicable Strategic Advantage.

    Based on “The Moral Advantage Model” the author argues that there is a strategic, competitive advantage beyond the traditional two of low cost and differentiation. From the article:

    With agility, companies with moral imagination evolve their strategies and operational practices to changing worlds while simultaneously remaining steadfastly faithful to the values and purpose that define them.
    …
    The key … lies in using Moral Imagination to understand two dynamics. The first concerns the degree to which work satisfies the deepest human needs of employees and concerns the company’s Values and Ethics. The second concerns the degree to which a company’s product and service satisfies the deepest human needs of its customers and concerns the company’s Strategy.

    I like the article both for it’s logic which is clear and compelling but also for the way it talks about moral choices grounded in clear strategic concepts and thinking. Read it!

  • The unmentionable designer

    I’m currently talking to our designer about a re-design for the Happy At Work Project’s web site, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with.

    She’s done all our design work so far (you can see some examples here), and if you’re ever in need of good design, on or off-line, I can’t recommend her highly enough. She’s extremely talented, and most importantly, she can grasp the important features of a task really quickly.

    I’d like to translate her company name into english, but unfortunately, what is in danish a quirky and fun word becomes, when translated into english, something that is entirely unmentionable in polite society :o)

  • Ricardo Semler

    , ,

    The ever blogging Chris Corrigan points to an excerpt of Ricardo Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend. A small teaser:

    I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it’s dead and buried the better off we all will be. Incendiary words, yet Semco’s alliance with Cushman & Wakefield, as well as other joint ventures that I will describe shortly, suggests that the transition from the old to the new can be hugely profitable and not nearly as socially disruptive as might be feared at first. On the contrary, the path Semco has been blazing for more than twenty years has led to an unprecedented record of innovation, customer satisfaction, growth, and an end to repressive command-and-control management practices that cause much labor unrest and personal misery, from the top to the bottom of many organizations.

    That does it, Semler is going on my list of people I’ve gotta have a conversation with.

  • Book review: Smart Love

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    I try to gather input for the Happy At Work Project from many sources. Web sites, books, movies, magazines – whatever may give me some new angle on what makes people happy at work. So please don’t read too much into it when I tell you, that I just finished reading a book called Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent & Your Child a Better Person by Martha and William Pieper :o)

    I saw the title, and thought that any alternative to discipline might be a nice thing to know about, in the search for ways to create better work environments. Indeed, much of what is says CAN be transplanted from the world of bringing up children to that of working together on the job.

    The obvious notion NOT to take with you, is the one where managers take on the roles of parents and employees become the children. Where knowledge, authority and responsibility is seen to lie only with some people (those who happen to be leaders) and employees are expected to do as they’re told. Fortunately this mindset is slowly disappearing.
    (more…)

  • Happy at work – world-wide

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    At the Interactive Organizations Conference 2004, I offered the idea of creating an international IO, based on the happy at work project.

    Instead of getting all theoretical, we could simply organize around the purpose of making people happy at work, and create an IO for just that. Here’s the idea: We already have some proven methods and technologies in the work we do in Denmark. We have lectures, a workshop, a book, a game, a video, a conference and much more. All of this we are willing to give away to anyone who’s interested in using it, and we’ll make this the basis of the world-wide happy at work project.

    If you’re interested in participating in this drop me an email. The exact details are still a little hazy – but mostly, I think it could be a LOT of fun :o)

    (more…)

  • Interactive Organizations Conference

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    The interactive organization is one that is less dominated by traditional control structures and where people are more free to do their work. Interactive organizations (IO’s) are therefore more efficient, adapt faster to changes in their environment – and they’re a lot more fun to be in. They can also be chaotic and frustrating :o)

    I’ve been a leader and participant (in interactive orgs everyone is both) in three different organizations which were interactive, and I can assure you, that I will never again work in a “traditional” workplace. I could simply never function again under the old, inflexible ways defined by the org chart.

    So when I heard that the first conference on IO’s was being organized in Krakow I knew that I had to be a part of it. The term Interactive Organization was defined in Harrison Owen’s book The power of spirit, how organizations transfrom and describes what a workplace organized around Open Space Technology might be like.
    (more…)

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