2003 has been a wonderful year for me. Here’s a list of some of the things that I’m really grateful for in 2003, in no particular order:
* The company of the wonderful and innovative people at Arena. Thomas, Ole, David, Valdemar, Peter, Tine, Guan, Niels and many more. We rock!
* Moving to an appartment on the 7th. floor. Great sunsets!
* Meeting Traci, Justin, Christine, Mike and the other wonderful people at the World Dynamics CEO round table.
* Seeing Seattle with Pam.
* Seeing the happy at work project take off like it has, and being able to make people happy.
(more…)
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Gratitude
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About time
As an ex-nerd, I agree completely with this PvP strip. I my opinion Scott Kurtz keeps getting funnier, and PvP is currently my favourite online comic.
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Happy at work in 2003
For those of you who read danish, I wrote this summary of the “Happy at work” project in 2003.
The short version in english: It’s been one hell of a year. In january it was just me and a few loose ideas, and none of the methods had been tested. Now, there are lots of interesting, skilled and dedicated people working on it, we’ve proven that our methods work, and there are lots of exciting projects coming out of it.
A HUGE thank you to everyone who participated. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do in 2004, I KNOW it will be wild.
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Complaining
I realized a while ago that if you’re against complaining, you can’t even complain about other people complaining. You can’t even complain about not being able to complain about other people complaining, and you can’t complain about that either. Oh, the agony of the positive approach :o)
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Happiness on the set
I just saw one of those “on the set” TV specials about the latest Lord of the rings movie and the director Peter Jackson said something very interesting about the casting for the movies. It turns out that when they were looking for actors they went by three main criteria:
1: They wanted people who could bring the characters from the book to life, who could give you the feeling that Frodo or Gandalf had stepped out of the book.2: They wanted good actors, but they avoided any really big stars. For instance, Orlando Bloom who plays Legolas was hired just before he finished acting school.
3: And then there was one final criterion, one that really interested me: Peter Jackson only wanted actors who were nice people. After all, they would be spending over a year shooting the movie, so they might as well have a good time.
The TV show showed some of the actors interacting, and it’s obvious that they like each other and had a great time. This is also witnessed by the fact, that the nine actors comprising the “Fellowship of the ring” all went out and got tattoos of the elvish number “9”. This stands in sharp contrast to the many Hollywood stars who are known more for the extravagant demands they can make on a movie production than for their easy-going natures.
Seen in the context of my “Happy at work” project this is very interesting, and it mirrors precisely the attitude at Rosenbluth International (one of the world largest business travel agencies) who “hire for personality and train for skill”. To them it matters more that a potential new employee be a nice person than highly qualified, as described in the book Put the customer second.
PS.
Please don’t watch any of those “behind the scenes” TV shows before seeing “Return of the king”, it will give away way too much of the experience.
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Karaoke
And speaking of parties, I’ve just discovered the wonderful world of midi karaoke. Want to sing?
1: Go here to download an excellent free karaoke player
2: Go here to download lots of songs
3: Go buy a microphone and hook it up to your computerThere are 1000’s of .kar files out there to choose from (a .kar file is a midi-file with lyrics in it, meaning the player can play the song AND show the lyrics karaoke-style). Here are a few of my favourites:
* Sting, We’ll be together
* Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs. Robinson
* Leonard Cohen, Suzanne
* Billy Idol, White weddingIt’s amazing that singing has been a huge part of every single human culture that exists, but now it’s almost disappeared entirely. We pay other people to sing for us, and they do a great job, but I believe we’ere losing something. There’s something about singing that ties people together. The indian spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar once said, that if he could only keep one of the practices that he recommends (like meditation, yoga, breathing exercises, etc.), he’d hang on to singing.
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Host a murder
Last saturday the Sats Aerobics show team had its christmas party at my place, and we decided to try something new: We bought a game at Murder Mystery Games. This is not a traditional board game, it’s more like impro theater.
Every guest gets a role and when they arrive for the party they discover that, gasp, a murder has been committed and, GASP, the killer is one of the guests present. The rest of the game (maybe a couple of hours) is spent trying to figure out who the killer is. Every player gets a list of hints that they have to pass on, and based on those you should be able to figure it out. The really fun bit is to stay in character and to improvise accordingly. We had a GREAT time, and people really went to town on the costumes!
The really cool bit is that even though the game is played live, all of the management is done online. You give the site the emails of your guests, and invitations and pregame info is sent out automatically. Everything you need to actually play the game can be downloaded and printed easily for each guest.
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Advertising Arena
Arena is turning out to be one seriously cool place. Interesting people, good conversations, exciting cooperations and lots of fun. A place to work away from work. Or maybe a place to meet a person who can bring your project a small step forward.
Run by everyone, owned by noone (or everyone). Nobody is responsible for buying coffee, and yet there’s always coffee when you need a cup. An interesting experiment in self-leadership and co-creation.
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Return of the king
I spent 11 hours in middle earth yesterday. We started at 4:30 with the first Lord of the rings movie, a couple of sandwiches at 7 and the next movie at 8:30. Then at 3 minutes past midnight they showed the third movie. It was kinda funny to see a cinema-full of people turn out for three movies straight, and here you can see what popcorn for 500 people looks like.
Return of the king rocks, as do all the LOTR movies. I stand in awe of the whole project of creating these movies, and I’m so happy that they’ve managed to capture the majesty and spirit of the books. Go see it! Now: How do we get Peter Jackson to do “The hobbit”?
