The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Forget everything you know about change!

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    Jim Collins, the author of Built to last and Good to great examines our peceptions of how change in orgnizations happens, and finds that most of our current thinking is dead wrong. This is one of the best and most insightful articles I’ve read in a loooong time. A teaser:

    I want to give you a lobotomy about change. I want you to forget everything you’ve ever learned about what it takes to create great results. I want you to realize that nearly all operating prescriptions for creating large-scale corporate change are nothing but myths.
    …
    Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken. All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation — as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.

    The key to succesful change: Put “Who” before “What”. Read the article at (where else) Fast Company.

  • Quote

    Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

    – Jerry Garcia (of the Grateful Dead)

  • Cocktailparty

    We had our second fantastic open space, open source cocktail party in october. It was a great evening and here are the pictures to prove it.

    Want to do an open space cocktailparty yourself? Here’s how:
    1: Invite a lot of nice people
    2: Figure out what you’ll need to make lots of different cocktails – our list is here (in danish)
    3: Let each guest decide what they want to bring
    4: When guests arrive put everything in the kitchen
    5: Let each guest decide what cocktail to make and when
    6: Have a blast

    We didn’t serve any food but we did arrange for plenty of chips and snacks. We had the party on the same day we moved in to the appartment, and while it worked great for us I’m not sure I’d recommend that particular solution to everyone.

  • Book review: Hey Nostradamus!

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    I discovered Douglas Coupland what seems like many years ago (but was in fact in 1997) when I read Generation X, and he remains one of my favourite authors. His style has since been steadily moving away from the hyper-realistic stories of Shampoo planet and Generation X to a more surrealist, subjective and poetic style which is also evident in his latest book Hey Nostradamus.

    What it’s about? Good question. There’s a shooting at a high school, much like the one at Columbine, and this has consequences for many people, whose intersecting stories are told in the books four separate passages. The mood of the book is detached, somber and haunting but still moving and while the book offers very few answers it certainly poses many good questions. It is an elegant piece of fiction which I recommend highly.

  • Self-organizing political campaign

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    Howard Deans presidential campaign is different, and I certainly hope it’s an indication of how things will be done in the future. Wally Bock sums it up here. It turns out that the real difference between Dean and everybody else is that he treats his supporters like a giant, self-organizing staff of experts. The key to that is giving up control, reversing the great political campaign trend of the last decade or so.

  • Home again

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    Gee but it’s great to be back home
    Home is where I want to be boy
    I’ve been on the road for so long my friend
    And if you came along I know you wouldn’t disagree
    – Paul Simon, keep the customer satisfied

    I’m now home after my trip to the states, and it’s been a wonderful trip. It’s been all about interesting conversations, wonderful people and exciting new thoughts – I live for this kind of thing.

    And it’s equally great to be back home. I may even have tricked the jetlag in one day. I arrived sunday at 1PM, went home and unpacked (mentally and physically) and then Patricia and I went to the movies (Finding Nemo and and Matrix revolutions, they both rock) the evening to keep me awake until a suitable hour, following all of which I woke up refreshed and ready this morning.

  • Quote

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    Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.

    – Harold Whitman

  • Blame and responsibility

    Another topic that came up at the conference was the issue of blame and responsibility. How do you react, when a situation is all your fault? Or when somebody accuses you of it? We talked about it, and a thought came to me: There are a few differences between blame and responsibility.

    Blame is looking back, responsibility is looking forward. If I blame you, it’s about something that’s already happened. If I give you responsibility for something, that means the outcome is still uncertain.

    Blame means you’re essentially powerless. It’s done, it’s in the past, all you can do now is argue about whether or not it’s your fault. Responsibility means you have the power to change things.

    But perhaps the most important difference to me, is that blame can be divided, whereas responsibility can’t. If something bad happens, it can be 50% my fault and 50% yours. If we have a shared responsibility for something, we both have 100% responsibility. Acting as if you can pass around shares of responsibility has some weird consequeces. In my thinking, 10 people working on the same project all have 100% responsibility.

    This reminds me of a story I heard once, of the CEO of a danish company who went around in the organization taking the blame. Whenever there was a conflict or a crisis, he’d step in and say “It’s my fault”, leaving his people free to work out solutions. He took the blame, they got the responsibility.

  • Peace

    The last session I attended at the PoP conference was about the question “Why aren’t we already peaceful.” Paul posted it, and frankly I’m not really sure if he was seriously pondering the question himself, or if he maybe posted it because he thought it was a question we needed to look at.

    Anyway, the discussion steadily circled around to the fact that in order for you to be at peace, you must start with yourself. If you expect peace to be some external, perfect and permanent state that you will attain once all war, conflict and suffering has disappeared from the plant, then you will never be peaceful. If you want to be at peace, you must find a way to be so in the presence of all these things.

    Here’s my answer: You will be at peace, when you believe that the world is exactly as it should be. This doesn’t mean that you can’t work to improve things, it just means that you acknowledge and appreciate the world for what it is right now. When you believe that you can be peaceful, and when you’re peaceful, you can work much more effectively to change the world.

  • Laughing at the Practice of Peace

    You may not know this, but I am in fact a certified laughter instructor. It’s not often I get a chance to practice it, so I offered to do some laughter exercises at the Practice of Peace conference, and it went extremely well. The evening started with playback theatre, or as our coach called it, playbak thee-AY-ter. It’s a form of improv where we did a very simple exercise that we’d tried earlier in the day called living statues. Practicing it in a small group was nerve-wracking enough and doing it in front of an audience of 40 people was downright scary. Fortunately people were very appreciative and it went quite well. After that this amazingly talented guy called Martin did juggling and comedy, and he was good and funny.

    Finally we got to the laughter exercises. I’d kinda expected this crowd to go for it, and they LOVED it. We started with a simple warm-up, progressed to some basic laughter exercises, and before long people were laughing up a storm. It was great to see people hugging and laughing or arguing and laughing (two of the exercises).

    The exercises are based on the principle that by pretending to laugh, essentially faking laughter, you’re getting the same physical results that you would if you were actually laughing. Of course what usually happens is that you feel so silly faking laughter that you end up laughing for real – without anything to laugh at. It feels really good and it’s lots of fun. You can read more about it at laughteryoga.org. People kept coming up to me the rest of the conference and thanking me for it, and that tells me that laughter is probably a large part of the practice of peace.

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