I’ll be at blogforum. How about you?
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Will your business fail if you take today off?
Peter Carruthers ponders the entreprenurial drive and what it does to business leaders in this article. Teaser: Most of us are bogged down with a deep guilt about our businesses. We?re uncomfortable being away from the beast for too long. Maybe it?s the way we were taught ? that we have to work hard to prosper. Maybe it?s because we?re afraid it?s really going to stop breathing. [A little like the first months as a new parent when you check the baby every few hours.
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Learning through art
There’s an interesting article by Linda Naiman in the CEO Refresher called Orchestrating Collaboration at Work Using the Arts, on the benefits of using arts in the business world. An appetizer: The arts take us on adventures in creative expression that help us to safely explore unknown territory, overcome fear, and take risks. We can transfer these learning experiences to the workplace. Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It teaches us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity.
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Book review: Corporate Kindergarten
What is the value of play in the corporate world, and how could we go about introducing more of it? These are the main questions that Jesper Bove-Nielsen examines in his book Corporate Kindergarten.
This book falls somewhere between manifest, business book and academic book. It has the depth and reach of a good business book, but it clearly has a message, namely that playing is a good thing, and has tremendous value to offer the business world. The book is in danish, so non-danes will have to wait for a translation.
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Non-inspirational quotes
Got this in the mail today. Pretty funny!
Top 20 Sayings we’d like to see on those office inspirational posters:
1. Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all people who opposed them.2. If you can stay calm, while all around you is chaos…then you probably haven’t completely understood the seriousness of the situation.
3. Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.
4. Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.
5. Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity
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Aaaaaaand: Action
When I got up this morning, I had no idea that I’d end up on the set of director Thomas Vinterbergs next movie Dear Wendy.
I had a meeting at Filmbyen (Film city), and suddenly, there I was, standing right behind the directors tent, while they did a re-take of one of the films final scenes. The film is set in West Virginia, and they’ve built a real slice of america right outside Copenhagen. It was fun to get a glimpse behind the scenes, and to get a sense of how Vinterberg directs his movies. There’s a picture of the back of the set on the photoblog. Notice the american style water tower.
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Quote
I’m a businessman, but I’m still going to do things on my own terms. I’m going to break a lot of rules, and we’re going to blur the distinction between work and play. So we have a policy here – it’s called “Let My People Go Surfing.” A policy which is, when the surf comes up, anybody can just go surfing. Any time of the day, you just take off and go surfing… That attitude changes your whole life. If your life is set up so that you can drop anything when the surf comes up, it changes the whole way you do your life. And it has changed this whole company here.
– Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia
Yvon explains the surf boards lined up in the entrance hallway of the companys headquarters in Ventura, California. Quoted in “Good Business” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.
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Going to DC and Seattle
I’m going to 2 conferences in the US in november. First I’m going to World Dynamics conference for democratic CEOs in Washington DC arranged by Traci Fenton and her crew, and after that I’m going to Washington state to be a part of the Practice of Peace conference. While these two conferences look quite different on the surface, I actually believe there’s a huge overlap between them and with the happiness at work project.
If you’re in DC or Seattle, and would like to meet and talk, drop me an email. I’m available om november 6 in DC and on november 13 and 14 in Seattle. Also if you know of a place I could stay in Seattle, I’d like to hear about it.
A big thank you to Kasper of Culture Adventure for the excellent travel arrangements. If you’re travelling, I can definitely recommend him.
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Beaten to it – by the Dalai Lama
We’re currently writing a book about happiness at work that will:
* Describe why happiness at work is important to both companies and employees
* Show concrete methods that are proven to work
* Attempt to energize the reader to work towards being happy at workThe writing is going beautifully. I’m finding my voice and the right style, and I’m simply churning out pages. Writing 10 book pages takes me about half a day. And fortunately I have a lot of help in the process, from fellow happiness-at-work-member Lars Henrik Nielsen.
And I’ve just discovered that the Dalai Lama has written a book called “the art of happiness at work“. Dammit! There’s a fine review of it here. I’ll have to read the book soon, to see if there’s anything in it that we can steal, er, borrow.
