You sneak up behind a co-worker and disco – without getting caught and with another co-worker videotaping it. Looks like fun.
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Death and grief
From an article in Fast Company:
Philosopher and consultant Peter Koestenbaum spends his days exploring truly big questions that have never sounded more relevant. Here, he reflects on what the shock of death teaches us about leadership — and how to move forward without forgetting.For another way to view it, check out Harrison Owen’s concept of griefwork, which is the process that we as humans go through every time we encounter change. There’s a brief description here, and more in his book Expanding our now.
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Robert Levering
Robert Levering is the man behind the “Great place to work” book and concept. Here’s a quote from the introduction to the book
…I am more optimistic than ever about the prospects for the workplace. When Milton and I began researching this area nearly two decades ago, great places to work were clearly exceptions to the rule. They often were the result of the vision of extraordinary business leaders like FedEx’s Fred Smith or HP’s David Packard. Today more and more senior managers have become convinced that fostering a great work environment is a business imperative. But perhaps more important, employees are no longer willing to put up with the kind of insensitive and demeaning management attitudes that have typified most workplaces since the dawn of the industrial age.
Grounds for optimism, I’d say. There’s an excellent interview with Robert Levering here.
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Book review: Bird by bird
I’ve just added Anne Lamott to my “List of People I’d Really Like To Meet”. Having just read her book Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life, I think she’s a nice person, interesting to be around and very wise.
The book contains many, many tips for the aspiring writer. Not on the technical stuff, like how to put the words together or how to sell your finished book to a publisher, but more on how to live as a writer. She makes the excellent point, that a writer’s main ambition should not be to be published but to write, since that is what a writer does most of the time.
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Autumn poem
The other day while I was driving home, I looked into the gutter and saw yellow leaves. Autumn’s here, and here’s a fitting poem which I found in Anne Lamott’s beautiful book “bird by bird”.
Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off the Aspen
tree a month too soon. No use,
wind, all you succeed in doing
is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful.
– Bill HolmHere’s the author’s own background for the poem.
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Open Space on Open Space
As part of my holidays I spent three days at the OSonOS, which is the annual conference for Open Space practitioners. For those who don’t know Open Space Technology here’s an excellent intro. To me it is quite simply an incredibly efficient meeting form, which treats people as adults capable of making their own choices.
It was an excellent conference. I loved meeting people from all over the world, and I really enjoyed getting deeper into Open Space. And the venue was fantastic. It was held at Bramstrup a little south of Odense in a barn. It may sound weird, but the place was beautiful and worked perfectly for our needs. Meals were taken in the old cow stables and the food was equally excellent. If you’re planning some large meeting in Denmark, consider Bramstrup as your venue.
As always Open Space worked its magic, and the sessions we had were productive, constructive, interesting and lots of fun. You can see the entire report from the conference. I hosted these two sessions: Short OS meetings and Freedom and OS.
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Book review: Learned optimism
Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.
But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
* Optimists lead better lives
* Optimists live longer
* Optimists are healthier
* Optimists do better at work and in school
* Optimists have fewer depressions
* Optimists have more friends and better social livesAnd did you know that:
* The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
* The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
* An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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I’m back
Today is my first work day after a long and excellent holiday, and MAN it’s good to be back.
Here are a few highlights from our holiday:
* Travelling through Germany, Holland and Denmark without once having to show our passports.
* Goliath and Colossos.
* Amsterdam by bicycle .
* Helping an old man push his ice-cream-cart-scooter up a hill that it couldn’t climb and getting two ice creams for it.
* The small twisty roads in the Harz region of Germany
* Getting in a mile-long traffic jam on a German highway and just riding our motorcycles throught the gaps between stalled cars.
* Portuguese tapas in Amsterdam.By the way, I kicked of my first working day with giving a speech to 12 employees from Novo about happiness at work, and it went extremely well! In short, I’m back and I’m flying! And thanks to guest blogger Carsten for his blog entry.
