The summer holidays are ending and as you or your colleagues return to work, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the best way to ease back into your job. Sometimes it seems as if all the energy you’ve gained on your vacation disappears very quickly, so here’s some tips on how to keep that good mood a little longer.
There are tips both for people who are returning from vacations and for their co-workers.
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These are the mosts popular posts in june:
Psychological test
Selling fish in Seattle – and having fun
Possibly the best music video ever
Generosity in action
Book review: The fifth discipline
How Denmark won the 1992 european soccer championship
Hosting
Book review: Getting to yes
100 things about me
Cool name wanted
Note that these are all long posts, ie. posts that have a “more…” link and their own page. Short posts are usually read straight from the front page and therefore do not appear in the server statistics.
Full marks to Tveskov for knowing the answer to a previous question, and for the additional explanation.
I’ve heard a different legend of the origin of guru meditation: It is said that the developers were playing with a new input device which was a balancing board that you stood on, and by leaning over you could control for example a game. And one of the uses was to try and stand still on the board, as if you were meditating. Hence guru meditation.
But I like Bjarnes version better.
The future of politics is currently being shaped by the Howard Dean presidential campaign in the US: The results of self-organizing are not only more people, but more ideas about how to do local politics. The idea of sending 30,000 letters to Iowa at the last Dean Meetup came from the grassroots, and that has been reported. What hasn?t been reported is that most of the Dean flyers that people are passing out at farmers markets and summer fairs around the country are put together by grassroots organizers working through the Net. Independently of the official campaign, a Seattle group thinks of a flyer idea, which a New York group designs, which they circulate through the Dean listservs, which gets stapled to a Bulletin Board in Missouri by a group of Dean supporters who met through the Internet. A Georgia group designs ?Dean Cards,? which are now spreading around the country.
This is from a post to Lawrence Lessigs blog where Dean Howard’s been guest blogging. Kinda makes me want to be american so I could vote for him.
Once again an excellent article from Fast Company on the importance on pride at work.
There`s one thing I’d like to add, namely that you can’t “do pride”. Pride is not a practice, it is the result of one or more practices. The article even shows some of these practices like caring for employees, focus on learning, including employees in decisions and focus on long term results. Here’s the list of practices, that I believe promote pride and happiness at work.
It is hardly news anymore, but there is a definite shift going on in science. Where the focus used to be almost exlusively on reductionism ie. an effort to understand the world by looking at ever smaller pieces and trying to understand them separately, now more and more attention is spent on the relations between objects.
Mark Buchanans book small world, uncovering nature’s hidden networks covers one part of this “new” science namely the discoveries in networks that have come very recently in many different areas. So what exactly is the common theme between the internet, fireflies in Thailand, neurons in our brains and the social networks that we’re all part of?
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Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.
This is how Malcolm Gladwell ends his book The tipping point, subtitled “how little things can make a big difference”. Throughout the book Gladwell examines the circumstances in which large scale change can be brought about by a small effort. From the explosive succes og Hush Puppies (a brand of shoes) to a wave of suicides that plagued Micronesia. From the success of Sesame Street to a syphilis epidemic in Boston in the 90’s.
Gladwell argues that this sort of change is much more common than we usually acknowledge, and that it is possible because of three factors, the three rules of the tipping point.
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Michael Chabon is a writer with a talent for writing fantastic stories based squarely in everyday life and american popular culture. This was obvious in his masterpiece “The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay” which had it’s roots in the golden age of american comics, but it finds a new, wonderful expression in Summerland, which is a childrens book in the same way as the Harry Potter books – this book can be enjoyed by anyone at any age.
The story is a true adventure, in which a number of children and mythical beings must save the world from Coyote (the trickster god in american indian mythology). The major themes are (get this) baseball, indians and airships. And Chabon manages to create a story that is funny, believable, touching, exciting and a times very sad. Where the worlds of J.K. Rowlings and Philip Pullmans books are a little old fashioned, Chabons adventure is quite modern, giving this fairy tale a more up to date feel.
This is an excellent book, especially for reading to someone, and I warmly recommend it. Here’s a quote from the book.
Gallup have a report from a study involving 200.000 emplyees from 36 different companies, that clearly links high job satisfaction with good financial results. Among other things the report shows that satisfied employees result in:
* Much lower employee turnover rates
* Higher customer loyalty
* Higher sales
* Higher profit margins
This is great news for my Project Happiness at Work. And I would love to add something to this study.
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Now that I’m up to more than 40 book reviews on this site, I’ve changed the book reviews page so that it groups the books in categories, the categories being:
Fiction
Improving work
Learning
Open Space
Philosophy
Psychology
Science
Various non-fiction
This should make it easier to find a specific book or a book an a certain topic, even though I have to say that some of them were quite difficult to categorize.
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