The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Politics and the internet

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    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.

  • Pride on the job

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    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.

  • Book review: Small world

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    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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  • Book review: The tipping point

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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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  • Book review: Summerland

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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.

  • Job satisfaction and the bottom line

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    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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  • Book categories

    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.

  • Book review: Man’s search for meaning

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    This is a very unusual book, spanning topics rarely encountered in one and the same volume. The author, Viktor E. Frankl, was a pshychologist and he spent most of world war 2 in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. And these two backgrounds have gone into this book which is both an account of his experiences in the concentration camps, a psychological analysis of how people react under such extreme conditions and a short introduction to his psychological school called Logotherapy.

    The basic underlying theme here is meaning (logos in greek). Frankl argues, that what made some people endure the trials of the concentration camps, while many others gave up, was their ability to see meaning in their suffering. And in general, Frankl sees the drive to discover meaning as our most basic need, and he believes that many psychological problems (from neuroses to alcoholism) stem from a lack of meaning in peoples lives.
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  • Book review: The inner game of work

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    I discovered Inner Skiing about 15 years ago, and enjoyed it immensely. That book describes how the inner game principles pioneered by Timothy Gallwey can be used to create better learning conditions for skiers. Gallwey originally used it for teaching tennis, and the method basically consists of teaching not by telling people what to do, but simply by helping them direct their attention to different aspects of what they want to learn.

    In this book, subtitled Overcoming mental obstacles for maximum performance, Timothy Gallwey applies the same principles to work. How can we create the best learning conditions at work and what advantages would this give us?
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  • Fun

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    The more balanced your life is and the more diverse your interests are, the better your thinking will be. If you work 20 hours a day, your product will be crap
    – George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research Inc. in an article in Fast Company

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