The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Self-organizing motorcycles

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    Every year, on the last thursday in march, motorcyclists from all over Denmark meet in Copenhagen. This is the day when Bakken (an amusement park outside town) opens, and it has become an event for thousands of motorcyclists.

    The most fantastic thing about it is that nobody organizes it. There’s no planning committee, no sponsors, no management, no advertising, no participation fee, nothing. Motorcycle riders know about it, and all day long they arrive from all over the country, parking their bikes all up and down Nørrebrogade and adjacent streets.

    The whole thing started around 15 years ago, with just a few friends meeting at a certain cafe, to drive out to Bakken. This year they were expecting 8.000 bikes.
    (more…)

  • Free books on leadership

    Questia.com are putting a lot of free books and articles on the net, and this week the focus is on leadership. Here are their prime picks in that category.

  • Book review: Fish tales

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    When you make room for play at work, great things happen. They discovered this at Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle. Selling fish can be hard, boring and repetitious, and a few years back they had very little fun doing it.

    And then they changed that. Today they have a lot more fun, give their customers a better experience and sell a lot more fish. This has been documented in a film and accompanying book called “Fish!” and in an additional book in the series called Fish Tales, which contains some great, true stories of organizations at play.
    (more…)

  • Feelgood movies

    Carsten and I arranged a feel-good movie night last week. It’s simple: Get some nice people together and watch a movie that makes you feel good. We saw Field of dreams, which to me epitomizes the genre. It contains every single element that makes a good feel-good movie: It’s a quiet, touching movie with a positive theme, it shows people acting selflessly and it has a happy ending (essential to a feel-good movie). Also, Field of dreams is about forgiveness, redemption and second chances – themes which often figure in feel-good movies. Other excellent examples of the genre are:
    (more…)

  • Open Space week

    It’s always a joy seeing Open Space meetings, and this week I’ve been part of two VERY different ones. First, last wednesday I helped organize a workshop for 25 teenagers from the worst part of Copenhagen. We’re talking 25 kids aged 12-18, with completely different attitudes and backgrounds.
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  • Restoring nature, restoring yourself

    Here’s an article about a seriously ill ex-soldier in Seattle, who decided to spend his last days cleaning up a creek near his home. During that project he got better, and today he works with many other people to restore the environment around Seattle.

    This is a beautiful example of helping yourself by doing something for others, in this case for nature. Sometimes the best way to help yourself is to forget yourself.

  • Coping with war

    I’ve been wondering how to deal with the situation in Iraq on a personal level. We’re living in a world which is now at war ? how do we cope with that? How stressed should we feel? How much do we need to hate Saddam or Bush and his people? How much CNN should we watch ? or not watch?

    The war is here. We may never know the the Bush administrations true motivations. Many people may die. What should we feel about that? Do we shake our heads at the TV news? Should we hate and despise the people we think have caused it? Should we feel sad at the thought of what this war might do to the world?

    The important thing is this: You are not powerless. There’s something you can do.
    (more…)

  • What’s in a name

    One of the true pleasures of being a Kjerulf (or a Kierulff, a Kjerulff or a Kjærulf) is to know that I’m part of a huge family of over 11.000 other Kjerulf’s. I know this beacuse of one guy, Cap Kierulff, who has collected the entire family tree going back 600 years to our common ancestor, Anders Kjaerulf. I looked myself up in the family tree, and seeing my own name in that context gave me a real sense of having roots – of being connected to history. But it doesn’t stop there: Every four years there’s a Kiermeet, an international Convention of Kierulff’s. I’m thinking of going to the next one, which is in 2006 in the Philippines.

    I invited Cap to visit my website and he did. His nice comments on it can be seen here.

    Interesting fact about Cap K: He was not only a witness to, but a key participant in, the birth of the “Hi-Fi” phenomenon. Read all about it.

  • Putting a face to Iraq

    To many people in the west, the only face we can put to Iraq is Saddam Hussein’s. There are no Nobel prize winners, movie directors or pop stars that we know of, and the “ordinary” people of Iraq are equally unknown to us. George Capaccio has travelled in Iraq repeatedly since 1997, and in this article he tells us about the people he knows there, and about their hospitality, generosity, openness and kindness.

    An example: Or the time I whipped up a real Italian dinner for Suha and her family. During the meal, she and her husband, who had never eaten spaghetti before, began playfully sucking on separate ends of the same strand until their lips touched and they gave each other a brief kiss. Their young sons were so embarrassed they didn’t know whether to cover their faces or leave the room.

  • Quote

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    We currently act as if people are not inherently motivated, rather that they go to work each day and wait for someone else to light their fire. This belief is common among managers and employees alike…
    It is right and human for managers to care about the motivation and morale of their people, it is just that they are not the cause of it. Managers should ask for feedback from employees about hot they could improve as managers, but they ask this out of their own interest and desire to learn, not for the sake of the employee. If we decide to view employees as free and accountable, then we stop fixing them.
    – Peter Koestenbaum in Freedom and accountability at work.

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