The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Book review: Birth of the Chaordic Age

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    This is one of Dee Hock’s favourite tricks to play on an audience. “How many of you recognize this?” he asks, holding out his own Visa card. Every hand in the room goes up. “Now,” Hock says, “how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?” Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.

    Dee Hock is the mastermind behind Visa and this book is part autobiography, part introduction to Dee’s thoughts on complexity theory and part social manifesto.
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  • Book review: The thin book of appreciative inquiry

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    Appreciative Inquiry is an extremely effective and fun method for introducing positive change. It bases itself on the assumption that improvement can be achieved by focusing on the positive and doing more of that. Normally when we try to improve something, we do the opposite. We focus on what doesn’t work, and try do less of that. AI (as it’s known) is just as effective – and a lot more fun.

    This book is a (as the name suggests) a concise how-to guide to AI.
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  • Google sets

    There’s a new, seriously cool feature currently being tested on Google, called Google sets. You name a couple of items and Google will attempt to expand that and find more items matching your examples.

    Starting with “Bill Clinton” and “George Bush” might give you a set of american presidents while “apples”, “pears” and “bananas” gives you a list of fruits.

    Let’s say you’re a fan of Open Space Technology and Appreciative Inquiry and you want to find more tools like them – well here’s a possible answer. Google rules!

  • All you need is… Love?

    I’m currently reading Tor N?rretranders’ latest book “det gener?se menneske” (The generous human). It’s all about how generosity and altruism can exist, in a cruel, Darwinistic, dog-eat-dog world. The answer seems to be that the the two basic mechanisms of Darwinism, natural selection and sexual selection, actually favour generous individuals.

    This reminded me of an excellent article in Fast Company about sharing your business resources and network. In other words, expressing generosity and, yes, love through business.

    And while researching the subject (actually while checking the spelling of generosity), I stumbled on generosity.org where you can find a fun way to practice generosity in daily life.

  • Quote

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    Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things.

    – Dee Hock

  • Ken MacLeod

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    Ken MacLeod is the greatest living Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk science-fiction humorist, and there’s a great interview with him here.

    I’ve read most of his books, and they’re excellent. My favourite detail is a company that’s bought the ex-soviet nuclear arsenal, and use it to rent protection to countries that don’t have nuclear weapons – “You bomb our clients, and we will bomb you”.

  • Movie review: Startup.com

    The makers of this brilliant documentary got permission to follow the rise and decline of internet startup govworks.com VERY closely. We’re there as the idea slowly takes form. As the first rounds of financing are secured. We cheer as the company grows, and the future looks rosy. And we’re very much there as the whole thing goes wrong, and ends up costing the founders their friendship.

    This is my favourite epitaph of the dotcom years. See it!

  • Entreprenur Open Space Conference

    I was going to write about the excellent Open Space conference for entrepreneurs that d-i-f arranged last friday, but then I saw that Lars Pind has already said pretty much everything that I wanted to sat about it, so go there and read about it.

  • Book review: An unused intelligence

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    There are many different theories about learning, but not a single one of them states, that the best way to learn, is to sit passively on a chair, while a teacher talks about the subject in question. No theory ever in the history of the world has claimed it, and yet this is how schools, colleges, universities, business training and countless other learning concepts operate.

    This book subtitled “Physical thinking for 21st century leadership” marks a departure from that school of thought and describes a way to ground learning in the body.
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  • Quote

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    I hear people everywhere saying that the trouble with our time is that we have no great leaders any more. If we look back, we always had them. But to me it seems that there is a very profound reason why there are no great leaders anymore. It is because they are no longer needed. The message is clear. We no longer want to be lead from the outside. Each of us must be our own leader. We know enough to follow the light that’s within ourselves, and through this light we will create a new community.

    – Laurens van der Post

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