I found this quote over at Kenny the Monk’s excellent blog:

“The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you.

When your children see you owned, then they are not your children anymore, they are the children of what owns you. If money owns you, they are the children of money. If your need for pretense and illusion owns you, they are the children of pretense and illusion. If your fear of loneliness owns you, they are the children of loneliness. If your fear of the truth owns you, they are the children of the fear of truth.”
– Michael Ventura

He has a whole post of great quotes here.

If you don’t know Kenny, you should. He’s a former catholic monk turned consultant and author and he has a very refreshing outlook on all things business.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kenny in New York last year over lunch. My favorite quote of his is this one, explaining why he quit as a priest:

I had no problem with God but I couldn’t stand the church!

:o)

Now go read his blog

Here’s some serious happiness at work for ya:

This is just awesome. It’s silly, playful, fun, loud AND it involves the passengers, making them part of the experience.

One of the many things I love about Southwest Airlines is that these kinds of people are the heroes of the organization. They’re the ones who are celebrated and held up as shining examples.

If you can help someone out or brighten someone’s day, be it a co-worker or a passenger, you’re doing your job well.

This is no coincidence – it’s by design. You can see Southwest’s former president Colleen Barret talk about it here. Just press play, the video will start playing just when she talks about this.

If you have 25 minutes, watch the whole thing – it rocks!

Complete this sentence: “When it rains, the price of umbrellas goes __.”

If you guessed up you’d be right in most places. But at IKEA stores, you’d be wrong.

Here’s how they price their umbrellas:

IKEA umbrellas
Sunny Day: $ 10
Rainy Day: $ 3

Yes, on rainy days, umbrellas are cheaper :o) What a nice way to make customers happy.

This is no coincidence – happiness matters at IKEA. Their founder, Ingvar Kamprad, once said this:

Work should always be fun for all colleagues. We all only have one life. A third of life is work. Without desire and fun, work becomes hell.

To me, this attitude only makes sense. Making your employees happy makes the business more profitable and making your customers happy keeps them coming back.

It ain’t rocket surgery, and fortunately more and more companies are figuring this out and committing themselves to happiness at work.

Your take

What about your workplace? Does happiness matter where you work? Does anyone care whether the people and customers are happy? Please write a comment, I’d love to know.

Related posts

• Top 5 Reasons Why “The customer is Always Right” is Wrong
• Happiness at Work at Southwest Airlines

Are butchers happy at work? Sure thing, according to an Australian survey:

A Galaxy poll of consumers on the perceived happiness of workers found that butchers were the most friendly and contented workers in Australia, and Ricky Beaves agrees.

Mr Beaves became a butcher 35 years ago and is happy every day.

“At the time I went into it simply because it was a job,” he said. “I’m lucky that I’ve always enjoyed it.”

Being a successful butcher has more to do with personality than anything else, Mr Beaves said. “We have fun with our customers.”

So there are apparently a great many happy buthcers.

What about happy plumbers? Those exist too:

Happy dentists? Why the heck not:

Almost any job holds the potential for happiness at work. There are happy bus drivers, nurses, programmers, teachers, undertakers, sewage workers and fry cooks at McDonald’s. There are also unhappy people in every profession you can mention.

This doesn’t mean that YOU personally could be happy in any job. You need a job that lets you do what you do best. You also need to work in a company culture that fits well with who you are.

So this is not to say that anyone can be happy in any job. That would be an overly simplistic, naive assertion. But any job has the potential for happiness, with a few exceptions: If a job is exploitative, if it requires you to be a bad person or if it involves unethical behaviour, then happiness at work is probably impossible.

Update: Just found an article, which proves that you can be happy at McDonald’s – and make a lot of other people happy: McDonald’s drive-thru worker gains online fan base.

Your take

What do you think? Can you think of a job that by definition makes happiness at work impossible? What jobs have made you happy or unhappy?

Related posts

• Why “Motivation by Pizza” Doesn’t Work
• Top 5 Reasons Why “The Customer is Always Right” is Wrong
• When is it Time to Leave a Bad Job? Find Your Quitting Point.

I was on Danish news TV (TV Avisen) Monday night talking about how you can stay happy at work after the summer vacation is over.

You can see the clip here – all two minutes of it :o)

Here’s three minutes of happiness for ya:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Fun though this clip is, there are also some deep lessons here about communication, fun, play and mutual expectations.

Why shouldn’t corporate communication be as lively, fun, playful and effective?