Toluu

The Chief Happiness Officer

Make Yourself and Your Business Happy At Work

The key to innovation is… happiness at workNovember 28

Top Dog Live 2008

I spent Tuesday in London at Top Dog Live, an innovation conference arranged by WhatIf Innovation, the world’s largest independent innovation agency.

I’ve been a long-time fan of WhatIf, both for the cool way they do business and for the amazingly nice people who work there, and this event did not disappoint. It was interesting, different, fun, inspiring and worth every penny of the (fairly high) ticket price.

The theme of the event was innovation in tough times. With a recession looming, many businesses are cutting back on innovation and that’s precisely the wrong thing to do. Remember: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

The speakers were many and varied - my favorites included Rachel Mooney, head of HR at Google, Lars Gejrot, head of HR at IKEA, Mike Addison og Procter & Gamble and Wim Roelandts, chairman of the board of Xilinx.

And here’s my main take-away from the day: Though the conference was about innovation, 80% of the talk was about people - and more spe

I’m getting married :o)November 10

Today’s big news has nothing to do with happiness at work and everything to do with happiness in life: This weekend I proposed to my wonderful girlfriend Patricia and she said yes.

Here are some pictures. Yes, I’m wearing an Elvis costume - it was a Vegas party :o)

We will marry October 1st. 2009 - in Las Vegas. Woooo-hoooooooooooooooo :o)

Great job adSeptember 24

I’ve often said that a company’s job ads are a great way of showing what kind of business you’re running and of attracting the right kind of people.

This ad does it brilliantly:

Click for a larger version .

The “Mr. Stabby” line alone is priceless :o)

What do you think - do job ads with personality attract or repulse you?

Yet another happy company: Pret A MangerAugust 28

Samantha Wood interviews Pret A Manger’s Head of Communications, Jay Chapman, and she is more than happy to divulge some of their secrets of success.

I especially love the opening:

She tells me she’d love to have a scary sounding formula to impress people with, but in her mind it’s all pretty simple stuff:

“If you treat your employees well and involve them in the decisions that will affect them, they’re much more likely to be engaged in carrying out the effects of those decisions.”

There’s another gem when they talk recruitment:

“You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be happy,” says Jay, “So we hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches”.

If you don’t know Pret A Manger, they make coffee, sandwiches and other great food. It’s sort of like the British Starbucks - only better!

What I’ve always liked about them (apart from the outstanding quality of their products and the great service you get) is their passion. It’s obvious that this company cares deeply about what they do - and that’s huge to me.

Change with a smileAugust 25

Why must change in organizations be so hard?

No company can thrive and survive if it can’t adapt and innovate and yet there’s an almost universal cry going up today that “change is tough and takes too much time and energy!”

You’ll have upper management on one side pushing for innovation, employees on the other side clinging to the old ways and middle managers caught (where else?) in the middle trying to actually get stuff done. Sound familiar?

My work with organizations all over the world has shown me that there is one vital factor that is being overlooked practically everywhere. One factor that can not only help companies change more rapidly and effectively but which contributes massively to the bottom line. That factor is happiness at work.

Here are the top three reasons why happy companies change more effectively and painlessly.

1: Happy people get more ideas
In times of change, companies cannot rely on the old ways of doing business and thus need new ideas. Preferably lots of them. And a fascinating study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School shows that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. In other words, happy e