The Happiness Advantage: Researching Happiness at Hogwarts

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Excerpt from The Happiness Advantage…

For me, Harvard remains a magical place, even after twelve years. When I invite friends from Texas to visit, they claim that eating in the freshmen dining hall is like being at Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s fantastical school of magic. Add in the other beautiful buildings, the university’s abundant resources, and the seemingly endless opportunities it offers, and my friends often end up asking, “Shawn, why would you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? Seriously, what does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?”

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About the Author

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, spent over a decade at Harvard University where he won numerous distinguished teaching awards for his work. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. In 2006, he was Head Teaching Fellow for ‘Positive Psychology,’ the most popular course at Harvard at the time. In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think Inc. to share his research with a wider population. When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Shawn was immediately called in as an expert by the world’s largest banks to help restart forward progress. Subsequently, Shawn has spoken in 45 countries to a wide variety of audiences: bankers on Wall Street, students in Dubai, CEOs in Zimbabwe. Shawn’s research on happiness and human potential have received attention from the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR. To read Shawn Anchor’s full biography, click here.

The Great Eraser

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I am a big proponent of continuous improvement and the need to always improve. Unfortunately, it has brought with it a real negative. It took me 8 years of watching my two sons wrestle until I realized I had fell victim to that negative consequence.

My youngest son won a tournament by beating the prior state champion in the finals. It was an incredible match and he wrestled impressively. As he came off the mat, I shook his hand and congratulated him… telling him that this was the best I’d ever seen him wrestle. Then, in the next breathe, I nearly said… ”BUT you look like you we running out of gas and need to do some extra running so that your stamina improves.” The kid has just wrestled the best match of his life and here the old man is thinking what he could have done better. That’s a sad commentary on what has happened to us.

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About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

Recommended Resource – Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

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Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
by Tim Harford

About the Reference

Adapt reveals the power of adaptive trial and error in solving the most difficult organizational challenges. Tim Harford illustrates the benefits of performing small, non-threatening trial projects to determine optimal product features, service options, or process performance. Further, he shows how such trials are often responsible for the new product breakthroughs that result in new market categories and propel companies to the next level of success.

Benefits of Using this Reference

Adapt provides several methods for leaders to foster small, non-threatening trial projects within their organization. From skunk works to formal pilots, these projects represent little financial risk but offer the opportunity for a product, services, and/or process breakthrough as well as better engaging employees; all helping enhance the bottom line. Additionally, Adapt reveals how to extract lessons learned from those efforts that initially appear to be a failure; ensuring the organization benefits from all its efforts and continues to move toward a beneficial innovation.

StrategyDriven Contributors like Adapt because it not only illustrates the concepts presented, it also provides many real-world examples and immediately implementable methods to foster ongoing innovation. The adaptive trial methods put forth in Adapt reflect several of the employee engagement and planning principles endorsed by StrategyDriven; making Adapt a StrategyDriven recommended read.

The Shortest Path to Higher Revenue

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The fastest way to find out what your next customer wants to buy, and how they want to buy it, is to ask your previous customers what they were looking for and how they went about buying it from you. In other words, if you want to increase your revenue, reverse-engineer your successful sales.

The information you gather, and the customer-driven actions you take afterwards, will start you on a fast track to higher revenue. Everything your company does – from product development to after-sale support – will be more attractive to customers and generate the kind of revenue momentum that makes it fun to come to work every day.

Taking this approach eliminates the chronic problems that plague marketing and selling efforts, including:

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About the Author

Kristin Zhivago is a Revenue Coach to companies of all sizes. She helps CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their revenue, by understanding what their customers really want to buy from them and how they want to buy it. Clients have included IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Jones, Bazaarvoice, and hundreds of other companies. Kristin also speaks worldwide on the subject of increasing revenue, marketing, sales, and social media. To read Kristin Zhivago’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article

Corporate Cultures – Culture’s Impact on How Work Gets Done

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An organization’s culture, its collectively shared values system, profoundly impacts what work is performed, when work is performed, and how work is performed. And the culture driver has as much if not more influence on the results achieved as does the organization’s land, labor, capital, technology, and intellectual property resources.

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