Filed under: happiness, Lifestyle trends, Thinking | Tags: shawn anchor, think positive
Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard. He is the CEO of Good Think Inc., a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers — people who are well above average — to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures. He is also the author of The Happiness Advantage.
Filed under: Digital culture, Future of Work, Gen Y, Get another life, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Research Methods, Social media | Tags: innovative recruitment methods, online identity & persona
A great post from WSJ via Yahoo on the changing nature of recruitment . . .
Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst. Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their “Web presence,” such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position. Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.
Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates’ suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether.
We all know about the dangers of posting too much about yourself online but how many candidates have considered what a positive, active and engaged persona online can do for their future job prospects? If you’ve ever had the task of hiring new staff you’d know that a resume tells you surprisingly little about a person. Yes it details their experience and at what level they’ve worked, it can tell you whether they’ve committed to education or jobs for any significant period of time, but it can’t tell you much beyond that.
After many mishaps at our end we’ve taken to Googling all prospective staff members prior to the second interview. It doesn’t necessarily tell us any more than we already know unless they have a significant web presence, but it does go some way to colouring in the picture of the person.
A résumé doesn’t provide much depth about a candidate, says Christina Cacioppo, an associate at Union Square Ventures who blogs about the hiring process on the company’s website and was herself hired after she compiled a profile comprising her personal blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, and links to social-media sites Delicious and Dopplr, which showed places where she had traveled.
John Fischer, founder and owner of StickerGiant.com, a Hygiene, Colo., company that makes bumper and marketing stickers, says a résumé isn’t the best way to determine whether a potential employee will be a good social fit for the company. Instead, his firm uses an online survey to help screen applicants. “We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think,” she says.
Questions are tailored to the position. A current opening for an Adobe Illustrator expert asks applicants about their skills, but also asks questions such as “What is your ideal dream job?” and “What is the best job you’ve ever had?” Applicants have the option to attach a résumé, but it isn’t required. Mr. Fischer says he started using online questionnaires several years ago, after receiving too many résumés from candidates who had no qualifications or interest. Having applicants fill out surveys is a “self-filter,” he says.
IGN Entertainment Inc., a gaming and media firm, launched a program dubbed Code Foo, in which it taught programming skills to passionate gamers with little experience, paying participants while they learned. Instead of asking for résumés, the firm posted a series of challenges on its website aimed at gauging candidates’ thought processes. (One challenge: Estimate how many pennies lined side by side would span the Golden Gate Bridge.)
It also asked candidates to submit a video demonstrating their love of gaming and the firm’s products.
Nearly 30 people out of about 100 applicants were picked for the six-week Code Foo program, and six were eventually hired full-time. Several of the hires were nontraditional applicants who didn’t attend college or who had thin work experience.
At most companies, résumés are still the first step of the recruiting process, even at supposedly nontraditional places like Google Inc., which hired about 7,000 people in 2011, after receiving some two million résumés. Google has an army of “hundreds” of recruiters who actually read every one, says Todd Carlisle, the technology firm’s director of staffing.
But Dr. Carlisle says he reads résumés in an unusual way: from the bottom up.
Candidates’ early work experience, hobbies, extracurricular activities or nonprofit involvement—such as painting houses to pay for college or touring with a punk rock band through Europe—often provide insight into how well an applicant would fit into the company culture, Dr. Carlisle says.
Plus, “It’s the first sample of work we have of yours,” he says.
Filed under: Community, happiness, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends | Tags: Bhutan, GDP, GNH, wellbeing
borrowed from evilcabeeza's photostream @ Flickr
Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product.
The term was coined by Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972. It signalled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many worthy moral goals it is somewhat easier to state than to achieve, nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for the Five Year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans to the country.
While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH is based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.
Measuring our Progress
On the 16th of November Bhutan hold their annual forum on Gross National Happiness A country that has facinated many of us for decades since the King of Bhutan refocused the country’s vision to include and more importantly measure, the country’s happiness in an effort to start to manage that as effectively as it would traditionally seek to manage economic growth. Below is an article from The Australian suggesting that Bhutan’s goal of happiness could be a lesson for us all. I’ve also posted some additional research reports from the global wellbeing studies from the nef in the UK that you might also find interesting.
Filed under: eco marketing, farm to table, Food trends & info, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends | Tags: Carrie Brownstein, Fred Armisen, Portland, Portlandia
And while we’re on the subject of Portland, which by the way if you’ve never traversed that far is an absolutely wonderful city.. It’s progressive, it’s considered, it’s design focused, you can eat well easily, people value organic and it generally feels like an all round healthy approach to life and life style. On that note,if you’re into the whole farm-to-table thing you absolutely need to check out this episode of Portlandia. Portlandia is a series created by local musician Fred Armisen and his partner-in-crime Carrie Brownstein. It’s a hilarious series covering the various aspects of what makes Portland weird. . . ["Keep Portland weird" by the way is a self titled motto bestowed upon Portland by the locals who live there]. We all love a bit of organic produce, we all care about the provenance of our food but this is perhaps taking it a little far . . . It’s genius. Enjoy.
You can check out more about Portlandia here. Better still, check out the real thing.
Filed under: content communities, Emergent media, Lifestyle trends | Tags: Melbourne bike magazine, treadlie
The Melbourne crew have done it again and gone and launched a brand new magazine way ahead of the rest of us. While Sydneysiders are still arguing over whether Clover Moore’s bike lane through 2010 will serve anyone other than the ‘sandal wearing muesli crunching’ [as Paul Keating so eloquently put it], the Melbourne peeps have just bypassed such ridiculous time wasting and moved straight in for the kill. Enter Treadlie. A brand new magazine by the guys at Green that promotes, encourages, explores and connects those involved in bike culture. And by the looks of it, this movement extends way beyond hippies in hessian or sociopaths in spandex. How refreshing.
You can check it out online here
Filed under: Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Nice Design | Tags: luxury trend, rough luxe
The holidays are over I can’t believe it. It seems like only yesterday I was scrambling to get everything finished for Christmas and now here I am sitting at my desk ready to start another year. I do however feel significantly more energised and excited about the year ahead than I did a few weeks ago. It’s amazing how good it feels to run away from grown up life for a while and let the engine cool down and in some cases, switch off entirely.
There’s a couple of things caught my attention which I thought I’d share with you, the first off is an interesting new hotel in London called Rough Luxe.
A couple of my mates were heading back to the UK for Christmas to spend it with family & showed me this odd little hotel they were planning to stay at in London. It’s called Rough Luxe and the idea behind it is A little luxury in the rough part of London. The hotel itself looks like it’s a mixture of old pieces, statement art & design alongside bibs & bobs that have been collected from round the traps. The idea basically is to push the idea of luxury beyond fancy pants ownables and into all things luxury – time, emotion, considered architecture & design.
They describe it on their site as :“Rough Luxe is a new way of looking at luxury as part of time and not only part of an object of consumption. Luxury is an enriching personal experience and not only an ownership or consumption of an expensive object. Therefore, the Rough Luxe definition of luxury is: time for reflection, personal encounters with people, nature, architecture and environment as well as food and social and cultural experiences linked to geographic locations.”
The hotel is part of a wider Rough Luxe Philosophy which can be applied across hotels, restaurants, retail and distribution businesses [or so they're hoping].
I’ll try & get some photos from the peeps who stayed there and post them here. In the meantime, check out the hotel here
Filed under: Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Research Presentations, Thinking, Trends stuff, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: 2008, consumer, now and next, nowandnext, Richard watson, shanghai, social trends, trend map, trend report, trends, what's next
A trendy map . .
The latest Trends Report from Richard Watson of “What’s Next” has just been uploaded. It explores a bunch of social consumer trends and has fancy planning tools like this trend map which is quite spiffy and looks very smart. If you fancy a look you can find the latest trend research here
Filed under: Advertising, Gen Research, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Research Methods, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: coolhunting, Dcode, Henley Centre, Piers Fawkes, PSFK, The problem with trends, trendhunting, trends, Trendspotters, trendspotting
Piers has called the Emperor’s bluff and now he’s naked . . . . Here’s a sneak but check it out for yourself, it’s a good post.
There’s something wrong in the trends business. It’s broken. It’s broken by lack of imagination, lack of collaboration and secrecy. Below we’ve listed some major areas that need fixing, not for our competitive sake, but for an industry to evolve and become useful enough to inspire its clients to make things better.
Trends services have an unhealthy reliance on control, restriction of information and perception. Trends companies put up gates that guard this mystical information that somehow only they could gather. This presentation from Henley Center’s d_Code is an example of how the trends industry attempts to scare companies into thinking how little they know. There’s no explanation of why d_code knows better, just that they somehow know a lot more than you do (and they’ve got the graphic designer to prove it). AgencySpy gave this great reaction to the presentation in 2007:
“No ideas. No dissection of new cultural movements to help you on your way. No outlay of creatives, organizations, thinkers that are shaking up the underground to shape the future. Nada. Every one of their clients should feel like they just got punk’d.”
Filed under: Advertising, Agency structure, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative co., Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Macro trends, Research Methods, Thinking, Trends stuff, Work Futures | Tags: feeder, ideas, Innovation, innovation feeder, innovation research, innovative, ivy ross, jody turner, Macro trends, old navy, social trends, trends, trendspotter, Work Futures
Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.
When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.
So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.
The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?
Filed under: Borrow this, content communities, creativity, Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Futures, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Social, Social media, Trends stuff, Work Futures | Tags: business week, experience the message, online consumer trends, online stats, online trends, US online internet usage
I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display – anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.
You can check out Max’s original post here
The original Business Week article can be found here
