Blogs

What Google, Patagonia, and SAP Know About Happiness That Most Companies Still Don’t In 2007, Google hired its first Chief Happiness Officer. The role had no precedent in corporate history. There was no job description template, no established competency framework, no industry benchmark for what a person in this position should actually do. What there was, instead, was a conviction — held by Google’s leadership, drawn from emerging...

The African Philosophy of Ubuntu and What It Teaches Us About Collective Flourishing There is a phrase in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa that has no precise equivalent in English, though dozens of translations have been attempted. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Person is a person through other persons. Or: I am because we are. Or, in the version that Archbishop Desmond Tutu — who spent decades explaining...

Flow State, Focus, and Flourishing: What Peak Performance Looks Like From the Inside There is a particular quality of experience that almost every high performer describes, across wildly different fields, in almost exactly the same language. The surgeon who loses track of time in the operating theatre. The programmer for whom three hours pass in what felt like twenty minutes. The musician who finishes a performance and cannot...

The Danish Secret to Happiness Isn’t Hygge — Here’s What It Actually Is Around 2016, the world discovered hygge. Suddenly, every bookshop had a section on it. Interior design magazines ran spreads on how to achieve it. Lifestyle influencers explained it as candles, wool blankets, hot drinks, and the particular quality of Danish winter cosiness. Corporations offered hygge workshops. Hotels marketed hygge weekends. The word — which had...

We’re Teaching Students to Compete. We Should Be Teaching Them to Flourish There is a race underway in every school and university in the world. It begins early — earlier than most people remember. It begins the first time a child brings home a test result and reads their family’s face before they read the number. It begins the first time they understand, viscerally and without words, that...

The Art of Doing Nothing: Why Rest Is a Productivity Strategy, Not a Guilty Pleasure There is a particular kind of guilt that arrives on a Sunday afternoon. You are lying on the sofa. The light is coming through the window at that golden, unhurried angle that only exists on weekend afternoons. There is nowhere to be, nothing urgent pressing. And somewhere in the back of your mind...

What If Universities Graded Wellbeing? The Case for Happiness as a Core Subject Imagine a university transcript that looked like this: Thermodynamics — A Organisational Behaviour — B+ Financial Accounting — A− Science of Happiness — A That last line would, for many people, produce an immediate reaction. Something between amusement and discomfort. A vague sense that it doesn’t quite belong there — that happiness is personal, subjective,...