If you listen to podcasts while exercising, perhaps you’ll enjoy the Audio of Steve letting me amble on for an hour.

A one-hour audio goes against my religion of brevity & less-is-more. However, if you want a painless way to peak into my thinking while hiking or peddling, this may be up your alley.

Here ’tis:

Some of you have inquired about my research into happiness and well-being. I paused the project for six weeks. Upon return, I realized there’s a lot more to it. Taking a broader perspective, I realized you can’t deal with happiness without addressing joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, love, sadness, anxiety, anger, motivation, and relationships, too.

Emotional business (which I will christen EB right here and now) concerns precisely the same thing it takes to replace 19th-20th century management with Management 3.0: treating people like people. That’s what it take to be an emotional business.

Today’s volatile business ride requires marines, not slaves. It’s a higher order game. Millions of people accustomed to being complacent cogs in the machine are taking on roles as savvy, enthusiastic, customer-facing folks who need to delight customers. To enable people to be their full, productive selves on the job means addressing good emotions and bad, the full spectrum. That includes making allowances for personal baggage. We’re all in this together. It takes trust to tango.

EB escalates the importance of the topic: emotion + business = all of us performing honestly as our true selves emerge. It’s the make or break discipline of social business.

Business has shunned psychology for too long. It’s now a positive field rather than the “nuts and sluts” attitude I studied at Princeton in the 60s. It holds many of the keys for leading a contented, satisfying life.

If we organize work around organic principles and fluid human networks, living more joy-filled lives can create a self-sustaining virtuous circle. “To become a better writer, become a better person,” wrote Brenda Ueland. Same thing to become a better corporate citizen. Work with your signature strengths, things you enjoy at a gut-level. You can change the nature of your contribution at work to spend more time doing what makes your day. Do what makes you satisfied and content.

I began with happiness but found you’ve got to deal with a whole range of other emotions.

Companies will be against this matching of person and the relationships they are expected to make and maintain. Dangerous coddling. They would be wrong. Corporations always crave conformity. Better to have robots. Corporate cultures want to knock off people’s rough edges. Reward structures, old boy networks, and power struggles work against change in areas where the old boys do not trust the workers, where it’s still us vs. them. Dismantling something like that would be rewarding but I’d rather deal with people who are coming from a positive direction.

A couple of miles from Internet Time Lab sits the Greater Good Science Center, close to the U.C. Berkeley Campus. Their vision takes the ideas I was drawn to further than I’d imagined.

Since 2001, we have been at the fore of a new scientific movement to explore the roots of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior—the science of a meaningful life. And we have been without peer in our award-winning efforts to translate and disseminate this science to the public.

They have an arsenal of behavior change findings ready to be harvested and put to work. The breadth of their vision and mine match perfectly, although they are sometimes overly academic and I want to see more practical implementation in corporations: the numbers, please.

Check out the the Greater Good Science Center website. I’m going to spend a lot of time there!

I’ve become webmaster for the GGSC members. The site is http://positivejay.wordpress.com/

Dating back 25,000 years, Australia’s Aborigines are the world’s longest-lived culture, despite the harsh conditions of the Australian Continent. By dedicating more than half of their resources to intangibles such as learning, relationships, and the technology of eco-farming, the Aborigines created a society without war, crime, poverty, or taxes. You have to learn a lot just to survive.

Karl-Erik Sveiby and Tex Skulthorpe, the inventor of “social capital” and a master Aborigine artist respectively, give a wonderful and artistic assessment of the Aborigines’ knowledge management practices in their book Treading Lightly: the Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People (2006).

Here is their description of how young men left their villages at the age of 12, not to return for fourteen years. Their “Walkabouts” lasted longer than your grad school.

At the age of around twelve a young man would, together with his contemporaries, embark on a long learning journey that would forever change him. It would take fourteen to sixteen years before he returned to his own country.

The young man understood some of the language of each community, because his easily teaching was from the women who had married into his community. He could therefore show respect when he went into each different community. But he still had much to lear, including the fact that communication is more than words; a people also show respect in the way they speak. To show respect he would, for instance, not look the members of one particular community in the face when he talk.

It was essential to know the whole of everything and he learned that the valuable knowledge is hidden with in and cannot be see-only with patience will it be revealed. Surface knowledge has only limited value.

When the man finally returned to his home community, he still had to perform three more ceremonies taking up to six months in total, before he was considered an adult man with the ability to take on his role for his community. And now he could finally marry.

The women were considered to mature into responsible adults at a much younger age. Hence the women did not need to travel widely to learn. The girls learned about the neighboring habits from the women in the community. Because the women married and went to live with men in other communities, knowledge from all the surrounding groups was brought into each community.

Fast-forward to today. Social network effects, denser connections, Taylorism implodes, everything’s connected, the faster and faster it goes, volatility sets records in virtually everything, nothing is certain, the future is a random walk. The world is zany.

I look at things from way up high and from deep down in the weeds. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on. I know some of the puzzle pieces well but I don’t have a clue what the picture will be. It’s time to slow down and reflect. I am months behind in my reading. Maybe I’m experiencing a solo singularity. I want to take a couple of months to learn “the languages” of each of my communities. If anybody asks, reply,

I intend to learn in public, here at internettime.com, my personal blog

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Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Every day, Working Smarter Daily uses social signals to select the top articles from blogs in these fields. Here’s how. And here are the top articles from this year:

“Fresh evidence of human gullibility never fails to entertain. Stanford professors Reeves and Nass provide plenty of cocktail-party ammunition with findings from 35 laboratory experiments demonstrating how even technologically sophisticated people treat boxes of circuitry as if they were other human beings. People are polite to computers, respond to praise from them and view them as teammates. They like computers with personalities similar to their own, find masculine-sounding computers extroverted, driven and intelligent while they judge feminine-sounding computers knowledgeable about love and relationships. Viewers rate content on a TV embellished with the label ‘specialist’ superior to identical content on a TV labeled ‘generalist’ (they even found the picture clearer on the ‘specialist’ box).”

It proved tough to put the theory into practice. Microsoft Bob was based on Nass and Reeves’ research. But the results weren’t all bad: Bill Gates married Microsoft Bob’s marketing manager, Melinda. Wikipedia reports that…

Bob received the 7th place in PC World magazine’s list of the 25 worst tech products of all time, a spot in Time magazine’s list of the 50 Worst Inventions, and number one worst product of the decade by CNET.com.

The notion of treating computers as if they are people popped into my head this morning when my wife stuck her head in my office to ask what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said. “Just swearing at the computer.” My research on well-being at work has sensitized me to the impact of negative emotions. At team whose members don’t express at least three positive emotions for every negative emotion will fall apart.

Could my outbursts against the computer be stressing me out? Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated that the slightest emotional transaction can color one’s mood for hours. And I was swearing at my computer whenever I hit a glitch, which translates into one rant every fifteen or twenty minutes throughout the day.

Would it make me happier if I stopped griping about the machine? I decided to find out.

As of right now, I have ceased swearing at my Macs. In fact, I’ll praise them when they do a great job. After all, the iMac I’m writing this on is 25,000 times faster than the first computer I ever operated — an IBM 7094 Mod II — and cost 25,000 times less. And it connects me to the world. Not bad.

Unlearning habits formed over the course of decades will take strong reminders. I’m giving that reminding task to Mr. Bill and Ratbert. They’re right on my machine, ready to remind me that the problem is just a software issue (Mr. Bill takes those hits) or human error (Catbert’s department.) They will council me to calm down. Time fixes all glitches.

Think I’ll be able to hang in for at least a week? And do you think it might improve my mood?

Taking a Stand for Office Ergonomics

The health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down

Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

I switched to standing desks several years ago. My upper office work tables are a few inches above waist-height. A fat squirrel enjoys running up and down the redwood tree just outside the window.

Step-stools lift my 120″ x 32″ work surface off the floor.

Downstairs in the Lab, I work at a waist-high slab of butcher block I bought at IKEA and mounted atop storage cabinets.

Those with sharp eyes will note Internet Time Lines, my n-scale model railroad, at the back of the butcher block top.

Do I get tired from standing all day? Never. I do suggest standing on a rug rather than a hard floor:

Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, and Winston Churchill worked at standing desks and that’s good enough for me.

Wondering what this has to do with my primary interests in happiness and working smarter? Healthier people are happier and more productive than the norm. Standing up at work adds a few years to your life!

Being fired?

Not being selected for the new project team?

Being assigned a task you don’t want to do?

Who’s kidding whom? These things are very personal.

I’ll never forget the time I had to lay off half my team. The personnel manager and I went through our routine. We put a large size box of Kleenex on the desk. One-by-one we called in half a dozen people, all close friends, and told them they were great, this was not about them, it was nothing personal, but they had the rest of the day to clean out their desks and depart.

People are emotional beings. We take everything personally.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, business has tried to cover this up. Management by spreadsheet is easier if workers are interchangeable parts. No messy emotions to get in the way.

But the business world is embroiled in great change. At the Stoos Gathering and other efforts to humanize management, participants are concluding that machines work well when you need to do the same thing over and over, but they’re not so hot when doing different things is required. Denser interconnections have transformed the world into a vast complex system. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Small things have enormous consequences. Logic breaks down. Shit happens. Everything’s different.

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and kill off obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

Business is emotional and is becoming more so. I aim to help corporations bring emotions out of the closet. Our forthcoming mobile app is part of that effort.

Business managers have a lousy time even talking about emotions and “the soft stuff” because they don’t know how to measure it. This has made it difficult to show the financial impact of having happy or languishing work teams. Even though it’s obvious that happy workers make customers happy, skeptics want “proof.”

Our app, Blips, measures happiness, satisfaction with life, and optimism by individual over time. This enables us to correlate changes in happiness to business results. Investing in the happiness of workers becomes a sound business investment. The app will debut at Online Educa in Berlin next month.

Now in its 18th year, Online Educa is the largest international e-learning event for the corporate, education and public service sectors, with over 2000 delegates from 100 countries. I’ll be back for the tenth year because this is the networking event where high-level decision makers shaping the industry come together. Fittingly, this year’s theme is Reaching beyond tomorrow.

We will encourage Educa participants to record their happiness on their iPhones several times a day. A large monitor in the Marlene Bar will display aggregate statistics in real time. It might show the happiness of business people vs. academics, German women as opposed to British men, or married people and singles. (All individual data will be anonymized to protect individual privacy.)

We’ll also have a discussion about bringing emotion into business, how individuals can become more emotionally intelligent, pinpointing stress and wellbeing in teams, and the politics of making major changes in organizations.

“Personal business” usually describes what you do when not at work. We’ll need a new term soon, because we’re finding that all business is personal.

Latest research on happiness and well-being