Category Archives: Thoughts

My general thoughts

Are you happy?

Thoughts,

One fine morning, and instead of the usual greetings of ‘hi, good morning, how are you’, my friend Deena surprised me by asking straight away: ‘Are you happy today?’  I smiled and started thinking whether I was really happy.  I answered her with an apparent grin: ‘Yes, why shouldn’t I be happy?’  Deena responded cheerfully: ‘Great, that proves it’.  Deena went on explaining that when starting a conversation with ‘are you happy today’ instead of the usual greeting you get people ‘happily’ surprised, get them to smile, and serves as an excellent icebreaker.  This will also trigger your happy thoughts and positively impact your mood and emotions.  And because emotions are contagious, this will spread out a certain level of ‘happiness’ to the people around you.

Starting your day with a smile!  Why not.  A beautiful, happy, and cheerful smile is always a good thing to start your day with.  I don’t think anyone argues against that.  Professor Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman in their book ‘You can be Happy’ said that experiments have demonstrated that even if you feign a smile you’ll actually feel happier.  Moreover, Ron Gutman in his Ted Talk ‘The hidden power of smiling‘ claims that smiling makes you live longer.

Happiness is far too important to leave it to chance.  Happiness does not just happen; it must be made to happen.  And guess what, it is not the job of your employer or the government or even your partner to make you happy.  It is your job to make yourself happy.  You should repeatedly practice ‘being happy’ until it becomes a habit, a natural thing to do.  You can always start with a smile, the prelude to happiness.

I usually say to people: the first thing you should do every morning is to look in the mirror and smile.  Seeing yourself smiling has a recursive effect that will boost your feeling of happiness.  By smiling in the morning you actually increase your chances of having the feeling of ‘getting off at the right side of the bed’ every day.  As Professor Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman put it in their book ‘You can be Happy’, our extraordinarily complex organ –our brain- can be fooled by something as simple as a smile.  If someone smiles when they look at you, don’t you light up from inside?

So what are you waiting for?  Go on, give happiness a try, you can certainly do it.  What we do have a great effect on the way we feel.  Write on a piece of paper ‘I am in charge of how I feel, and today I choose to be happy’, and stick this paper on your fridge or on your desk in the office.

I recently watched an inspirational Ted Talk by Benjamin Zander about the power of classical music (if you like classical music, watch this talk.  If you don’t, it’s more reason to watch it).  Zander mentioned that someone he knew made the vow to ‘not say anything that wouldn’t stand as the last thing she says’.  I would like to turn this over and say: let your smile be the first thing other people remember about you.  You will certainly be happy.

Are you happy today?

To Trust or Not To Trust – That’s Leadership

Thoughts, ,

In my early days of ‘professional’ project management of IT solutions, I was running a data migration project when I was also assigned to a new Business Group to lead a team supporting an existing in-house-built solution.  After few days of the assignment, I was going out for a coffee with my new boss, the Business Group Manager.  As we were stepping into the coffee shop he suddenly asked me: “How much time you’re going to spend on your data migration project before you can move completely to my group?”  I said: “I still need around 3 months, spending up to half of my time in that project”.  I said that and started thinking of justification of my off-the-air guesstimate as I expected a series of “why and how” questions.  My new manager completely surprised me when he responded with one word: “Cool”.  Then he continued explaining to me his expectations of what I will be doing as part of his Group.  My new boss never asked me about how much time I am giving to my new role again, and I completed the data migration project in a bit less than 3 months.

Some many years later in another company, I was in a meeting with a Manager who, at the time, I was working with him for more than a year.  I presented a concise document of 2 pages as a description of a potential solution requested by a business group.  After his initial judgement of the poorness of the document based on its length, the Manager threw a series of questions –interjected with satirical comments- on how this document was developed.  I explained that this document is a description of rather a straightforward solution, compiled out of long documents and some meetings with the potential users of the solution.  I was taken by complete surprise when the Manager asked me, with a hint of mis-trust, “can I see these original documents, now!”  I left the meeting, printed 40+ pages of different documents and brought them back, only for the Manager to take a 10-seconds look at them (poor trees).  Unfortunately, I left this company and the poor project was still looping in its very early stage trying hard to set free out of the ‘excessive multi-cook syndrome’.

I remembered these two situations as I was going through the book “Smart Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey, Greg Link and Rebecca R. Merrill.  The authors stated that “trust has become the new currency of the global economy.  It is the basis on which many people do business – or don’t” (page 13).  The authors beautifully explained that when trust goes down in a relationship or an organisation, speed goes down and cost goes up.  I was amused by this straightforward explanation.  They clarified to me in layman’s terms why things were going fast and effective in the company of the first story above, and why they were the opposite in the second.

Trust is an important lubricant to run organisations smoothly.  Trust inhibits the fear of failure and encourages creativity and collaboration among all workers.  The minute that you start asking about each and every detail, (micro-management!) innovation flies away.  As soon as you hint to your team that you don’t trust them enough, you start losing their initiative, they will rarely try new things, tasks will take longer and become more costly, and you’ll start hearing phrases like “if you want to get along, you’d better go along.”

As for the two Managers in the stories above, they showed me in a practical way some important differences between managers and leaders.  For that, I do thank them both a lot, trust me.