Andrew Ferrier

I stayed in London last night, so decided to try something a little different and fly out of London City rather than Heathrow for my upcoming journey to Madrid. I think I’ve decided that this was a mistake. I was staying at R’s in Hammersmith, and the journey to City is much longer than it was in my head. In retrospect, Heathrow would have been much simpler; just a quick trip down the Piccadilly line. The DLR (something Richard has written about before) didn’t help. Only a few years after opening a potentially useful extension to London City, they are already deciding to play the UK rail game and shut it at the weekends for engineering work; a bus was needed. Pathetic.

The journey was tinged by a strange sadness, too. A middle-aged woman who had been sitting opposite me on the Piccadilly line for a few minutes, to all outward appearances entirely normal, suddenly surreptitiously slipped a can of Strongbow out of her (smart leather) handbag and swigged a gulp, then slipped it back in – all as discreetly as possible. Fortunately for me, I’ve never been close to anyone who’s been affected by alcoholism, but it began to dawn on me how strange an addiction it must be to need a drink in such a place – and from such a person. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for her.

I met Alexander Kjerulf, the self-titled Chief Happiness Officer (possibly one of the most cheerful and effusive people you’d ever meet) at euroGel 2006, where he was running a workshop. Now he’s coming to the UK to work with HP, providing consultancy on happiness in the workplace. There’s a competition running to win free consultancy for companies of 100 employees or less. If you work somewhere of that size, and you think your workplace could do with a few smiles, I’d strongly suggest taking a look at his blog entry on the subject. He’s a great chap and you’d potentially be getting some great consultancy for free.

(even if you don’t work in such a company, take a look anyway; his blog is full of inspiring tips)

I’ve recently taken to reading a lot more on-line – particularly as services such as del.icio.us have helped me to find high-quality content and more high-quality blogs come on the scene. This, of course, is the long tail of written content. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that as I read more and different things, I get more impatient with long articles. I hardly read non-fiction books any more, and fiction books almost never (preferring film).

I suspect I’m not the only one suffering from this decreased attention span, but the question is – is there anything we should do about it? Insofar as lots of shorter information diverts people from a few bits of longer information (reading 100/articles/week, say, rather than 2 books/week), it probably indicates that we simply don’t get as much value or entertainment from the longer stuff as we thought we did (or should). This is called revealed preference – what you prefer is shown by your actions, not by your words. So I suspect the simple answer is no.

Seth Godin certainly seems to agree with part of this theory – he has a theory that books, in many cases, have now become a ‘takeaway’ for shorter essays and other written pieces. I don’t think it’s fair to go as far as to say that they are simply fluff, but Seth nevertheless makes a good point – that many books simply expand on shorter ideas – and it is questionable, sometimes, what the marginal value of that is over consuming something completely different (everything you do has a time-driven opportunity cost).

The problem, of course, is that building up habits like this may make it harder to concentrate for sustained periods of time on reading/viewing/listening when that is necessary.

I’m interested in what your experiences are – do you suffer from decreased attention span? Is it a result of increased volumes of information, or do you think it’s something different?

Economists approach things in weird ways. I’ve noticed several posts on the more popular economic blogs recently discussing marriage, relationships, and sex: Are Husbands Really Like Potatoes? being a good example, as well as a discussion of polygamy. Tyler Cowen has even briefly looked at how nudity affects human behaviour (arguably not directly related to relationships, but it’s a fun read anyway).

Given that I like the economic way of thinking (given my limited training), I thought I’d take a look at dating, something close to my heart as a bachelor. This arguably makes me so far unqualified to discuss the subject – but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Most relationships go through three simply described phases:

1. Establishment – the fun part – getting to know a new person.
2. Established – the sometimes fun, sometimes not part. Most couples are in this phase right now.
3. Break-up – the not-so-fun part – upsetting, perhaps anger-generating. At the very least, not fun.

Successful long-term relationships, one hopes, never reach phase 3.

Most people enter relationships, I would assert, because they want a piece of phase 1 – it sounds like fun. Phase 3 is far away, and hopefully not going to happen anyway, so they downplay its significance. The question is – if phase 3 could be time-adjusted – expressed in the immediacy of today’s hurt rather than 3 years’ time – would people, on average, assess the situation any differently?

In fact, this comes down to a question of rationality. Economists like to assume that everyone is rational (or at least more rational than most people would). This means that people make optimal decisions, given the information they have. Without this, it’s hard to make markets make sense. Commonly expressed sentiments from friends after a break-up include: ‘at least you learnt something; remember the good times; it’s good you went through that relationship’. If cynical, one could dismiss those as simply statements designed to console and soften the blow. But the presumed implication of those words is that your choice was rational – it was worth the emotional upset in phase 3 for the enjoyment in phases 1 and 2.

I’m deliberately not going to come to a conclusion – I find rationality to be one of the hardest parts of economics – whilst I can understand people making rational choices about where to buy cornflakes from, it’s much harder to map it onto emotions. But it’d be nice to think that we do make sensible choices when it comes to dating, and that we do learn from our mistakes. I wonder if that’s so?

(NB: I know I’ve oversimplified the situation. But I think the same principles hold even if you develop dating into a more complex model)

Since meeting Alexander Kjerulf at euroGel 2006 last year, I’ve been following his work as the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer with interest. He’s just released his first book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5. Alex is also one of the most energetic and inspiring people I’ve met. He’s kindly consented to be the first interviewee on this blog. I hope you enjoy it.

AF: What first interested you about happiness at work? Were you unhappy at your workplace?

AK: I’ve tried being really, really happy at work. And I’ve tried being desperately unhappy. And I think it’s the contrast between the two experiences, the huge differences that draw me to the topic. When I’m happy at work I’m positive, upbeat, creative, supportive, giving, energetic. But during the one year I spent being unhappy at work I found myself becoming despondent, cynical, tired, depressed and negative. I hated the experience – but wasn’t able to change it. Until I quit!

Have you discovered which companies make people happy at work? In particular, is there an international bias: are some countries better at this than others?

The biggest bias is this: Smaller companies are usually better at happiness. If you look at the top-10 list for happy companies here in Denmark, 7 out of 10 have less than 500 people. This is one reason why WL Gore (they make GoreTex) limit plant sizes to 150 people. There’s also a national bias: International studies show that the happiest workers are found in the Scandinavian countries. This is because Scandinavian organizations have a decades long tradition for focusing on happiness at work. We even have a word for it: Arbejdsglæde, a word that exists only in the Nordic languages.

Do you think there’s a conflict between businesses making profits and keeping employees happy?

Quite the contrary. Study after study has shown that happy companies make more money. Why? Because happy employees:

• Are more creative
• Take fewer sickdays
• Are more productive
• Make the customers happy
• Focus more on quality and make fewer mistakes

In my opinion, this is the major factor behind the “Nordic Miracle”, the incredible success of Scandinavian companies like Nokia, Carlsberg, IKEA, Statoil and the Scandinavian economies in general.

You’ve just published your first book: Happy Hour is 9 to 5. Was there any part of the writing process that made you unhappy?

Only one part: Stopping. I could have gone on writing and re-writing but at one point you have to stop and say “It’s finished. Or it’s a finished as it needs to be!” That was difficult. Other than that, writing was a lot of fun. As it should be. Imagine saying “I wrote this book about happiness at work – it was a horrible experience every step of the way” )

You’re now self-employed as a happiness consultant. Do you think self-employment is a good way to be happy with your work?

It is for me!! I’ve been self-employed since 1996 and have probably been spoiled for life. I’m not sure I could ever go back and work in a job. But it depends on your personality. If you like a little more excitement, uncertainty, challenge and self-direction then it’s the way to go. You probably also need to be addicted to low levels of fear )

Should large corporates have vice-presidents of happiness?

Yes! Why have an HR manager, when you can have a Chief Happiness Officer. That would be a great way for a company to show, that they’re committed to their employees’ happiness.

What does the future hold? Are you seeing an improvement in happiness levels among employees? Is there a market for more people like yourself?

The world of work is definitely getting better on the whole. Ask yourself: Would you rather have a job today or in a company in the 1950′s? 1920′s? 1980′s even? Work is becoming more interesting, creative, challenging and the mood at work is (in general) becoming more open, free and flexible. On the negative side, we see more and more workplace stress – probably as a direct consequence of the increased freedom.

But there is no doubt that the future of work is happy. That is my ultimate goal: To change the world of work to the point where happiness is not an exception, but the norm. Where most of us refuse to take jobs that don’t make us happy. Where no one is forced to treat a job as “just a job”. And yes, there is a huge market for this – just look at all the people working in innovation, motivation, communication, teambuilding etc… At the core of this lies one thing: Making people happy at work!

Thanks to Alex for the interview.

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky‘s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

I went to a summit on Second Life and virtual worlds in Hursley today, hosted by Kevin Aires, Jack Mason, and Roo Reynolds – it’s becoming obvious that there’s a big buzz about Second Life both inside and outside IBM – a primary bit of evidence being IBM’s recent announcement of a $10m investment in virtual worlds such as Second Life. For obvious reasons, I can’t relate everything that was discussed. However, the discussion did get me thinking about Second Life in a slightly different way from before: as a basis for social networking applications, rather than as a basis for any application: an example of the former being The Greater IBM Connection, an IBM alumni community. In this respect, it seems to be more analogous to, say, LinkedIn, than another application platform (Windows, the web, etc.). This scope seems realistic – as I’ve stated before, meetings and conferences seem to be the best application of Second Life that’s been demonstrated so far. The consumer impact of Second Life is still TBD.

I find it entertaining when people state ‘Walmart wants…’, ‘Ford thinks…’, or ‘BT needs…’. It’s quite painfully obvious that corporations don’t have feelings or thoughts. What is true is that people within them do. I’ve thought for some time that one of greatest contributors to a corporation’s success is when the thoughts of its people are aligned. Unaligned thoughts are unlikely to be useful. Aligned thoughts can happen by accident (less likely) or because of good quality leadership (more likely), but in either case it’s important to recognise that they are still individual thoughts.

One of the reasons I like working for IBM is that it’s happy to allow me and my IBM colleagues to blog externally. Of course there are guidelines – obviously I can’t give away confidential information. It’s still a brave act for a company like IBM, however, and many others of equivalent size are rightly nervous about allowing the same – what happens if the PR and marketing folks lose control over companies’ images? This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of PR and marketing as disciplines, but it’s clear that there’s a risk of exposing non-alignment – people have different opinions, after all, right? Sure, yes, there’s that risk. However, although I hope our customers can see that IBMers are working together to produce good quality products and services for them, at least we have the reassurance that we’re being judged on our merits.

I’d encourage any other IBMers who aren’t already doing so to blog externally. You can find more information internally in the usual place (how’s that for keeping a secret, huh?).

IBM Hursley invited three final-year MEng students from Imperial College to give us presentations on their individual MEng projects today (mine, from several years ago, can be found here). They were:

• Marc Hull, who talked about his project on Balancing simplicity and efficiency in web applications. Marc’s work focused on improving the development of stateful web applications, and in particular on object-relational mapping in Java, in an attempt to allow more straightforward persistence of objects to databases. This has always seemed to me to be an area lacking in usability and ease (see J2EE for plenty of examples), so anything that moves us closer is welcome.
• Matthew Sackman, who talked about his project Glint: Breeding Mobile Ambients with Actors (which won the IBM Project Prize for the best final year Individual Project). Essentially, Matthew seems to be attacking the area of concurrent and distributed computing, in order to improve its robustness against deadlock (and other concurrency problems). He has chosen to do this by writing a compiler for the GLINT language, which is based on an Actor model and is especially particularly suitable for modelling concurrent systems.
• Francis Russell, who talked about his project Delayed Evaluation and Runtime Code Generation as a means to Producing High Performance Numerical Software. Francis’s infrastructure shifts some code generation and execution to the runtime of a program (lazy evaluation). It does this by building up a DAG to represent expressions that are ‘should’ have been already evaluated. The expression it represents isn’t actually evaluated until it’s needed, which enables certain optimisations to be performed (which is useful, for example, in matrix arithmetic). The framework generates and executes the optimised code at runtime (and it also caches this generated code).

I had the chance to meet these folks briefly (Marc and Matthew had also been here previously, when they were part of the team from Imperial who won the Thinkpad Challenge). It was interesting to see some academic work for a change – whilst I’d never be able to make a career out of that, bringing academia and business together always seems to reap benefits.

I wish Marc, Matthew and Francis luck if they choose to develop their projects further.

I’ve just booked my ticket for Bill Clinton‘s leadership seminar next Tuesday. Although my politics don’t align that well with his, I’ve nevertheless long thought he’s an intelligent man, and look forward to hearing what he has to say. David Millward from the Telegraph has also written about this.