Q&A With The Authors of "What Happy Companies Know"
Dan Baker, Cathy Greenberg, Collins Hemingway
Q: Businesses are in a serious battle for survival. How does being ‘happy’ apply?
A: A happy company is one with positive leadership that deliberately builds a positive culture and takes systematic steps to help employees be creative. These steps bring happiness—meaningful engagement and meaningful satisfaction. Most companies fall into negative attitudes and fear-based behaviors because they are worried about survival rather than opportunity. Leaders are themselves motivated by fear or do not know how to create a positive culture. You have to seek to create happiness. The only environment that arises spontaneously in an organization is chaos.
Q: What do happy companies know that other companies do not?
A: Whenever you cite successful companies—ones that treat their employees well, ones that have leaders and employees eager to come to work, ones that have long-term success—the reaction is, “Sure, they can afford to treat their people well. They made a lot of money.” People assume that happiness is the reward. Happy companies know that happiness is the secret sauce that enables them to succeed to begin with.
Q: Your position sounds great, but do you have any data to back it up?
A: We offer both real-world examples and solid data. We canvass a number of leading companies from a variety of industries. From spaceflight to manufacturing, from software to retail, from financial services to healthcare. Many of these companies we know well personally. Others we have researched extensively. When you have a dozen or more recognized leaders of successful organizations who take a similar approach, you’re on to something important. Also, bring all the studies and research together—the first time this has been done. The support of our thesis is breathtaking and the proof is unquestionable. (See the Facts & Figures sheet for summaries and Chapters 12 and 13 for details.)
Happiness is not what you get once you have succeeded. Happiness is what creates success—solid profits and long-term performance.
Q: Other books have talked about positive cultures and positive leadership. What makes your book different?
A: Most books on management and leadership come from an outsider’s perspective, usually an academic or consultant. The value is diminished by the theoretical approach or the lack of real-world applicability within work. An outsider telling businesspeople how to change is not convincing.
What Happy Companies Know comes from the perspective of a businessperson making difficult decisions in a rapid-fire world, day in and day out. We embed our models and processes in real examples involving the work that businesspeople do: hiring and firing; training; product development; marketing and sales; financials; long-term planning. We show real decisions made with old-style negativity and the results that occurred; then we show real decisions made with new-style positivism and the results that occurred. We show the pragmatic value of positive behavior in the context of things businesspeople can do immediately as part of their regular jobs.
Q. Which is more critical, leadership or individual responsibility on the part of employees?
A: Leadership is most important because one leader can affect many, many others. But every employee is responsible for his or her own behavior, for being the “CEO of his or her own life,” to quote one of our example companies. Personal responsibility at every level along with positive leadership creates a powerful culture capable of driving a company into the future.
Q. Who is the intended reader, then?
A: The intended reader is the CEO and others in senior leadership positions, again because they can affect dozens or hundreds in the organization. But the understanding of how human biology works under stress, how human creativity arises in the brain and expresses itself in the work world, how humans can take personal responsibility even under the most difficult circumstances—these are lessons that can help everyone. Even people stuck for some time in a negative workplace can create a positive center where they themselves work.
Q: Given Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and all the other scandals, what is the applicability of Happy Companies to the modern corporate environment?
A: When we began the actual writing in early 2005, we summarized the current scandals and left a spot for new developments. By the time the book was done, that short placeholder had expanded to two full pages of additional corporate misbehavior. We had to condense the litany of crimes to keep the chapter to a reasonable length. That’s how endemic negativity and fear are in today’s business culture.
It’s not enough, however, to blame wrong-doers or shake our fingers at them—or to send them to jail. We need to understand the origin of those behaviors—all fear-based—and we need to understand how higher brain function can take companies in a totally different direction. Far more companies suffer “stress flu” than outright criminality, and they are all on the wrong path. Business schools need to teach positive leadership as well as business models and financial analysis, but the subject seems too “soft” for them. This book provides hard reasons why they should.
Q: You touch upon spirituality in several chapters. How does a spiritual approach apply in the hard-nosed world of business?
A: The creative centers of the human brain come alive when people are engaged in something bigger than themselves. That sense of ‘something more important than I’ is a spiritual reaction. A business must have purpose beyond making a buck. A business motivated only by profit will probably fail. It certainly will be a lousy place to work. Businesses can find nobility in how they support their community or in their actual work—even a used car dealer can be about providing something more, such as safe, affordable transport for the poor. The best businesses do both: find a higher meaning and help their community. In doing so, they are literally stimulating their own biology to become innovative and creative in their daily work.
Q: In books with multiple authors, most often there is one primary author and one or more secondary authors. In your case, you have three primary authors. How did that circumstance come about?
A: Each of us has a unique background, and each of us brought something special to the table. Dan is a clinical psychologist who was worked with CEOs for decades and developed a practice around positive psychology. Cathy is a leadership expert who held senior positions with two of the largest consultancies in the world and headed up a nationally known leadership institute. Collins has worked for start-up companies and was a senior manager at one of the world’s largest and fastest growing companies. These complementary perspectives enabled us to put together a work based on strong psychological and leadership principles in a way that will produce results in a real business environment.