Well, here’s a turn up for the books as they say – the good old Financial Times talking about happiness, whatever next. I suppose we shouldn’t complain that Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness measure is actually very old news, and we should be thankful that the whole concept of social well-being is being discussed by such serious and influential bodies as the FT. And it makes a change doesn’t it from the constant doom and gloom emanating from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

I do get slightly twitchy about the mention of  statistics though. Which management guru was it who said you can’t manage what you can’t measure? The problem is that people tend to become obsessed with the target and forget why it was introduced in the first place. Hence the bizarre situation in GPs surgeries up and down the land where you’re prevented from booking appointments more than 24 hours ahead/told to ring back tomorrow so that Surgery Managers can meet the target for waiting lists.  Or in schools where children unlikely to pass a GCSE are ‘advised’ not to sit it so that the school’s pass rate is maintained. If we start measuring well-being in this way in the UK, and especially if we link it to performance-related pay, guess what will happen?

Image: TFDuesing on flickr.com, reused under Creative Commons License.

Recently several of my close friends have lost their jobs or are in the painful process of redundancy consultation with their employers, so my posting on Positive Psychology News Daily this month focuses on what positive psychology can tell us about human reactions to imposed (negative) change.

I had to include the good old Change Curve model (it explains the emotional roller coaster we experience as a result of change we didn’t expect or didn’t want) which you may already be familiar with.

There are various practical steps that we can take to increase our ability to manage negative change more effectively; I’ve suggested three activities here. I’m sure you can think of many others – please share them with us in your comments. To paraphrase Darwin, it isn’t the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most

In the doom and gloom that continues to fall over the UK’s employment market, this vacancy may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. According to this Reuters article, world-wide interest in Tourism Queensland’s opportunity to become caretaker of a tropical island off the Great Barrier Reef caused the website to crash.

You have to submit a 60 second video as part of the application process. Candidates’ videos can be viewed on the website – and you can even rank which ones you think are best. It’s no surprise to see that the better-looking candidates get the most stars – some things never change….

According to Tourism Queensland, 200,000 people applied in the first 24 hours. That’s what we call stiff competition. According to the website you’ve got until Feb 22nd to apply….

Image: chem7 on flickr.com, reused under Creative Commons License.

Google continues to go from strength to strength. It employs around 19,000 people, with annual revenues of $17bn and profits of $5bn.  It has 70% of the search market and 40% of the online advertising market. Not bad going for a 10-year old which started life in a garage in California.

Now the company has set up a School of Personal Growth, which aims help employees develop emotionally, mentally, physically and ‘beyond the self’.

I mentioned Google’s interest in Positive Psychology in this posting (Nov 12) about MAPP vacancies. Perhaps if it carries on growing at anything like the current rate, it might persuade other large organisations to follow suit, and maybe even abandon their traditional training courses to do something more enlightened (literally).

We live in hope!

Image: dannysullivan