How did you lose your innocence - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

How did you lose your innocence - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog David Maister asks a great question: How did you lose your business innocence? I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them). An example: ?the firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That?s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.??? So here?s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing the world forgot to beat out of me my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people. Im really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run (stories please?) I agree with David there are a lot of people out there whose view of business include beliefs like: The ends justify the means its OK to cheat and lie in business If you want to get ahead in business, you need to be tough maybe even a jerk Business is only about money It doesnt matter how happy people are at work as long as they put in the hours I challenged some of those notions here and here. I think were seeing cynical businesses and cynical business people falling behind. Why? Theyre not creative. They cant innovate. They lose the talent wars and their best people to their more innocent competitors. And thats why the future of business belongs to the happy at work :o) Go read David excellent post, and tell him how your business innocence is doing. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related