Happiness Makes the World Go ‘Round
Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you significantly happier. From page five – ‘…a word of warning for those who expect to become happier by becoming richer…evidence is quite overwhelming that after a certain point the gains are very small’. This for me taps into the ‘Enoughness’ paradigm I’ve been writing about for a few years
There’s other interesting insight to in regard to the progress of certain countries and overall ideas on what can be done to lift people’s happiness. Mental Health is a major key here yet often ignored as an area of Government support. You can go to the Columbia website at http://www.earth.columbia.edu or if you want to download the report from here, click this link It’s about 7meg in size
Or is it? …Over the past six years, the mainstream media polls have consistently shown the Liberal Party /National Party Coalition as well ahead of the Australian Labor Party. Those polls turned out to be wrong last time around when Tony Abbott failed to get enough of the vote to defeat Julia Gillard. Or should…
Read More >In my view ALL futures thinking about ‘big issues’ starts with futures thinking about personal issues. The idea that we take for granted the way our lives operate has for millennia been shown to be a high risk assumption. From the food we eat, to where we live, to products we use (and how we…
Read More >What you look at, how you look at it and where you find your information are critical elements for developing far more effective strategy. Futures work is about removing the organisational blinkers to increase awareness of risks and emerging opportunities often through Environmental Scanning (ES). ES comes in all sorts of guises and the key…
Read More >How do you innovate? Where do you innovate? Why do you innovate? How do I start innovating? These and a truckload of other similar questions are often tied to the idea that innovation is the silver bullet or panacea to mediocrity in organisations. And maybe it is. There’s a whole raft of ways in which…
Read More >From an organisational perspective it is pretty common for senior managers to spend significant energy considering when to upgrade plant and equipment, be it machinery, vehicles or IT infrastructure. The upgrades can occur on the run (in response to a surge in demand for instance), as a result of necessity (say as a result of…
Read More >If you’ve seen me speak before you already know I take a provocative stance when it comes to areas like personnel development, training and recruitment. Clients also know that once we’ve opened the door to thinking differently, they’re guided through some significant ‘of course’ moments in terms of how they approach developing their people and…
Read More >I flag from the outset that I haven’t been a regular readers of newspapers for almost a decade, only slightly less than my giving up on mainstream TV News shows. As such you should take this with a grain of salt, coming as it does from someone who reads maybe a paper a week and…
Read More >In the search for fuels and energy sources that act as a replacement to Oil, there’s much hype and claims that need to be tested. In much the same as claims about carbon capture technology being built onto existing coal fired power stations seem to lack both viability and credibility (in my view), the same…
Read More >Every day people in positions of ‘opinion authority’ make choices about what ‘opinions’ they will offer on a whole array of subjects. And it would be fair to say that over the past five years or so, many of those ‘opinion authorities’ have been significantly negative on Australia’s manufacturing sector. There’s no doubt that the…
Read More >As a futurist spending much of my time assessing emerging developments and their implications across an array of industry sectors, I am frequently asked for a view on ‘consumer trends’. Common questions are ‘what will consumers want in the future?’ ‘Does our product (service) have a place?’ ‘What is driving consumer behaviour?’ ‘How can we…
Read More >