Happiness at work has become quite a trendy topic over the past 10 years. And good for us—not just us at Positive Solutions—, all of us!
As global challenges grow by the day, happiness appears to be a safe, worthy value that can undoubtedly help grow and sustain our business worlds. And make a great difference along the way.
And that is something our friend and client, Mo Gawdat, Chief Business Officer at Google [X], Google’s semi-secret innovation arm, comprehended and cultivated way before the chief happiness officer and happy workplaces craze even started.
Considering the amount of time we spend at work over a lifetime and the unhappy state of our world today, happiness in general and happiness at work are undeniably a fundamental undertaking. So fundamental that it has prompted Mo Gawdat to dedicate his time and resources to spread happiness worldwide, through professional high-level happiness training and innovation workshops.
To help Mo develop his mission, Positive Solutions has produced a Happiness At Work series. And we are proud to release here our first episode:
Mo Gawdat’s expertise in happiness, his engineer’s logic, personal insight and leadership experience have enabled him to create, throughout his career, happy working environments in the midst of highly successful, yet highly challenging and stressful, business operations. And the results translate directly to the bottom line; as he mentions in the video, it is now proven that happy workers are 12% more productive*, and unhappy workers are 10% less productive**, while public companies with high employee satisfaction outperform their peers by 2.3% to 3.8% per year in long-run stock returns***.
It comes as no surprise that Google was one of the first top companies to jump on the bandwagon, asking Mo to expand his happiness skills to train 2,000 Google executives, of which more than 96% rated the training as “life-changing” and 40% as “the best they ever took”. Mo has also trained executives at Citi, MasterCard, UBS, Morgan Stanley, SalesForce, Bookings.com and Hotels.com since May 2017.
Mo Gawdat, a systems engineer and a serial entrepreneur, started his career at IBM and Microsoft before joining Google in 2007 to kick-start its business in Emerging Markets and develop close to half of Google’s operations worldwide. In 2013 he moved to Google[X] where he led the business strategy, planning, sales, business development and partnerships globally. A successful path you’d say… Yet, after years of feeling miserable in the rat race he had inflicted on himself (as most successful executives often do), Mo decided to break the vicious cycle and delve, from an engineer’s standpoint, into the cause of his unhappiness.
The result of his twelve years of research: a well-engineered model/mathematical formula that enables anyone toreach a state of near-constant happiness regardless of life’s circumstances. A/B testing of Mo’s algorithm proved to be highly effective amongst hundreds of friends, colleagues, associates… but it is true in 2014 that Mo’s formula was put to the ultimate test when he lost his dear son Ali to a series of preventable medical errors during a simple surgical procedure.
Solve For Happy, the book he wrote following the death of his son, is the pillar of a mission Mo has committed to as his personal moonshot: a mission to deliver his happiness message to 1-billion people around the world. Released in April 2017, the book has since become an international best-seller translated into 28 languages.
”A powerful personal story woven with a rich analysis of what we all seek
in a way we can act upon”
Sergey Brin, Cofounder of Google
If you’d like to become the next best-place-to-work-for, know more about Mo’s happiness training and innovation workshops or just to start a conversation about happiness, reach out to us at conversation@
Sources
* University of Warwick 2014 by Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi
** University of Warwick 2014 by Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi
*** 2017 study by Alex Edmans, London Business School; Lucius Li, London School of Economics and Chendi Zhang, Warwick Business School
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