Author: Tom Slee

If you thought China is a vigorous, energetic country then follow this. The excellent Blood & Treasure brings us a link to some fine photos of Chinese parliamentarians dozing off.

Tracking back a Google search from someone who landed on my post of the other day about grumpy employees led me to this supporting evidence, from the BBC in 2001. The evidence against chirpy people is mounting.

Link: BBC News | BUSINESS | Unhappy people ‘make the best workers’.

Unhappy in your work?

Well that’s exactly how your boss will want it from now on, according to new research from Canada.

Psychologists from the University of Alberta found miserable people make better workers than happy ones.

Cheerful people waste too much time trying to maintain their happy mood, while their dour co-workers simply get on with the task in hand, the project found.

The findings put a question mark over the millions spent each year on ensuring a happy working environment.

Comedians

Some companies even hire comedians to keep their employees smiling.

But if the Canadian research is right, they are wasting their money.

Grumpy, of Disney’s The Seven Dwarves
Grumpy: rarely whistled while he worked
The researchers, led by psychologists Robert Sinclair and Carrie Lavis, studied four groups of workers building circuit boards on a production line.

Although those who described their mood as ‘sad’ did not produce any more work, they made half as many mistakes as happy workers – so fewer of their products failed quality control tests.

The study also found miserable people used work to distract themselves from their mood.

While happy people were more likely to regard work as an unwanted distraction – and a source of unhappiness.

The findings fly in the face of previous research on the subject, which suggests happy workers are more productive.

If it catches on, it could also spell the end for bonding weekends, company songs and other attempts at corporate jollity – something that could put a smile on the face of the most stony-faced employee.

I love this article. Jennifer Wells in the Toronto Star interviews Jing Zhou, of Rice University. Wells’ article When negative thinking is job 1 is about the paper "When job dissatisfaction leads to creativity: Encouraging the expression of voice".

Monday,
Monday. Can’t trust that day. You know what we’re talking about. The
work week commences and finds you in a bad mood. Attitude? Negative.

Well
here’s something to buoy dyspeptic workers. According to Jing Zhou – a
professor of management at Rice University in Houston and co-author of
a new research paper on job dissatisfaction – grumpy employees can be
forces of good within an organization.

That perpetually peppy co-worker of yours? Vastly over-rated.

Let’s
begin with the long-held assumption that a high level of job
satisfaction contributes positively to organizational effectiveness.
You call that an "intuitively appealing link." Has there been no
empirical research to support this assumption?

People in our
field, when you see things like this, you do something called a meta
analysis… Taken as a whole, 100-something studies. What do they tell
us? What’s the general conclusion? That’s why we say when we look at a
meta analysis result… the relation between job satisfaction and
effectiveness is not there.

Yet the image of the happy, smiling employee persists as the standard for good employee behaviour does it not?

A
lot of those things are our perceptions and are not supported by the
data. Lots of times when people are really happy, co-operative, things
like that, I think they would be very beneficial for a company if the
company wants people to do exactly what they are told. You know, the
routine kind of tasks… But tasks are complex in today’s competitive
environment, so they need to be able to think.

You sampled 149
employees and found something quite surprising: those with high job
dissatisfaction exhibited the highest creativity. How do you explain
that?

This is so unconventional, it was scary to begin
with because you know we thought we are kind of arguing against the
majority. But if you look at the whole thing it makes sense, because
these are the employees whose job was not research and development. So
they go to work not thinking "I’m going to be creative today." They
only become creative when they’re dissatisfied with something and try
to find a solution to it.

So the bad-mood employee can work as a change agent, in a positive way, within a corporation.

Exactly,
because they see problems, whereas those who are very happy and
content, the people who are always, you ask them, "Are you satisfied
with your job?" "Yes." "Are you satisfied with your work environment?"
"Yes. I’m happy with everything. I don’t see problems." Therefore they
don’t try to find new ideas to solve problems.

So it is the miserable employee who may have come up with new and better ways of doing things.

We
want to be a bit careful with the "miserable." I know it’s exciting to
use those extreme words. When we say "bad mood," this is within the
typical normal range of peoples’ negative emotion. We’re not suggesting
that those are clinically depressed people… We’re suggesting the
source, the source that triggers the bad mood, is probably that people
were not happy with how things are run in the workplace. So if
companies are sensitive to that and capture that negative energy early
they probably can channel that into… an effort to find a good idea, a
new idea to solve problems.

I’m sensing management resistance to this idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely… A lot of managers who are leaders act on conventional wisdom, not on what is right.

You are not, in fact , suggesting that bad moods necessarily lead to creativity in the workplace.

No that’s not what we’re suggesting.

Under which conditions can job dissatisfaction lead to positive outcomes?

If
you have a culture that supports innovation, if you have a supervisor
or co-worker who provides developmental feedback, to focus the person
who’s in a bad mood, focus the person’s attention to discovering
problems, improving things. That would help. From the person’s
perspective… lots of people when they’re not happy they just get up
and leave. The person would need to feel somehow that it’s hard to
leave. We call that continuous commitment. Somehow it’s hard to leave
and you’re almost forced to try to make things better.

I was
particularly struck by this sentence in your paper: "When employees
respond to job dissatisfaction with loyalty, they are, in essence,
burying their heads in the sand and carrying on as if everything were
fine despite their discontentment." Can you expand on that?

If
they are loyal blindly… If they already see a problem but for
whatever reason they feel to be loyal is to pretend there’s nothing
wrong. That would be horrible for the organization… Managers who
don’t want to hear different opinions will reward yes men and yes women
in the workplace. So some employees have learned not to rock the boat,
not to say anything that the leaders don’t want to hear, even when they
see problems. In that kind of culture and environment, they won’t be
creative. They’ll just pretend nothing is happening.

So an
active response to the unhappiness is needed on the part of the
employee as opposed to passivity, or quitting. You encourage the
"expression of voice." What do you mean by that?

By
voice we mean… they need to be able to speak up. Something is not
right here. The way we’re doing things is no longer effective. Let’s
find a new and better way of doing it.

What can organizations do to encourage this untapped creativity?

First
of all they need to have a new mindset. This is what we’re trying to do
in this stream of research. To realize that creativity is not just a
job for R and D people. It’s a job for everyone… Once the top
management has this mindset, then they can do things we’re suggesting
in our research, such as encouraging people to provide feedback,
provide a culture that will support innovation and provide the climate
where people… try to make a change for the better.

Companies have a knack for placing non-risk-taking, non-creative types in management positions.

Exactly.

What then must be done?

Well,
either they do something now or be forced to do something by the
external environment. You know what I mean. If they cannot make a
change on their own terms, the competition will force them to… So
they need to either go through training or somehow change the way
leaders are developed and promoted to find and promote and select
leaders who do have this healthy dose of risk-taking mindset.

I feel it’s time to tell my manager to embrace my sour moods. Is there a particular strategy you would recommend?

First
of all, this research is about changing the conventional wisdom. So
they need to be aware this is based on scientific research. They need
to know this data comes from very vigorous research. Second, I think
today’s managers are so busy, running the processes of meetings and
stuff like that, they lose the personal touch. I say, how about an
informal conversation? How about taking someone to lunch? Why can’t a
manager engage in those personal touches?

Perhaps I could simply pass along a copy of your research paper.

Sure, that would help. I guarantee it.

From the Register: Indies unite to challenge Big Four digital deals | The Register.

The world’s biggest record label, albeit a "virtual" one, emerged today at the Midemnet conference in Cannes.

Indies have found themselves treated as second class citizens or ignored altogether in the era of digital music. The new organization Merlin will act as a global rights licensing agency, and represents the growing influence of the independent sector acting collectively. Members hope that collective action will lead to better deals with online stores such as Apple’s iTunes, and music-oriented sites such as MySpace.

"Merlin came together to license the individually unlicenseable," said Beggars Group chairman Martin Mills. "It’s the virtual fifth major."

No individual Merlin member label claim as much as one per cent of the world’s market share, but collectively they add up to 30 per cent of the global music market – and 80 per cent of the world’s new releases.

"We’re the largest company in the world if we act together," said Martin Lambot of the PIAS Group, and former president of Impala, the global indie labels’ association.

I spent part of this snowy morning reading Zadie Smith’s 5,000 word essay in the Guardian about writing, and what writers do and don’t know about it. It’s a fine example of an essay. It’s not journalism: there is nothing current about it, nothing that ties it to 2007 rather than 2002 or 2012. It’s also not academic: there are no footnotes, no references to others. It is personal and yet well thought out, so that it contributes something original (something I have not seen elsewhere anyway) in an individualistic sense. Like the best essays, it is a contribution to a continuing conversation from someone you like to listen to.

Which got me thinking, where could you find a 5,000 word essay in Canada? Not a piece of journalism, not creative non-fiction, not research, not issue-focused writing, not as short as an op-ed, but a real essay? The Walrus, I suppose, but where else? I’ve seen occasional pieces elsewhere, but rarely of this length. And certainly not in widely-read publications. Seems to me this is a real lack of the Canadian public sphere. I’d be glad to be proved wrong.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the middle of the piece to give you a sense of its content and tone.

Link: Fail better | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books.

First things first: writers do not have perfect or even superior knowledge about the quality or otherwise of their own work – God knows, most writers are quite deluded about the nature of their own talent. But writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it’s worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for better or worse, unique. It’s what you find in the criticism of Virginia Woolf, of Iris Murdoch, of Roland Barthes. What unites those very different critics is the confidence with which they made the connection between personality and prose. To be clear: theirs was neither strictly biographical criticism nor prescriptively moral criticism, and nothing they wrote was reducible to the childish formulations "only good men write good books" or "one must know a man’s life to understand his work". But neither did they think of a writer’s personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don’t think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

Most of the argument about copyrights these days focuses on the attempts by big copyright holders (Disney etc) to extend the reach and length of copyright. And on most of those arguments I’m in favour of restrictions on copyright. But as usual there is another side to the story, which is eluquently argued here by Sion Touhig. It’s a long essay, and I’m just extracting a few pieces here. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Link: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer | The Register.

We’re continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I’d argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.

I’m a freelance professional photographer, and in recent years, the internet ‘economy’ has devastated my sector. It’s now difficult to make a viable living due to widespread copyright theft from newspapers, media groups, individuals and a glut of images freely or cheaply available on the Web. These have combined to crash the unit cost of images across the board, regardless of category or intrinsic worth. For example, the introduction of Royalty Free ‘microstock’, which means you can now buy an image for $1.00, is just one factor that has dragged down professional fees…

The perception is "if it’s on the web, it’s either free, or I’m
gonna nick it anyway because, hey, ‘they’ can afford it". The reality
is that there are now more copyright-free or near-free images on the
web than copyright images. Most of them will be on Flickr (owned by
Yahoo!), MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) or the
major corporate image portals. Neither Flickr nor MySpace exist to
commercially leverage images, but clients now go there trawling for
free content, so they don’t have to pay a photographer for it. It has
caused a crash in the unit cost of any images which aren’t given away
and which are licensed for profit.

So as a consequence, the only entities that are now able to make
decent profits from photography are large corporations – because only
those corporations have the infrastructure to aggregate images into
massive hubs.

Fifteen years ago my sector had over a dozen photo-agencies which
worked with freelance photographers, providing images to newspapers and
magazines. Some specialized in sport, some in long-term documentary
projects, some in hard news. Some were co-ops run by their members,
some were big, some were small. In other words, the ‘photo-eco-system’
was reasonably diverse and a wide variety of imagery was produced by
professional photographers earning decent fees.

Nearly all those agencies are out of business and now only a few
major image corporations like Getty Images, Corbis – owned by Bill
Gates – and Jupiter Images dominate the market and produce ‘wholly
owned’ work – the corporation owns the copyright – either from staff or
contract photographers. The work varies across the board, from high-end
stock photography to news images.

If wholly-owned or virtually copyright-free (more commonly known as
Royalty Free) content can be aggregated into a hub, and the economies
of scale means the hub drives out smaller competitors, then huge
profits be made.

Most anti-copyright arguments are based on a distaste for unfairly
held "property". But for individual authors, it’s not, and never really
has been a property issue – it’s our labour we’re
talking about. Copyright exists to allow us to earn a living, but
routine flouting of this law simply strengthens the ability of large
companies to seize that labour and sit on it for profit – as their property.

In reality, what is happening on the web is the transfer of the
authors’ labour to large corporations for nothing. Anti-copyright
lobbyists have become either unwitting allies, or shills, for big
business.

The Register also published a set of reader responses, which are not nearly as interesting.

A bouquet, not a brickbat, for Toronto Star Business Columnist David Olive, who has had a mighty busy New Year by the looks of things. Not only does he have four columns in today’s Sunday Star – two on the hanging of Saddam Hussein, one on the $210 million parachute for Robert Nardell on resigning from Home Depot, Inc, and one
response to letters on an earlier column, but he also has a long piece in This Magazine on Red Toryism.

I’ve enjoyed David Olive’s writing for a long time. He’s not particularly left-wing, but he does have a strong sense of social justice, and — unusually for a business columnist — it comes through in his business writings. He’s done sterling work over the years reporting on CEO salaries, for example. He’s careful with his facts, writes clearly, and makes strong points in a thoughtful manner. We could do with more journalists like him.

Link: TheStar.com – Business – A $210 million parachute.