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.

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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 … Continue reading

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
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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.

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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 … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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.

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