Happiness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) (HBR Emotional Intelligence) (HBR Emotional Intelligence)

by Harvard Business Review, Daniel Gilbert, and Annie McKee

What is the nature of human happiness, and how do we achieve it in the course of our professional lives? And is it even worth pursuing? This book explores answers to these questions by presenting research into how happiness is measured, frameworks for personal behaviors, management techniques that build happiness in the workplace--and warnings that highlight where the happiness hype has been overblown. This volume includes the work of; Daniel Gilbert. Annie McKee. Gretchen Spreitzer. Teresa M. Amabile. How to be human at work. HBR's Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

• ISBN13: 9781633693210
• Publish Date: 9 May 2017 (first published 18 April 2017)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Harvard Business Review Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 176
• Language: English

Reviews

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

A nice, quick introduction to happiness, how to achieve it at work, and why that might be important for both employees and employers. (The general gist is that being happy results in more creativity and productivity on behalf of workers, and managers who think that employees work best when scared of negative consequences or worried about job security are totally wrong.)

There are two very brief essays at the end that take a negative view on happiness, but they seem to have been thrown in for some artificial sense of balance rather than because they say anything useful. One mainly protests that "happiness" is hard to define and that being content all the time is pointless--both arguments clearly addressed in the previous essays in the book, which one presumes the author of THIS essay should have been aware of. The other "happiness is bad" essay makes inane arguments like "You shouldn't expect your work to make you happy because if you're fired you're going to lose all that happiness and be a mess." That's basically like saying you shouldn't find happiness in a pet because eventually the pet will die, or you shouldn't find happiness in friends because friends sometimes leave or you just grow apart. Completely unconvincing, and I expected more research and better arguments, especially to close the book.