Nimble Blog

As we embark on a new decade, I thought this may be a good time to reflect on Happiness – specifically, Happiness at work. It is with a sense of trepidation that I write about concepts like happiness, and doubly so in the context of the workplace. The trouble starts right at the very beginning, with the basic question of the definition of happiness.

In a recent conversation, an analyst I was briefing made an interesting point.  He said that while Kanban and SAFe® provided incremental change/ improvements, real innovation and real change came from disruptive forces – technology innovation or others – and those were the kind of changes organizations had to nurture and bring about in order to leapfrog competition, industry and market.

In his classic talk “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”,  given to a Harvard University audience in 1995, Charlie Munger, the iconic and legendary business partner of Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway, talks about the terrible ignorance and patterned extreme irrationality which he observed in himself and others soon after he graduated from Harvard Law School. He further adds that he made careful notes mostly by observations and some by reading and used these as principles and tools for his life and work. Broadly what Charlie Munger calls as Human Misjudgments can be now categorized as Cognitive biases in Behavioral economics and psychology.

A few decades back, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was no more than a dream, but now it has become such an inseparable part of our daily routine that imagining life without AI seems impossible. From self-driving cars, smart phones, and smart devices like Alexa and Siri to Google Maps that help you navigate your daily life, everything has become influenced or driven by AI. Thanks to the technology revolutions that make impossible things possible!