Delivering Happiness — A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Introducing Delivering Happiness, The Comic Book

by shari on 02.22.12

Delivering Happiness and Writers of the Round Table Press are proud to announce the launch of Delivering Happiness, the comic book! In this interview with DH, publisher Corey Michael Blake discusses his reason for creating the DH comic, his creative influences, and why the world of comics might surprise you. You can pre-order the DH comic book (due to publish 3/16) at Amazon.com.

DH: In 2007, you decided to start publishing books. What was your vision for using comics as part of your business model?
Corey Michael Blake: Comic books came on our radar in 2008 when we were working with executive coach and author Bea Fields on a story based business book called Edge. It’s a character driven story of a CEO breaking through his creative blocks as a business leader. At that time we recognized the value of pushing the creative envelope when delivering educational or inspiring content for professionals. Around that time, our creative director Nathan Brown was pushing me to get more involved in comics. I loved building creative teams and producing content and this seemed like a natural fit, so we began licensing best-selling business books to repurpose as comics. Our first releases hit the stores in April of 2011 and since then we’ve released a total of 10 comics with three more hitting the streets in March of this year, including Delivering Happiness, Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing and an adaptation of the U.S. Constitution.

DH: Why did you think Delivering Happiness would be a great comic book?
CMB: I listened to Tony’s audio version of Delivering Happiness when it first came out and was so inspired by his journey that I encouraged my staff and business partner to read the book. DH became such a regular part of our creative and culture conversations at Round Table Companies that we knew the idea of a comic version would be a blast. I reached out to Tony via email and he responded with interest quickly. Both James Key Lim and Jenn Lim jumped into action working with us and Hachette to get the project on its feet.

DH: What are some of the issues you need to address when turning a traditional business book into a successful comic book?
CMB: Our main goal is to create a product that the author and his team are inspired to use. With DH, the scripting was fairly straightforward. The biggest concern was an illustration style that the DH team felt was in line with the company’s mission and message, so finding the right artist was the main imperative. We went after Rob Ten Pas who illustrated Dan Pink’s Johnny Bunko and once we settled on him and the character styles we were off to the races.

Corey Michael Blake

DH: Were you a comic book fan as a kid?
CMB: I was actually a Star Wars and Legos kid. But as a theatre major and then actor turned director and producer in LA, I’ve always been a huge fan of storytelling and the value of collaboration. When I was making films with our now VP, David Cohen, in LA, nurturing the team and helping them succeed was the priority. So shifting our team building expertise to illustrators and scripters was a natural extension of our skills. David was a comic book fan as a kid, had been a childhood TV actor, and then went on to produce documentary films before transitioning over to RTC, so we share a similar love for storytelling in various creative formats. [click to continue…]

Happiness Is Not Linear

by Agnes Hsu on 02.20.12

A bite of happiness.

Delivering Happiness welcomes guest blogger, Agnes Hsu.

Can happiness be embodied in a pink buttercream swirled cupcake? For me, the answer is a resounding, “yes!” But it took me 30 years to fully understand why. My first five years of life were in Paris where I grew up tempted by the most decadent desserts: silky éclairs, buttery croissants, flaky pain au chocolat, to name a few. My family would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up and my answer was always to open a boulangerie.

My mother called me a “gourmand,” or “a person who takes great pleasure in food.” I remember my parents using me as entertainment for their guests – asking me to open and close my chubby hands to get everyone laughing.

Flash forward to my teenage years where I became obsessively interested in health and nutrition. I joined my high school cross-country team and devoured nutrition books. This is when my first interest in baking developed. I was still madly in love with desserts, except now I started learning how to bake so I could make them fat-free and sugar-free shadows of their decadent selves.

I was so fascinated by nutrition that I pursued a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the field. But after graduate school, I knew being a nutritionist was not something my heart was capable of embracing as a full-time career. My passion for food was growing – not just healthy foods, but all kinds of foods – as I realized how much they connected people. I remember at the time throwing decadent parties where I cooked and baked from scratch for all my friends, and loving how warm and happy I would feel afterwards.

Not knowing what to do next, I applied the analytic skills earned through my graduate schooling toward a market research position at a product company. After five years, however, I was developing an itch to do something on my own – but the only thing I truly loved was food, most of all desserts, my lifelong love.

I took a leap and opened up the Teacake Bake Shop, filled with the most decadent cookies and cupcakes, all baked from scratch and made 100% from sugar and fat. Six years later, I have four of those bake shops plus a facility that ships around the country. But I’ve only been able to excel at my business due to my understanding of food science (applied to baking) and work experience in how to successfully market a company’s brand image.

Our mission at Teacake Bake Shop is to “sweeten your day,” to present you with a small slice of heaven and add bliss to your everyday life. Although the medium is through desserts, I’ve found that making other people happy is intrinsically what makes me happy.

I encourage everyone to understand their life’s motivations through the opportunities that present themselves. Sometimes things don’t make sense, but if there’s a burning desire to move and act upon something, it’s usually the right call. Things will fall in place at the least expected time.

Why Happiness Is Less Than 2 Ounces Away

by shari on 02.17.12

Assessing a mental barrier.

Research suggests that the weight of a mental barrier is actually less than two ounces.

This research has been conducted in the laboratory known as my bathroom. It is here that I observed, on more than one occasion, the appearance of my husband’s socks atop our hamper. For months, I struggled to determine why they never seemed to make it inside, hypothesizing it was because they are the last articles of dirty clothing he removes en route to bed. I suspected his socks fell into the category of “afterthought” and were casually tossed back into the bathroom once he stepped out of it.

This would be no particular cause for alarm had I not recently found myself falling under the “Sock Spell.” Once a poised observer of curious behavior, I had suddenly started thinking differently. At first, my thoughts were playful. Oh, isn’t that silly? But with time, they grew restrictive. I’ll move them tomorrow. Hmmm, they look kinda heavy. Maybe it’s not a good idea to move them after all.

The pile-up.

The Sock Spell had a disturbing consequence which physically manifested itself on our floor. Both my husband and I began piling our laundry in front of the hamper, under the watchful eyes of the Sock Lords peering down from Their bamboo throne. Neither one of us dared to lift the lid. What would we find inside? How could we be certain putting the laundry away would be worth it? Things seemed easier this way. Untidy and rather difficult to walk around, but, errr, easier.

And then one evening, I was struck by the emotional cesspool I had become. This wasn’t the real me! I may be regularly overwhelmed by laundry, but I have never been ruled by it! I pulled out my scale to confront the weight of this mental impasse, and there it was: the block, the barrier, the same phenomenon that I am convinced leaves passion and dreams in purgatory was a whopping one and five-eighths ounces.

Clearly, it was time to lift the lid.

Lift the lid for happiness.

Focus On Making Your Staff Happy

by Henry Stewart on 02.15.12

Happy, Ltd., cultivates happy employees.

DH guest blogger Henry Stewart is Chief Executive of the London-based Happy Ltd., a training company which has earned numerous awards including rankings in the World’s Most Democratic Workplaces and the UK’s Best Workplaces, and the Institute of IT Training’s Gold medal for Training Company of the Year. Download Henry’s book, The Happy Manifesto, for free, read his blog, or check him out on Twitter @happyhenry.

People work best when they’re happy at work.

That principle is the core of everything we do at Happy (a training business in London, UK). Think about whether you agree with it. If you do, and I find over 95% of people do, then what should be the key focus of management? By simple logic, it should clearly be creating an environment where people are happy and feel good about themselves.

When I speak at conferences, I like to ask the audience to raise their hands if that is the main focus of management in their organisation. Generally one or two in a hundred raise their hands. (I suspect I’d get a different response if I spoke at Zappos.) Yet there is strong evidence to suggest such a focus makes good business sense.

One restaurant chain in the UK carried out research some years ago to find out why sales at some of their restaurants grew faster than at others. They found one factor stood out in explaining the difference: how happy the staff said they were in the annual staff survey.

One restaurant chain in the UK carried out a piece of research some years ago to find out what elements explained why sales at some of their restaurants grew faster than at others. They found one factor stood out above all others in explaining the difference: how happy the staff said they were in the annual staff survey. For a time they even changed their managers’ bonuses so that 50% was based solely on those staff survey results.

They still wanted to maximize growth and profits, of course. However, they believed that the way to achieve that was not to target these elements but instead to target the key factor that creates growth and profits, namely how happy its staff were. They sent a clear message to their managers: ‘Your key focus should be on making your staff happy.’

This is backed up by hard academic evidence. Alex Edman of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the result of investing in the companies listed in the Great Place to Work listings over the last 25 years. He found a difference, compared to the stock market, of 3.5% a year. An investment which would have returned $100,000 in a tracker fund would have achieved $236,000 from investing in companies that focus on creating great workplaces.

So how would your organisation be different if the main focus of management was making your staff happy? Most people respond that it would not only be more enjoyable but it would be easier to get things done and would be more productive. So what can you do to make it happen?

Love ‘n Happiness Contest Winners

by shari on 02.14.12

The results are in for our Love ‘n Happiness Contest! Here are the final placings as chosen by our community:

1st – 3rd place: winners of a DH t-shirt of your choice and a wristband 3-pack from the DH:shop

4th – 6th place: winners of a DH coffee tumbler and wristband pack

7th – 9th place: winners of a DH reusable shopper and wristband pack

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all those who submitted poems! We wish you a very Happy Valentine’s Day!

Is Seeing A City’s Emotions A Good Thing?

by shari on 02.13.12

The Feel-o-Meter reflects the emotions of a city. Is that a good thing?

The Feel-o-Meter is an eight meter tall sculpture designed to reflect a city’s mood in real-time, but one of its creators asks, “Is that a good thing?”

As reported in the BMW Guggenheim Lab blog, the Feel-o-Meter was developed in 2007 by the Fraunhofer Institute and will soon be returning to Berlin, the site of its original installation. Made of neon tubes and steel, the sculpture is fed data from software that analyzes the emotion behind facial expressions. It may appear happy, sad, or neutral depending on the emotional status of the city-goers it overlooks.

Although the sculpture was intended to show people their emotions can be “seen,” one of the installation’s original creators, Julius von Bismarck, notes another purpose behind the work. “We wanted people to start considering if they want people to read their emotions, and if they want to know others’ emotions; if they want to be private or they want to be public.”

Bismarck feels it’s better to avoid a public display. “Knowing how the stock market feels doesn’t make the world any better,” von Bismark says. “So knowing how everyone else is feeling, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s actually a good thing.”

Amy Hiller offers a different perspective on measuring the public’s emotion. Hiller holds a Ph.D. in social welfare and teaches city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s school of design. After reviewing maps of deaths related to gunshots in Philadelphia, she conceived the idea of measuring the geographic distribution of emotion based on neighborhoods rather than a city at large.

Hiller sees the potential in developing a plan for help and action based on the use of this type of metric. “. . . to map something like sadness, frustration, or the feeling of opportunity,” she says, “would really unlock the true inequalities within the city.”

Science tells us that emotions, happy or sad, are contagious. Ultimately, would knowing the true pulse of your neighbors or neighborhoods on a given day change the way you feel and live? It might be interesting to see what would happen if we were given a daily choice to put our private emotions on public display, as done with this heart sculpture in New York City.

Images courtesy of Julius von Bismark.

What Makes People Happy in Paris?

by shari on 02.10.12

50 people 1 question Paris from Stills in Motion Malmö on Vimeo.

50 people in Paris were asked what makes them happy. How does your take on happiness compare?

Putting the Spotlight on Happiness with CineCause

by shari on 02.08.12

There’s a meeting place for film and happiness. It’s called CineCause.

CineCause founder and CEO Jon Fitzgerald describes his company as the portal for connecting film and celebrities to socially relevant causes.

Getting its start in early 2011, CineCause has amassed films across numerous categories such as education, the environment, health, war, and human rights.

CineCause’s online site allows filmmakers to submit their content which Jon groups by theme. He also devotes some of his time to seeking out promising new films.

Relevant causes are reviewed for transparency before Jon aligns three of them with a given film. Current CineCause celebrities like Matt Damon and Oprah Winfrey may be contacted by Jon or may inquire on their own to lend support.

To create showcases for the films, CineCause hosts “spotlights,” often in the context of a film festival, sometimes as a community event that stands on its own. The spotlights offer an immediate opportunity to make a donation (online or in the theatre) and get involved with the cause.

At San Diego’s Film Festival, for example, CineCause hosted a Q&A session with the filmakers following the screenings; the audience could make donations via smart phone.

On February 10 – 12, CineCause will host a Spotlight on Happiness in Santa Monica, California. The decision to select happiness as a theme was “simply the right way to start the new year,” says Jon. “It’s a topic that everyone cares about.” The films being presented are Happy, Project Happiness, and The Economics of Happiness.

Delivering Happiness has donated 100 books for the event to continue spreading and inspiring happiness around the globe while supporting CineCause’s journey.

After 20 years of making movies and directing festivals, Jon describes his greater purpose as drawing attention to and attracting positive change. “I can’t write big fat checks,” he says, “but I can use my marketing and film background to make a difference.”

Jon is an entrepreneur and what makes him tick is his family and his ability to create and do new things. He considers film to be a powerful medium for influencing change and says his career has helped him see the importance of living with gratitude. “It doesn’t take much to make me happy,” he notes, “but it takes a lot to make me unhappy.”

Jon believes in sharing his knowledge, whether in the form of contributing to festival strategies or acting as a sounding board for a friend who has an idea for a film. In addition to spearheading CineCause, he’s taken films into schools and has created a trilogy of documentaries (The Back 9, The Highest Pass, and Dance of Liberation) covering self transformation.

CineCause will soon be launching a membership program that includes access to quarterly Live chats with filmmakers and a feature film per month. A rewards programs allows subscribers to earn points for sharing movies and clips with friends and for interacting with causes. Prizes for helping make a difference include trips to movie sets and international film festivals.

Check out CineCause and help put happiness in the spotlight.

Is There An Equation For Happiness?

by shari on 02.06.12

In 2007, Chip Conley wrote one of our favorite business books, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. The book documented how, as the CEO of the large boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre, Chip used Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to create happier employees and customers during the last downturn. He’s out with his newest book, Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success, and it’s as good as the last one, ranking #7 on this week’s New York Times bestsellers list.

We asked Chip a few questions about how emotions and math can be combined.

DH: Why is the use of emotional equations helpful during difficult economic times?
Chip Conley: I believe that when the world is full of external chaos, we yearn for internal logic to help illuminate solutions in our lives. Rather than look for the light at the end of the tunnel, I found that using these equations was a way of lighting a metaphorical candle to create some emotional clarity.

DH: You define despair as suffering minus meaning (Despair = Suffering – Meaning). What does that mean?
CC: Viktor Frankl’s landmark book “Man’s Search for Meaning” was my salvation 3-4 years ago when I was going through a depressing time. I turned that profound book into this equation so that it could serve as a daily reminder or mantra on a bad day. Suffering is basically a constant in life. If you’re a Buddhist, that’s the first Noble Truth, but it’s just as relevant in a punishing recession and in many relationships. Meaning is the variable – it’s what you make of it. The way this equation works, if you increase the meaning of something and suffering stays constant, then despair declines. For me, it meant I was asking “What’s the lesson or learning in this?” Often, I had to think of life as sort of an emotional boot camp and that the way I created meaning from a challenging situation was to imagine what emotional muscles I was training – whether it’s resiliency, humility, compassion, or courage – that could serve me later in life.

DH: Tell us about your equation for Happiness (Wanting What You Have / Having What You Want).
CC:After I learned the Despair equation, I was fascinated by the opposite end of the spectrum: what are the ingredients for Happiness? I was fortunate enough to take a trip to Bhutan to spend a week with the folks who started creating the Gross National Happiness index in Bhutan nearly 40 years ago (today, more than 50 countries around the world have created a similar index). An alternative way of looking at this equation is Happiness = Practicing Gratitude / Pursuing Gratification. [click to continue…]

Enter Our Love ‘n Happiness Contest

by shari on 02.03.12

It’s February and the DH Team is feelin’ the love for our awesome community. That’s why we’re inviting you to enter our Love ‘n Happiness Contest! Send us your ode to love ‘n happiness by completing a 4-line poem beginning with the classic line, roses are red, and score a chance to win fun prizes from the DH:shop.

Deadline to enter: February 10th, 2012

How to enter: submit your poem online via Facebook, Twitter (using hashtag #DHlove), or our website. One entry per person, please.

Results: we’ll post our picks of the top 9 most creative poems to Facebook on 2/12 and let the community vote for their favorites. Final results will be posted to the DH website and Facebook page on Valentine’s Day, 2/14.

Prizes:
1st – 3rd place: win a DH t-shirt of your choice and a wristband 3-pack from the DH:shop
4th – 6th place: a DH coffee tumbler and wristband pack
7th – 9th place: a DH reusable shopper and wristband pack

For more details: please see our Contest Rules.

Need some inspiration? Try these on for size:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Do what you love
And be the real you!

Roses are red
T-shirts are fun
They can spread happiness
To you and everyone!

Wishing you good luck, happiness, and lots of LOVE!
The Delivering Happiness Team

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