Can we be happier?

'Did you know the time of the week that the average British worker is most miserable? When He's meeting with his manager!' As Professor Lord Layard said this, the entire audience laughed. This is from his research from his latest book, 'Can we be happier?'.

Last night, I attended a great lecture with Professor Lord Layard, the happiness expert at the LSE, where I was an undergraduate Law Student.

Below: Dame Minouche Shafik and Professor Lord Layard

          

Lord Layard started by talking about the foundation of the LSE, by Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Fabians, who believed in the importance of improving society. William Beveridge, who set up the modern welfare state in the UK, was a Director of the LSE and was also profoundly concerned about the happiness of society.

Then Lord Layard talked about how society seemed to be getting less happy. This is confirmed by looking at life expectancy, which is now going down for the first time in recorded memory in the USA and to some extent in the UK. I believe that Coronavirus will accelerate this trend.

As Society has become more selfish, individualistic and competitive, according to Lord Layard, unfortunately, we have created a happiness 'Zero-sum game'. Each time I 'go up', someone else must inevitably also 'go down'. 

How can that philosophy of one-upmanship that many live with create happiness across society? Perhaps that's why, despite all our improvements in material circumstances, we, as a society, are more miserable than ever before.

Professor Lord Layard mentioned that the best way to determine an old person's life expectancy is not their doctor's 'physical' exam, but simply asking the patient 'are you happy?'. 

We put together a stimulating group for drinks and dinner after the event. This included a school teacher, Polly, and her husband, Ben, a software programmer, who works for Google's Deep Mind. My old school friend Lucas, studied PPE at Oxford University.

Lucas was the smartest pupil at my school - he got the second-highest first-class degree in his year, studying Politics. Philosophy. Economics at Oxford (this was back in the days when very few students attained a first-class degree). Then he took a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He is now a Professor of Philosophy at Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

Lucas brought along a close friend from Oxford University, Tara, a management consultant. I also invited Steve, who studied at Oxford and is a Doctor and Professor of medicine. We had a wide-ranging discussion about happiness. Some of the topics we covered.

Steve said he preferred the word eudaimonia —Aristotle's concept of flourishing—rather than happiness, which seemed to be more based on luck (Eutuxes) than living a good life.

Tara said that certain people, 'Eeyores' are always going to be miserable, and others will usually be happy. Then, Lucas, Polly and Steve discussed how bad the education system had become in the UK.

They all agreed that the institutions' constant performance monitoring was sucking the life out of any innovation. You can read more about this here - Moonshot thinking to unleash innovation.

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Six reasons why long-term productivity growth has flatlined in the UK .

                                      

One business issue that keeps resurfacing here in the UK is that of productivity. The big question is, 'Why has it flatlined here since 2008?' I noticed that, yet again, the Bank of England has predicted 0% productivity growth for this year in the UK.

I have much experience of living and working in other cultures. I was born in the Netherlands and lived there for a time. I have also lived and worked in South America, Spain and India, and most recently, in the USA from 2005-2015. Therefore, I have some practical context to explain what's happening in the UK, relative to other global economies.


1. Business transactions take too long to carry out here in the UK. For example, buying and selling our house in Boston took less than a month. In the UK, it takes far longer.

2. Business people need to be bolder. They also rely too much on gut feeling and should incorporate more data, more rigorous thinking, and fewer biases into their decision-making

  

3. Training and education. A lot of British businesspeople need help to write accurate, grammatical English. They need help to do basic maths. 

Lack of education has got to be a key reason for our poor productivity. We need better education - more executive coaching and business education, both online and traditional. 

And the general level of primary education needs to improve here. Spelling, grammar, maths, you name it. Knowledge of foreign affairs, news and even a foreign language is good too.

4. Investment has got to come a close second. If you want to be a productivity ninja, you need the tools. I worked at one company where I was managing a six-figure marketing budget, but the company gave me a faulty computer that crashed the entire time.   

Talk about an unproductive false Economy! All the evidence points to us needing to spend more on equipment, from essential productivity apps to tools like DocuSign or Microsoft Teams, to speed up business interactions. In addition, there is far more employee training in the US. 

When I was at business school, many MBAs were financed by their employers. I rarely see that in the UK. Why aren't UK companies trying to develop their employees -  sending our employees on professional training to boost their skills or even actively encouraging employees to get training themselves. 

I have done much of this in my career, but these efforts were only supported regularly in the US. In the UK, companies prefer to poach talent from other companies rather than develop talent internally.

5. We have seen a fall in leadership quality in the UK. You only have to look at the government right now. Our Prime Minister pledged five points that he would improve. Most of those situations are now worse, and he hasn't even improved one

Failing to hit these goals will undoubtedly reduce our productivity and competitiveness as a nation.

 

6. We in the UK have a fatal weakness for conventional wisdom. I'm paraphrasing Dominic Cummings here. But undoubtedly, one of the reasons his Brexit campaign defeated the much better-funded and institutionally backed remain campaign was because his team was creative and unorthodox. The other side was neither (To clarify, I was and am pro-European Union, but I admired the Brexiteers' strategy and execution).

The current conventional wisdom is that productivity will rise if we all return to working in the office. 

Even though productivity declined for fifteen years or more before the trend for remote work even began. 

If you want help thinking more unconventionally, I recommend this Malcolm Gladwell book for inspiration. 

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