Autor: Julia Neuhaus
Since I am a child I have a serious mental disorder (especially from a German bookkeepers point of view): making other people happy makes me extremely happy. I never cared about the fact if the person would return whatever I did because I did it just for myself in some way because of that feeling of warmth and the exitement I feel, when I see somebody being surprised by something nice he/she didn´t expect. My heart wants to do a somersault and I have to smile about one million times afterwards when I remember the moment. I deeply believe in the fact that if everybody would give good energy freely, everybody would get lots of good energy from all kinds of sources and overall happiness and health and peace on this planet would increase immensely.
When I was in Paris in 2008 for a Master Class with Bernie Hiller, a wonderful coach from Los Angeles who has worked with many Hollywood stars like George Clooney, Helen Mirren and many more, I first heard that there is a name for my disorder: Random acts of kindness. And that there are many more people out there who share my passion for happiness and encouraging other people to be happy. So I learned that there are real pros out there for that and that some of them are amongst the most successful people in the world. And not only can you become a true star through happiness, generousity and gratitude, also great companies can evolve when you think of Tony Hsieh`s “Delivering happiness” at Zappos. Harvard law professor and co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Jonathan Zittrain even sees a random act of kindness in the invention of the internet itself as I learned from his very interesting talk at TED in 2009:
As an employee of a company that is devoted to helping its clients to become extraordinarily successful in what they do I feel obliged to raise the issue of happiness as an essential ingredient in the alchemy of life and business.
I am exited about so many things that are changing in our world and I am deeply touched by the efforts of many people to make the world a better place. We talked a lot about the Cluetrain Manifest at J&P in the last days and how things have changed for some of our clients and keep changing and how despite of all technical innovation the human voice becomes more and more important … also in business. And that it can´t be faked. Therefore I think it is crucial to encourage companies to build a culture that makes room for the genuine voices of their employees and to empower them to speak on their behalf. And be kind on their behalf and deliver happiness.
So we took the “Delivering Happiness Pledge” today and pledged that we as employees of J&P will do at least one thing each week to make a randomly selected person happy. We are exited and keep you posted and would sooooo love to hear about any other experiences of that kind no matter if in a business or personal environment.
10. September 2010 um 10:57
I was late to work today – more than the usual 5 minutes. And honestly, this only accounts for like 1 minute, but seeing this postman struggling on his bike and finally his basket with all the letters dropping on the street made me stop and helping him. I remember very vividly how important it is to have all your letters in a clever order when delivering things. I self-financed my first years in college by working as a bike messenger.
10. September 2010 um 13:34
LOL…I can vividly imagine it…and I thought you are going to clean your window sill to make your landlady happy :-D
Great how you start being even more awake to whats going on around you…
This is so much fun! I gave my favourite chocolate cake to the people at my optician and they were really surprised! And they probably thought I am a little nuts but they definitely loved the cake!
10. September 2010 um 16:21
I payed my rent WAY early this month – that should count as “making my landlady happy”. But I’ll reconsider it next week.
17. September 2010 um 14:40
What goes around comes around…Danny helped the postman last week, today the lady at the post helped me save a lot of my time. And made me extremly happy! I had to send out some boots I sold on ebay in my break and couldn´t find a box that had the right size. I wanted to buy a box at the post office but they were all too small as well. The lady who works there saw me struggeling and went looking for a box in the storage because her colleague always keeps some of them for people like me. A little thing no one asks them to do but it makes a huge difference for the customer. Finding a store, getting a box and going back to the post office would have been at least one hour. Time that I can spend on other things and I appreciate this a lot. And apart from being personally happy about the kindness I received in an everyday situation I professionally believe that employees who “go the extra mile” for customers are an extremely powerful marketing force. Today more than ever.
28. September 2010 um 18:26
Random acts of kindness are definitely something to value, and speaking of which, the Zappos Insights team wanted to thank J&P for the culture book. It was really neat to see other company’s culture in play and the photographs were amazing.
If you ever make it out to Vegas, please stop by and say hello :).
Have a great day,
Amelia and the Insights team
1. Oktober 2010 um 14:25
Lovely video with Tony Hsieh and Seth Godin in the streets of NYC disussing that happiness is the best friend of kindness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kr0RRVLIGQ&feature=player_embedded#!
Tony and Seth: There are still sable tooth tigers out there! But they can´t stop us ;-)
This weeks random act of kindness at J&P was getting VIP-Tickets to a completely sold out party at the Octoberfest for two American friends of one of our bosses friends. It took everybody here in the office lots of time, many calls and we heard “NO” a lot but in the end it worked out and we were really proud to help them to have a very special WIESN-experience!!!
OK next week some serious charity has to happen!
13. Oktober 2010 um 13:08
Dear Amelia!
Thank you so much for your post, you are such amazing people and you truly inspire us!
If you ever make it to Munich, please visit us! And we hope that we really make it to Vegas with one of our clients someday to one of your programmes!
Lovely day, Julia and the J&P-Team
21. Oktober 2010 um 13:40
We learned about http://www.ecosia.org , a web search engine powered by Bing and Yahoo! that has pledged to donate at least 80% of their revenues to a rainforest protection program run by the WWF.
According to Ecosia, every search will save about 21 square feet (2.0 m2) of tropical forest.
A small thing everybody can do easily in everyday life by doing what most people do a lot – searching the internet.
We tried it for some days now and we are very happy with the search results!
If you download the plugin the search engine will appear automatically in your browser.
Apart from that we decided to make a little monthly donation to http://www.ifaw.org to support their work in terms of delivering happiness for animals.
21. Oktober 2010 um 13:55
As Julia said, we’re all using http://www.ecosia.org here and as the “heavy-researcher” here I can assure you that it’s no difference in result quality from Google. So I really “pressure” the people around me to actually use it.
It’s such a sweet idea to make a change in doing your every day work.
19. November 2010 um 11:16
The last weeks have been very busy at J&P (great!!!) and it proved itself difficult to keep up the spirit of random acts of kindness while everybody is so focused on “doing business” and being kind to the “real” customers, still some nice things made their way into our day without forcing it and they make me really happy:
a birthday lunch party with food cooked by our CEO herself (she is truly an artist in the kitchen) for our colleague on maternity leave…
opening of our library for a young man who is currently becoming a certified trainer & NLP coach and also giving away books to him we really like…