‘Drucker Apps’ 9/14/10: Earning Happiness

The Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University today added a new topic to Drucker Apps, an ongoing conversation about bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership.

This latest addition to Drucker Apps will examine what brings workers the most happiness at work. It was inspired by a much-cited recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton of Princeton University, which found that $75,000 is the magic salary figure for ensuring worker happiness.

Taking part in this running dialogue will be Daniel Pink, best-selling author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us; Sonja Lyubomirski, psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside and author of The How of Happiness; Ed Diener, author of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth; and others with insights into this subject.

For Peter Drucker, keeping workers happy and satisfied went beyond giving them fat paychecks. He suggested that workers needed to feel satisfied in multiple ways (physiologically, psychologically, socially, economically and by having a measure of power). Work is “impersonal and objective,” he wrote in his 1973 classic, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “But working is done by a human being. As the old human relations tag has it, ‘One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.’”

We invite you to receive an email every Friday with a quick take on the latest posts to our daily blog and occasional updates about our work to better society by stimulating effective management and responsible leadership.