Building a culture of happiness with Raj Raghunathan

Raj Raghunathan is a professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches one of the most successful online courses on Coursera on the subject of happiness, titled - A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment, and has a written a book on the topic called - If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?

Subbu and Professor Raj discuss what motivated him to research a not-so-lucid topic as happiness, a working definition of happiness, the seven sins and habits of the highly happy, prioritizing happiness, and how leaders can facilitate interpersonal trust in an organizational context.  

Topics

• 2:35 - Correlation between career success and life success
• 6:00 - Definition of happiness
• 9:00 - Happiness as a construct for organizations (Affective v/s reflective)
• 12:45 - Functional advantages of happiness
• 13:35 - Happier people tend to be more productive
• 15:30 - Non-energetic joy
• 19:30 - The 7 deadly sins of happiness (and the 7 habits of the highly happy)
• 19:45 - Chasing superiority v/s flow
• 22:30 - Leaving happiness on the table by being more cynical than we ought to be
• 24:00 - Mind addiction v/s mindfulness 
• 24:45 - The fundamental happiness paradox
• 26:45 - Why organizations don't pay enough attention to employees' happiness
• 34:30 - Being overtly control seeking and what to do instead
• 35:05 - Psychological Reactance v/s Psychological Safety and Employee Voice
• 38:00 - Quality of decisions in teams that don't encourage psychological safety
• 40:45 - The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion
• 45:35 - Post-traumatic growth 
• 51:30 - The application of 'Smart Trust'