# Transcript: 10 years of happiness at work

## Description

This talk will explore why it makes sense to address something as intangible as the feeling of happiness in the workplace. You will learn how leaders’ perspectives on corporate culture have evolved over time. There will also be space to reflect on how the world of work (and happiness within it) might develop in the coming years.



Who is Michal Šrajer



Michal Šrajer studied mathematics and physics and co-founded the Inmite studio sixteen years ago. It quickly became a leader in smartphone app development in the Czech Republic. There, Michal became the first Czech "Chief Happiness Officer" and set out to discover how to build successful companies where people feel great. Nine years ago, after an acquisition, Inmite became part of the global Avast. However, Michal’s role as CHO and his mission remained. After a year-long family trip around the world, where he drew inspiration from many great companies, he returned to the Czech Republic and co-founded the international conference Happiness@Work Live!, which recently became part of Red Button. In the meantime, Michal also co-founded several tech startups and recently launched the CEO Community, creating a space for leaders to meet, support each other, and grow.

## Transcript

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**[00:10:00]** about how to build a company where programmers feel good,

**[00:10:03]** how to build a company optimized for people to feel good there.

**[00:10:06]** It was about transparency,

**[00:10:09]** about not needing to build big hierarchies,

**[00:10:12]** and more importantly, about giving space

**[00:10:15]** so they can do the good work they came to do.

**[00:10:18]** And we started trying this ourselves. Like him,

**[00:10:21]** we built a nice environment to work well in.

**[00:10:26]** My favorite part is the office we made at that time,

**[00:10:29]** a big green board with a timeline on it,

**[00:10:33]** and the timeline even went around the corner. It worked like this:

**[00:10:36]** when we thought about what defines us,

**[00:10:39]** what makes our company what it is,

**[00:10:42]** we naturally came back to the people who work with us.

**[00:10:45]** So we asked each team member

**[00:10:48]** to think about what they represent in the company and where they fit

**[00:10:53]** in the story of our company. That's how the timeline started,

**[00:10:57]** with each person having their own avatar and a piece of themselves there.

**[00:11:00]** Then, when a colleague could bring a friend for a tour,

**[00:11:03]** they could show, "This is me in the company,

**[00:11:06]** and I matter here. I'm part of everything."

**[00:11:09]** People often asked me if we erased those who left,

**[00:11:13]** because a few people did leave the company.

**[00:11:16]** But we didn't erase them, because they were already part of the story.

**[00:11:19]** They left their mark and were part of it.

**[00:11:23]** Whether they were with us for a long time or not quite.

**[00:11:28]** And we did a bunch of other things to make sure we felt good in the company.

**[00:11:32]** For example, we built snowmen on the face of an android.

**[00:11:35]** Later, we even managed to make a bitten apple as a snowman.

**[00:11:39]** We were improving.

**[00:11:41]** And when we built the company so that we felt good in it,

**[00:11:44]** we realized that we feel good when there is no unnecessary hierarchy.

**[00:11:48]** We feel good, we feel good,

**[00:11:50]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:11:52]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:11:54]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:11:56]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:11:58]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:00]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:02]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:04]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:06]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:08]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:10]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:12]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:14]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:16]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:18]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:20]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:22]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:24]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:26]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:28]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:30]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:32]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:34]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:36]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:38]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:40]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:42]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:44]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:46]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:48]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:50]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:52]** we feel good, we feel good,

**[00:12:54]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:12:56]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:12:58]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:13:00]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:13:02]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:13:04]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:13:06]** when we feel good, when we feel good,

**[00:13:08]** when we feel good.

**[00:13:38]** And of course, more and more scientific findings are emerging.

**[00:13:46]** It's, I just got confused,

**[00:13:48]** I have the wrong time written down, everything is shifted by half an hour.

**[00:13:52]** If I finish badly, we'll see how it turns out.

**[00:13:56]** Here with my timing, you can see that with those numbers,

**[00:13:58]** although I like them on graphs, sometimes

**[00:14:00]** the person doesn't write it correctly on paper.

**[00:14:04]** You could find tons of studies today,

**[00:14:06]** and this is, for example, a meta-study from 2005,

**[00:14:10]** which looks at 225 scientific studies,

**[00:14:13]** showing that happier people are more productive,

**[00:14:17]** more creative, earn more money, have more friends,

**[00:14:20]** social support, even have stronger immune systems,

**[00:14:23]** help others more, and are more resilient to stress.

**[00:14:27]** And we could find many, many similar studies.

**[00:14:30]** For example, happy workplaces are 300% more successful,

**[00:14:33]** more innovative, more productive,

**[00:14:35]** have lower turnover according to Gallup,

**[00:14:37]** and have fewer sick days.

**[00:14:40]** These are all pretty good arguments

**[00:14:42]** for why happiness at work

**[00:14:44]** and the atmosphere in a company deserve attention.

**[00:14:48]** And finally, I like this graph here,

**[00:14:50]** which shows, the dark line

**[00:14:54]** represents the Fortune 100 Best Employers to Work For,

**[00:14:57]** from the best employers in the United States

**[00:15:00]** between 1998 and 2016.

**[00:15:02]** The light line is a large,

**[00:15:04]** index of about three thousand.

**[00:15:06]** And you can see that the best employers

**[00:15:08]** grew during this period,

**[00:15:10]** tracked over 18 years,

**[00:15:13]** tripled the value of events.

**[00:15:16]** That means even companies that work great for people,

**[00:15:19]** end up working great for the market

**[00:15:21]** and do great business.

**[00:15:23]** Which is good news.

**[00:15:25]** But now the question remains,

**[00:15:27]** how to actually do it and what can we learn about it.

**[00:15:29]** Before we dive into that question,

**[00:15:31]** I'll start the first of two

**[00:15:34]** interactive questions for you on the slide.

**[00:15:37]** Please try to take out your phone,

**[00:15:39]** it should work with everything.

**[00:15:43]** Now you'll see a question,

**[00:15:45]** about what contributes to happiness at work.

**[00:15:47]** I'll let the question run for a moment

**[00:15:49]** and we'll move to the next slide

**[00:15:51]** and soon we'll look at

**[00:15:54]** what you wrote there.

**[00:15:56]** Try to think about what contributes to feeling good at work.

**[00:15:58]** Please answer with one word,

**[00:16:00]** so we can nicely create a map,

**[00:16:02]** which we will then see together.

**[00:16:04]** I started researching tons of companies worldwide,

**[00:16:06]** because it turned out we didn't discover America

**[00:16:08]** by starting a company

**[00:16:10]** where people would feel good.

**[00:16:12]** I began looking for inspiration

**[00:16:14]** and tried more and more experiments on ideas.

**[00:16:16]** The ultimate experiment on ideas in Huzovky,

**[00:16:18]** which we did,

**[00:16:21]** was letting people set their own salaries among themselves.

**[00:16:23]** And it really worked like this,

**[00:16:27]** that people, as they were together in teams,

**[00:16:29]** mutually in that team,

**[00:16:31]** where they met most often,

**[00:16:33]** they evaluated each other,

**[00:16:35]** wrote it into some spreadsheet,

**[00:16:37]** there were nice formulas that recalculated it,

**[00:16:39]** but directly from that evaluation,

**[00:16:43]** which was averaged from the colleagues closest to me in my team,

**[00:16:45]** that's how the salary was determined.

**[00:16:47]** And that was everything decided.

**[00:16:49]** The point was that suddenly we didn't need any hierarchy for that,

**[00:16:52]** so that some boss would teach some evaluation,

**[00:16:54]** because the boss doesn't see anyway,

**[00:16:57]** what those people do day to day,

**[00:16:59]** and it's much better to get feedback from people

**[00:17:01]** you really collaborate with.

**[00:17:03]** By the way, an interesting part of that experiment was,

**[00:17:05]** that it involved not only writing a numerical rating,

**[00:17:08]** within some parameters we had quite well defined,

**[00:17:11]** but also giving verbal feedback.

**[00:17:14]** And gradually, the longer we used it,

**[00:17:16]** the more important that feedback became.

**[00:17:19]** The more we all learned together to say,

**[00:17:22]** how things really are and why we give the ratings we do.

**[00:17:26]** But in the end, it really ended up in a formula,

**[00:17:29]** which everyone could see how it worked,

**[00:17:31]** and where anyone could try how it would turn out.

**[00:17:37]** We were doing quite well in the company.

**[00:17:39]** The company really took off.

**[00:17:40]** We worked with the biggest companies here in our country.

**[00:17:44]** Somewhere around 2010, 2012,

**[00:17:46]** you most likely used some of our applications.

**[00:17:49]** We made all the first banking applications,

**[00:17:51]** applications for Czech Television, Google.

**[00:17:53]** And we won all the others.

**[00:17:55]** Wherever there was an award here or worldwide,

**[00:17:57]** we suddenly started appearing in magazines and on TV.

**[00:18:00]** And Forbes wrote exactly about our formula,

**[00:18:03]** where a colleague rates your work, not the boss,

**[00:18:06]** which was also described in detail,

**[00:18:08]** how we calculated, how we calculated the salaries.

**[00:18:11]** And I started to realize,

**[00:18:13]** that the two worlds I lived in began to merge in my mind,

**[00:18:16]** which I lived on one side.

**[00:18:18]** That was the matrix and purely digital world,

**[00:18:21]** programming, and suddenly people started to appear there,

**[00:18:24]** and my discovery of how to do it,

**[00:18:26]** so that we feel happier at work

**[00:18:28]** and maybe not just at work.

**[00:18:30]** And I started to find out

**[00:18:32]** what else belongs in this picture.

**[00:18:35]** And now I want to look back with you at that slide,

**[00:18:38]** what do you think should be there.

**[00:18:41]** And I already see answers, exactly what it is.

**[00:18:45]** You can see that I’m not telling you anything new,

**[00:18:47]** because you already have it all here,

**[00:18:49]** so when you read through this slide,

**[00:18:51]** this is exactly what I will talk about next,

**[00:18:53]** I don’t know how many minutes.

**[00:18:58]** You see there community, trust, communication, colleagues,

**[00:19:01]** but also meaningfulness, results, teamwork.

**[00:19:06]** Rewards definitely play some role,

**[00:19:08]** we will get to that, freedom, recognition, and happiness at work.

**[00:19:12]** It’s all there in the slides

**[00:19:14]** and I will try to shape it into some images through my insights from ten years

**[00:19:19]** of happiness at work.

**[00:19:24]** So, our company continued,

**[00:19:26]** grew to about 40 people at that time,

**[00:19:30]** when Avast approached us.

**[00:19:33]** Today it’s no longer Avast, but maybe you still remember,

**[00:19:36]** not so long ago, two years back, Avast was still Avast,

**[00:19:39]** and they told us they wanted to buy us as a company.

**[00:19:41]** For us, a new idea, information,

**[00:19:44]** something we hadn’t really considered,

**[00:19:46]** we didn’t build the company to sell it,

**[00:19:48]** we built a company where we would feel good.

**[00:19:50]** But we started discussing whether it might be interesting,

**[00:19:52]** whether it might be interesting

**[00:19:55]** for a big global app for hundreds of millions of people,

**[00:19:57]** and not just for hundreds of thousands here in Central Europe.

**[00:20:00]** and we started discussing with Avast whether to go for it or not.

**[00:20:02]** And in the end, we made that big fundamental decision, like all big decisions.

**[00:20:08]** And that was by asking this group,

**[00:20:11]** we asked colleagues, friends in our team.

**[00:20:14]** And really, we made a Google Form,

**[00:20:16]** with several contextual questions and then the question,

**[00:20:19]** whether they would go for the acquisition if they were in our place.

**[00:20:23]** And we voted to go into it together.

**[00:20:26]** So we will accept the challenge and share it with the big world.

**[00:20:28]** So we officially announced to the world on Twitter with our selfie,

**[00:20:35]** that we are becoming part of Avast.

**[00:20:36]** Notice that the selfie has two L's.

**[00:20:38]** That's a selfie you take after you sell something.

**[00:20:40]** We sold the company, so we took a selfie with two L's.

**[00:20:44]** The term still hasn't caught on, but I've been trying to promote it for ten years.

**[00:20:47]** Maybe now is the moment.

**[00:20:50]** And so we all become part of Avast.

**[00:20:55]** And Avast is on a whole different level than our small InMyte with 40 people.

**[00:21:00]** At that time, Avast was protecting against billions of virus attacks every day.

**[00:21:04]** They had tons of products and about 650 people then.

**[00:21:09]** Also, the company was extremely profitable, one of the biggest,

**[00:21:13]** with one of the largest revenues here in the Czech Republic.

**[00:21:16]** Avast was always proud to be the second largest taxpayer in the Czech Republic.

**[00:21:22]** And it’s also a company from which other things might be expected.

**[00:21:27]** And I came in with my perspective on happiness at work.

**[00:21:30]** By then, I had been calling myself chief happiness officer for some time,

**[00:21:34]** which, by the way, was a role I invented,

**[00:21:36]** because my friends, with whom we founded our company,

**[00:21:39]** one took the CEO role, another CFO, and nothing better was left for me,

**[00:21:42]** so I had to invent CHO, inspired by Alex from Denmark.

**[00:21:48]** And at Avast, it looked like while our winter building at InMyte looked like,

**[00:21:54]** we went to build a snowman on the terrace,

**[00:21:56]** before we joined Avast, their winter building looked like,

**[00:22:00]** they rented a private plane and flew to Tromso,

**[00:22:02]** so people could photograph the northern lights.

**[00:22:05]** And it’s also a company with perfect, well-designed offices.

**[00:22:10]** They were being created just as we were arriving.

**[00:22:13]** And I suddenly came with the thesis that maybe it’s not about having perfect offices

**[00:22:18]** and free food, and maybe it’s not about flying private planes on trips.

**[00:22:23]** Maybe happiness at work lies deeper within us.

**[00:22:26]** And so, for example, a small story about preparing those new offices.

**[00:22:31]** It looked like everything was in progress, being prepared,

**[00:22:36]** but even then, as the chief happiness officer CHO,

**[00:22:41]** I felt that people should be part of what’s being prepared for them.

**[00:22:46]** If we want the company to be ours and to feel ownership and engagement,

**[00:22:53]** we need to be part of it all.

**[00:22:55]** So a small example was that when we moved into the new building,

**[00:22:58]** which, by the way, is just a short distance from the studio where we're filming now,

**[00:23:01]** so we organized a hackathon, originally calling it a 'parkathon' back then,

**[00:23:07]** because the fourth building looked like a wedge from above.

**[00:23:09]** And it went like this: before we moved in, we invited all our colleagues

**[00:23:14]** to create some applications or enhance the environment

**[00:23:19]** that was being prepared in our new building.

**[00:23:21]** Let's watch a short video that I will comment on to explain what was happening.

**[00:23:25]** We gathered the whole crew, anyone who wanted to join did.

**[00:23:29]** We came for a tour of the building, then locked the garage in the old building,

**[00:23:33]** moved the cars out, and started programming.

**[00:23:36]** It was really, I think, 24 hours of preparing applications for our new building,

**[00:23:40]** to make it a great place for you to live.

**[00:23:42]** I added this video on purpose so you can see

**[00:23:44]** what a truly happy programmer looks like.

**[00:23:48]** Watch closely the images; this is what a really happy programmer looks like.

**[00:23:52]** Notice, he’s not jumping for joy, not hugging, and not eating bananas.

**[00:23:58]** The guys played foosball for a bit, but most of the time they were fully immersed in their work.

**[00:24:02]** Something was taking shape under their hands, and great things were created.

**[00:24:06]** Tools were made, for example, to measure how long the lunch queue is,

**[00:24:10]** or to find someone in the building, or we had a visualization of

**[00:24:14]** where attacks were happening that the building’s big screens were defending you from.

**[00:24:18]** And all of this was created at that hackathon.

**[00:24:23]** Maybe it’s a bit different from what you imagined when you hear 'happiness at work'.

**[00:24:27]** A lot of things were created there, then we presented them to each other,

**[00:24:31]** and we used those tools in the building.

**[00:24:35]** And suddenly, something magical happened: it was our building,

**[00:24:39]** not just some move someone else prepared for us, but it was ours.

**[00:24:43]** It was something we were advancing towards.

**[00:24:47]** And slowly, the fog started to clear for me, that maybe happiness at work

**[00:24:51]** is a blurred picture that gradually comes into focus.

**[00:24:55]** The second thing I discovered at Avast was that

**[00:24:59]** it was nice, of course, to have a professional gym in the office with everything,

**[00:25:03]** but maybe it was enough to organize a group run,

**[00:25:07]** and we had a running club, and we just went outside together,

**[00:25:11]** spending some time together. Yes, Avast was also known for

**[00:25:15]** being one of the first bigger companies here to create a Google-style cafeteria,

**[00:25:19]** where unlimited food was available all day long.

**[00:25:23]** And honestly, as the happiness director, I was surprised by that.

**[00:25:27]** I said we shouldn’t pamper people just by giving them free food,

**[00:25:31]** that happiness has to come from somewhere else. And in the end, the food, of course, was realized

**[00:25:35]** and it was great, but for me not so much because there was great free food,

**[00:25:39]** but because it was a place where people could naturally come together like this.

**[00:25:42]** And notice that it was designed that way, with long tables,

**[00:25:45]** where you simply had no choice but to come and sit next to someone,

**[00:25:48]** including the fact that you could just meet Edu and Baud there at lunch,

**[00:25:52]** the two founders of Avast, who were just there among the people, and everyone was together

**[00:25:56]** and suddenly some connections started to form.

**[00:25:59]** To support those connections even more, because with six out of those 50 people

**[00:26:03]** we can regularly connect with each other, but chatting in the lunch line, why not.

**[00:26:07]** We created a tool called Avast Grow Shop,

**[00:26:11]** like an e-shop for personal growth, don’t look for Grow Shop yet, nothing else.

**[00:26:15]** And it was a simple thing we made together with the Naučme se portal,

**[00:26:21]** which looked like anyone could list a course on that portal about anything,

**[00:26:25]** for which they had some expertise.

**[00:26:27]** So you see there were courses on hacking, golf, happiness at work,

**[00:26:33]** drone flying, but also courses on web analytics.

**[00:26:37]** Anything that anyone enjoyed, they could list it there.

**[00:26:40]** And anyone from the company could sign up, and of course it was during work hours,

**[00:26:44]** so people could attend each other’s courses where new things were shown.

**[00:26:50]** And what was interesting was that suddenly people started meeting over topics

**[00:26:54]** other than just what was happening at work, in those meeting rooms.

**[00:26:58]** And suddenly, after flying drones,

**[00:27:01]** you might meet again at a meeting with that person from the finance department,

**[00:27:06]** who asks you for some reports, so it’s no longer just the finance guy

**[00:27:09]** who wants reports, but suddenly it’s a person with other dimensions

**[00:27:13]** and other colors, with whom you can talk on a completely different level,

**[00:27:16]** than when you only meet over the results you need to achieve.

**[00:27:22]** And so from the fog somewhere emerges another principle,

**[00:27:27]** which I will show in a moment. I was at Avast for two years,

**[00:27:31]** now I’ll quickly recalculate my table here, how I’m doing with time?

**[00:27:35]** I recalculated.

**[00:27:38]** After those two years, I thought I had learned something about happiness at work,

**[00:27:43]** I had worked some time at Avast.

**[00:27:46]** But it was time to look a bit further into the world

**[00:27:50]** and also time to spend some time with my kids after all the entrepreneurship.

**[00:27:55]** So my family and I took a one-year sabbatical

**[00:27:58]** and set off on a trip around the world.

**[00:28:01]** Here the kids planned it for us like this with Sophistikování umapy and we set off.

**[00:28:05]** This is my favorite part of the presentation, enjoy it with me.

**[00:28:08]** I’ll hold back a tear because it was a few years ago now,

**[00:28:12]** where we were discovering the world.

**[00:28:14]** We saw museums, we saw natural landmarks,

**[00:28:17]** we saw historical monuments, and of course we were on beaches,

**[00:28:21]** enjoying time with the kids.

**[00:28:23]** But what I added there was also that

**[00:28:26]** I tried, in the countries we traveled through during that year,

**[00:28:30]** to visit interesting places that approach in an interesting way

**[00:28:34]** how companies build cultures, companies that are somehow human.

**[00:28:38]** Come with me on a few stops around the world.

**[00:28:41]** The first will be here, in Zaragoza, Spain, at the company Vigen,

**[00:28:44]** which manufactures medical devices, equipment for doctors.

**[00:28:48]** And a little thing I took from them was this small board,

**[00:28:52]** which they had in their offices.

**[00:28:54]** Termometroemocional, I can't say a word in Spanish,

**[00:28:57]** but I guess it means emotional thermometer,

**[00:29:00]** which works as you can see in the picture.

**[00:29:03]** You come to the office in the morning and place yourself on the thermometer

**[00:29:07]** according to how you feel that day.

**[00:29:09]** And accept that they don't only have happy emotions there,

**[00:29:12]** like whether you are happy, joyful, or cheerful.

**[00:29:15]** But there are many others, which I can't name,

**[00:29:18]** but I see them in the pictures.

**[00:29:20]** And there are more than it might seem.

**[00:29:23]** Then I naturally looked into my favorite science,

**[00:29:26]** to see if it makes sense to talk about emotions.

**[00:29:28]** And it turns out that even just

**[00:29:30]** starting to think about emotions in more words,

**[00:29:33]** than just happy and unhappy,

**[00:29:35]** but being able to name them,

**[00:29:37]** or reflecting on where on this map you might be

**[00:29:40]** and which emotion fits your current state,

**[00:29:42]** suddenly allows us to work with emotions more.

**[00:29:45]** And at the same time, it becomes okay to bring some emotions to work

**[00:29:48]** and somehow be with them at work.

**[00:29:51]** Because that's just how it is.

**[00:29:53]** We are people who live lives outside of work,

**[00:29:56]** which intertwine with the lives we have at work.

**[00:29:58]** And when something happens...

**[00:30:00]** if someone is currently in the North Moravia region,

**[00:30:03]** then obviously no one there is exactly jumping for joy at work right now,

**[00:30:07]** because they have half a meter of mud at home after the floods.

**[00:30:10]** And it's not just about being happy at work, so we notice and have to do something.

**[00:30:14]** It's more about us noticing what belongs to it.

**[00:30:18]** And these are the things that define us.

**[00:30:20]** So when someone is having a really bad day,

**[00:30:24]** we can ask if they need support

**[00:30:27]** or if they want to sit in a corner and work.

**[00:30:30]** That's what happiness at work is about.

**[00:30:33]** Another piece from Denmark, from the company SEB Pension,

**[00:30:37]** where they looked for ways to bring people closer together.

**[00:30:40]** And one of the tools they created I really liked.

**[00:30:43]** They printed so-called meeting maps,

**[00:30:47]** which they placed in the kitchens,

**[00:30:48]** where they had a map for a 15-minute meeting, a map for a 30-minute meeting,

**[00:30:53]** because those meetings were planned as walks.

**[00:30:57]** So instead of booking a room,

**[00:31:00]** you could just take a map for a 30-minute meeting from the kitchen

**[00:31:03]** and go for a walk following the map,

**[00:31:05]** which would take about 30 minutes.

**[00:31:08]** Here I planned a map for about a one-hour meeting for you,

**[00:31:10]** if you want to try it out.

**[00:31:12]** And indeed, the so-called walking meeting,

**[00:31:15]** a meeting walk, really works like this,

**[00:31:16]** you get on your feet

**[00:31:19]** and head out of the office somewhere outside,

**[00:31:22]** ideally into an open space.

**[00:31:24]** When I later looked again,

**[00:31:26]** at my favorite scientific studies,

**[00:31:27]** I thought it had something to it,

**[00:31:29]** maybe more than we expected.

**[00:31:32]** It turns out that meetings and the fact

**[00:31:34]** that we move during the discussion,

**[00:31:38]** shift our minds somewhere else entirely.

**[00:31:40]** The research was really interesting,

**[00:31:43]** they actually studied

**[00:31:44]** how creative people are,

**[00:31:47]** when they are in a meeting in a conference room,

**[00:31:49]** then when they are in a meeting on a treadmill,

**[00:31:51]** but inside the building,

**[00:31:52]** then in a meeting when they are in a wheelchair, but outside,

**[00:31:54]** so they don't move their legs,

**[00:31:55]** but they are in an open space.

**[00:31:56]** And it turned out that the variant,

**[00:31:58]** where they move, are outside in an open space,

**[00:32:00]** in the fresh air,

**[00:32:01]** suddenly shifts significantly,

**[00:32:04]** how open we are to new ideas,

**[00:32:06]** how creative we are,

**[00:32:07]** how ready we are to come up with something new.

**[00:32:10]** I really promote meetings by walking,

**[00:32:12]** and I always tried to do them.

**[00:32:13]** And sometimes it was a surprise,

**[00:32:15]** when I came to the guys and programmers,

**[00:32:17]** like, we're going to a meeting, a walk.

**[00:32:18]** They looked at me,

**[00:32:19]** to see if they really had slippers to change into and were going somewhere.

**[00:32:21]** I was already changed,

**[00:32:22]** so I clearly indicated,

**[00:32:23]** that we were really going outside.

**[00:32:24]** And it has one more nice element,

**[00:32:26]** that when you have your own building

**[00:32:28]** and you leave it,

**[00:32:29]** and then gradually return through the meeting,

**[00:32:40]** unfortunately it doesn't work,

**[00:32:41]** I don't recommend it for team meetings of 30 people.

**[00:32:44]** Two or three people is the sweet spot

**[00:32:46]** for a walking meeting, of course.

**[00:32:48]** The next stop on the trip around the world

**[00:32:51]** will be San Francisco,

**[00:32:54]** at the company Strava.

**[00:32:55]** Some of you might know the Strava app,

**[00:32:57]** it's for athletes,

**[00:32:58]** who log their sports performances there.

**[00:33:01]** And it's an app for athletes made by athletes.

**[00:33:04]** And I was really impressed at Strava,

**[00:33:05]** how the company lives through its product.

**[00:33:08]** Really, there are probably no employees there who aren't athletes.

**[00:33:10]** They probably don't even have a garage for cars,

**[00:33:12]** but when you come to work,

**[00:33:14]** the first thing you see after that,

**[00:33:15]** When you open the door to Strava's office,

**[00:33:17]** there are bike racks,

**[00:33:18]** because everyone simply rides a bike there,

**[00:33:20]** of course, or runs in.

**[00:33:21]** Next, you pass through the locker room,

**[00:33:22]** because that's always the way you go,

**[00:33:25]** when you go somewhere,

**[00:33:26]** you go through the locker room,

**[00:33:27]** you change there,

**[00:33:28]** and only then do you go to the computers,

**[00:33:30]** where you develop the application.

**[00:33:31]** It's just,

**[00:33:33]** through and through, the company shows that,

**[00:33:35]** there are athletes there

**[00:33:36]** and they made an app for athletes,

**[00:33:38]** and I think that contributes to the culture

**[00:33:40]** and how happy the people are there,

**[00:33:41]** because the right people are there

**[00:33:42]** in the right places,

**[00:33:43]** which fundamentally contributes.

**[00:33:44]** I'll take a look at Australia next.

**[00:33:47]** Here is the company Atlassian,

**[00:33:49]** which, by the way, later bought Trello

**[00:33:51]** from Joe from Poland,

**[00:33:52]** who was at the start of the story.

**[00:33:54]** But Atlassian was interesting to me

**[00:33:56]** even back then,

**[00:33:57]** about six or seven years ago,

**[00:34:01]** because this gentleman worked there,

**[00:34:02]** Dom Price,

**[00:34:03]** and his job was already work futurist.

**[00:34:08]** I really can't translate that into Czech,

**[00:34:09]** but he's a guy

**[00:34:10]** who builds on the future of work.

**[00:34:12]** Maybe a work futurist.

**[00:34:16]** And even then he was looking

**[00:34:17]** for ways to make

**[00:34:18]** teams work well,

**[00:34:19]** so people feel good in those teams,

**[00:34:21]** and by the way, they are still working on it today

**[00:34:23]** and they have new and new outputs,

**[00:34:25]** you can check their website,

**[00:34:26]** they have something they call a team playbook,

**[00:34:28]** and these are very specific guides,

**[00:34:29]** which you can use in your team to

**[00:34:31]** make some things work better for you,

**[00:34:33]** for example, how exactly to do retrospectives in a team,

**[00:34:36]** how to divide roles,

**[00:34:37]** how to check your team's health,

**[00:34:39]** and many other things.

**[00:34:41]** And these are exactly the tools

**[00:34:42]** and small things,

**[00:34:43]** that then come together into the bigger picture,

**[00:34:46]** which creates the fact

**[00:34:47]** that work will be a bit better for all of you,

**[00:34:50]** and you will even do better work,

**[00:34:52]** better results.

**[00:34:53]** You will notice exactly

**[00:34:54]** that this obviously also relates to

**[00:34:55]** what happens at work,

**[00:34:56]** not just how we feel there.

**[00:34:57]** The last stop is at Zappos in Las Vegas,

**[00:35:00]** a company I learned about

**[00:35:02]** maybe as one of the first inspirations

**[00:35:04]** about happiness at work,

**[00:35:06]** through this book,

**[00:35:08]** published by Tomáš Heisler

**[00:35:09]** years ago, Happiness Delivered by Tony Hsieh,

**[00:35:12]** who unfortunately is no longer with us,

**[00:35:15]** but what he built was truly unique.

**[00:35:17]** It is a company with many thousands of people,

**[00:35:19]** that operated completely differently,

**[00:35:21]** than what would be usual.

**[00:35:22]** I definitely recommend the book,

**[00:35:23]** but what they tried,

**[00:35:25]** even with several thousand people,

**[00:35:27]** was to rebuild the company from

**[00:35:29]** what you see in the picture on the right,

**[00:35:30]** and what is in the picture on the left.

**[00:35:31]** That means they completely broke the traditional hierarchy

**[00:35:34]** and suddenly they started building a company,

**[00:35:35]** which is organized more in circles,

**[00:35:37]** that form and dissolve depending on,

**[00:35:39]** what is needed at the time.

**[00:35:40]** A person appears in roles sometimes

**[00:35:42]** in several of these circles,

**[00:35:43]** and suddenly there isn't necessarily a CEO,

**[00:35:46]** who decides and clearly sets the direction,

**[00:35:48]** but there might be a strategic circle,

**[00:35:50]** which works together on,

**[00:35:52]** what the direction will be.

**[00:35:54]** That is their responsibility,

**[00:35:55]** but responsibility from other circles lies elsewhere,

**[00:35:57]** and they are interconnected,

**[00:35:58]** and together they move forward.

**[00:36:00]** To wrap up this journey around the world,

**[00:36:03]** I'll tell you three more words,

**[00:36:06]** that I learned.

**[00:36:07]** Actually, thermometer and emotional

**[00:36:08]** are other things,

**[00:36:09]** so in total I learned five words.

**[00:36:11]** One of them is Arbeisglöde,

**[00:36:14]** that's how Alex from Denmark always pronounces it.

**[00:36:17]** I'll let you figure out what it probably means,

**[00:36:21]** but it contains two words: Arbeis,

**[00:36:23]** which means work, and glöde, which means happiness,

**[00:36:25]** and they really have in Danish vocabulary

**[00:36:26]** the concept of happiness at work.

**[00:36:27]** And Denmark is a great inspiration for me.

**[00:36:29]** To this day, I'm always happy,

**[00:36:31]** when I can visit Alex there

**[00:36:34]** and the companies in Denmark,

**[00:36:36]** because years ago I was proud to say,

**[00:36:39]** that the Danish queen several times used

**[00:36:42]** the word Arbeisglöde in her New Year's speech,

**[00:36:45]** at that time we had a different president

**[00:36:47]** than today,

**[00:36:49]** and that word was rarely used

**[00:36:50]** in presidential speeches.

**[00:36:51]** Today, I think,

**[00:36:52]** that the atmosphere is shifting

**[00:36:54]** and we can already imagine,

**[00:36:55]** unfortunately, happiness at work isn't a very nice phrase,

**[00:36:57]** so we don't use it,

**[00:36:58]** we haven't pushed it through yet.

**[00:37:00]** Another word I learned

**[00:37:02]** and just for interest,

**[00:37:03]** how the culture and history of a country

**[00:37:06]** can be reflected in the approach to work

**[00:37:08]** and even in the vocabulary,

**[00:37:09]** for example, in Japan they have the word Karoshi,

**[00:37:12]** which means death from overwork.

**[00:37:14]** And this is already in big cities,

**[00:37:15]** in Tokyo,

**[00:37:16]** where there are people

**[00:37:17]** who remain single their whole lives

**[00:37:19]** and their only purpose is work,

**[00:37:21]** and it shows

**[00:37:22]** that this is not the best way to live.

**[00:37:24]** On the other hand, if you look

**[00:37:25]** still within Japan, at Okinawa,

**[00:37:27]** you'll more likely hear about a term

**[00:37:29]** called Ikigai.

**[00:37:31]** You might have translated it as the reason

**[00:37:33]** to get out of bed in the morning.

**[00:37:35]** And Ikigai is in the center of that picture,

**[00:37:37]** where it meets,

**[00:37:38]** doing what you love.

**[00:37:40]** At the same time, it's something

**[00:37:41]** the world needs.

**[00:37:42]** At the same time, it's something

**[00:37:43]** someone is willing to pay you for,

**[00:37:44]** and you are good at it.

**[00:37:46]** And it seems

**[00:37:47]** that Ikigai is also one of the reasons

**[00:37:49]** why Okinawa

**[00:37:51]** is one of the blue zones in the world,

**[00:37:53]** which means,

**[00:37:54]** it's one of the places

**[00:37:55]** where people live the longest.

**[00:37:56]** It has the highest concentration

**[00:37:57]** of people over 100 years old.

**[00:37:58]** And it's exactly,

**[00:37:59]** among other things,

**[00:38:00]** because people there don't have the vision

**[00:38:03]** that I'll work until, I don't know,

**[00:38:05]** 65, or wherever retirement is today,

**[00:38:07]** 80,

**[00:38:08]** then I'll retire

**[00:38:10]** and I won't have to work anymore,

**[00:38:12]** it will be easy

**[00:38:13]** and I won't have to do anything.

**[00:38:14]** They look for their own Ikigai

**[00:38:16]** and it's part of their life.

**[00:38:18]** So even at 80, 90,

**[00:38:20]** they are active in communities,

**[00:38:22]** still meeting up

**[00:38:23]** and still trying to do something

**[00:38:24]** where they feel their usefulness,

**[00:38:26]** their need.

**[00:38:27]** And that's exactly,

**[00:38:29]** these are a few more pieces,

**[00:38:31]** even from places

**[00:38:32]** where I didn't stop on the concept journey,

**[00:38:34]** this is, for example, from Bhutan.

**[00:38:36]** Happiness, simply put,

**[00:38:37]** means

**[00:38:38]** gross domestic happiness.

**[00:38:39]** And that's something

**[00:38:40]** they have really been measuring in Bhutan for years,

**[00:38:41]** instead of gross domestic product.

**[00:38:43]** They have a bunch of parameters

**[00:38:44]** in which they measure gross domestic happiness

**[00:38:47]** and based on which they decide.

**[00:38:48]** The Bhutanese king simply tries to optimize,

**[00:38:50]** maximize happiness

**[00:38:52]** in the country.

**[00:38:54]** Another piece here

**[00:38:56]** is from the United Arab Emirates,

**[00:38:58]** where years ago they already had a minister of happiness,

**[00:39:00]** this is it,

**[00:39:01]** which dealt with

**[00:39:02]** how to make it,

**[00:39:03]** so that people would be happier.

**[00:39:05]** And this is how we could look around the whole world.

**[00:39:08]** Every year comes out

**[00:39:10]** the global World Happiness Report,

**[00:39:13]** where Gallup,

**[00:39:15]** a multinational organization,

**[00:39:17]** measures how happy we are

**[00:39:18]** in different countries around the world,

**[00:39:19]** with a series of questions,

**[00:39:20]** through a large study.

**[00:39:21]** And this is my second quiz question for you.

**[00:39:24]** What do you think,

**[00:39:26]** what place does the Czech Republic hold,

**[00:39:28]** in the latest Gallup research?

**[00:39:30]** It's a global happiness study,

**[00:39:32]** including about 150 countries.

**[00:39:35]** If we can keep the results hidden for now,

**[00:39:38]** let's please keep them

**[00:39:39]** hidden for a moment,

**[00:39:40]** so we don't start seeing how it really is,

**[00:39:42]** because some of you may have heard in the media

**[00:39:44]** how we are doing.

**[00:39:45]** Something is already shaping up there,

**[00:39:47]** so we didn't hide it,

**[00:39:48]** but you probably already clicked it.

**[00:39:52]** It's 150 countries worldwide,

**[00:39:54]** the Czech Republic,

**[00:39:56]** let's calmly look at the result.

**[00:40:00]** The Czech Republic is not between 81st and 120th place.

**[00:40:06]** I just sent a podcast where two people were talking,

**[00:40:11]** talking about how we tend to grumble and nitpick things,

**[00:40:14]** even though we're actually doing quite well.

**[00:40:16]** In fact, the Czech Republic is not even between 41st and 80th place among those 150 countries.

**[00:40:22]** The good news is that the Czech Republic is already in the second top ten.

**[00:40:27]** And I'll put an arrow there so you can quickly find it.

**[00:40:30]** We are in 18th place out of all 150 countries worldwide,

**[00:40:33]** where they conduct the research.

**[00:40:35]** And what's more, having followed the research for a few years now,

**[00:40:40]** we were ranked 21st, then 20th, 19th,

**[00:40:45]** and now we hold 18th place, so we're doing well.

**[00:40:49]** And in the end, when someone makes us think about it,

**[00:40:51]** we realize that we have it good here.

**[00:40:54]** Although sometimes, unfortunately, we have floods,

**[00:40:57]** but our Central European climate has actually been quite manageable.

**[00:41:01]** We don't have any major threats or serious concerns

**[00:41:04]** that could happen to us.

**[00:41:07]** But like you, the types of people

**[00:41:12]** we rank around 149th or 150th place.

**[00:41:17]** But believe me, the countries at 150th place are exactly those.

**[00:41:22]** And of course, Israel has recently dropped way down,

**[00:41:26]** because those are countries where the world is completely different than here.

**[00:41:29]** We have it good and we know it, and maybe that's

**[00:41:33]** how I'll close my journey around the world.

**[00:41:36]** Because after being everywhere,

**[00:41:39]** talking to companies in the north, south, east, and west,

**[00:41:43]** I thought maybe it wasn't necessary to go to Australia

**[00:41:48]** or the United States.

**[00:41:50]** Maybe it was enough to go to Česká Třebová

**[00:41:53]** and meet Leoš Jiřel, who runs a wonderful company called Solea.

**[00:41:58]** Its purpose is to bring people back to life.

**[00:42:01]** He employs people with disabilities.

**[00:42:03]** The stories he told gave me goosebumps,

**[00:42:06]** and he said doctors of those people often call him now,

**[00:42:10]** patients who had long-term serious health problems.

**[00:42:13]** Leoš offers them work and figures out how to make it possible

**[00:42:16]** so they can work again, to have a job after many years.

**[00:42:20]** So he gives them meaning and usefulness again.

**[00:42:23]** And suddenly doctors call him, asking what happened,

**[00:42:26]** because they've been working with the patient for five years and couldn't help,

**[00:42:29]** no matter what they tried.

**[00:42:31]** And suddenly the patient's health markers improved dramatically

**[00:42:34]** in every way.

**[00:42:36]** And it was, in quotes, just that the person suddenly found meaning.

**[00:42:39]** And became part of something bigger than themselves.

**[00:42:42]** Or a bit further, if you want to head out from Prague,

**[00:42:45]** maybe greetings to Zonentor, where you might be watching us now,

**[00:42:48]** in Čejkovice.

**[00:42:50]** Josef Dvořáček and his company, which produces organic teas and spices,

**[00:42:55]** are, to me, one of the biggest inspirations when it comes to happiness at work.

**[00:42:59]** If you haven't been to Čejkovice yet, definitely go and visit.

**[00:43:02]** Not only does it smell wonderful there, but the atmosphere in the company,

**[00:43:05]** and how incredibly well it operates.

**[00:43:07]** To me, these are examples showing that you really don't have to travel around the world

**[00:43:14]** or be an IT company in Prague,

**[00:43:17]** you can be a manufacturing company, you can have tough work,

**[00:43:20]** and yet people can still want to be there.

**[00:43:22]** I've been on several tours at Zonentor with Josef,

**[00:43:26]** and wherever he meets someone in production,

**[00:43:30]** he knows each of the roughly 180 people personally,

**[00:43:33]** knows their life story in full detail,

**[00:43:36]** can talk about their children, and sees each of them as a person,

**[00:43:40]** with everything that being human entails.

**[00:43:42]** And that incredibly reflects throughout the entire company.

**[00:43:45]** A surprising and my favorite example is this one here.

**[00:43:48]** In the front row, third from the left, is Jirka Klein,

**[00:43:52]** head of the municipal police in Opava,

**[00:43:55]** who now has his hands full with something completely different,

**[00:43:58]** than what we are talking about.

**[00:44:00]** But Jirka is even able to apply these principles

**[00:44:03]** to such a rigid organization as the municipal police.

**[00:44:06]** And people often tell me with a smirk,

**[00:44:08]** well, you talk here about happiness at work,

**[00:44:10]** but we are a big company and we can't change processes or rules,

**[00:44:13]** so I always show the example of Jirka Klein.

**[00:44:15]** He even changed the slogan MPNJ,

**[00:44:18]** which stood for Municipal Police Nový Jičín,

**[00:44:21]** where he worked before, and renamed it MPNJ.

**[00:44:24]** And it means We help and we act.

**[00:44:29]** Sorry, I lost that.

**[00:44:32]** But it was that Jirka, through his approach and by

**[00:44:35]** starting to treat the officers in his team as people,

**[00:44:38]** and they began to address why they are there,

**[00:44:41]** what the municipal police is for.

**[00:44:43]** And suddenly, the Municipal Police in Nový Jičín,

**[00:44:45]** where he worked before, had the most fans on Facebook

**[00:44:48]** among all municipal police forces in the Czech Republic,

**[00:44:50]** even though it was far from the largest.

**[00:44:52]** And people really liked them and were genuine fans,

**[00:44:55]** who saw that they were suddenly doing the work completely differently,

**[00:44:58]** than we are used to, that city officials come to us

**[00:45:01]** like a fine for bad parking.

**[00:45:03]** They are there to help.

**[00:45:05]** And the stories you still see today from Opava,

**[00:45:08]** are worth checking out.

**[00:45:11]** But with the world glass, let's go back to us

**[00:45:14]** and finally to this logo, which has in its name

**[00:45:17]** Happiness at Work.

**[00:45:21]** And this is the story not only of the conference,

**[00:45:25]** which you may have heard about, as I will mention here,

**[00:45:28]** and it started about ten years ago,

**[00:45:32]** I'm calculating this roughly, but I even put it in the lecture title,

**[00:45:35]** where with Monika Hilm, who I have pictured here,

**[00:45:38]** we met by chance in Denmark with Alex,

**[00:45:41]** where we attended a multi-day workshop,

**[00:45:44]** a seminar on happiness at work about eleven years ago.

**[00:45:47]** And we said we have to bring this principle

**[00:45:50]** here to the Czech Republic, it would be,

**[00:45:53]** a shame not to raise it here.

**[00:45:56]** So we started organizing a conference, where about ten years ago

**[00:45:59]** we pushed all our acquaintances and friends to come,

**[00:46:02]** so we wouldn't be alone. And we started trying to show

**[00:46:05]** that maybe work can function differently,

**[00:46:08]** than talking about people as human resources.

**[00:46:11]** And maybe it would have a positive impact on those people and on the fact

**[00:46:14]** that the company with a few dozen people,

**[00:46:17]** the conference gradually started to grow.

**[00:46:20]** And here it connects with the story on the timeline,

**[00:46:24]** where after returning from travels around the world,

**[00:46:27]** we met Lukáš,

**[00:46:30]** who joined us, along with Martin Šafaryk.

**[00:46:33]** And we started thinking that we could grasp happiness at work

**[00:46:36]** in a proper way. By the way, this is an important photo,

**[00:46:39]** this was with the guys, the first off-site meeting,

**[00:46:42]** of the newly formed company Happiness at Work, SRO.

**[00:46:45]** And we started figuring out how to do it.

**[00:46:48]** And the paper you see, everything was planned there.

**[00:46:51]** We wrote everything down, then we rolled it up

**[00:46:54]** and we were happy about how beautifully we came up with it,

**[00:46:57]** how happiness at work would take root everywhere here.

**[00:47:00]** And we would make a grand business out of it.

**[00:47:03]** We said we wouldn't just do lectures and workshops,

**[00:47:06]** but tried to create a product to capture it somehow,

**[00:47:09]** and in the end, we mostly did lectures and workshops,

**[00:47:12]** but we also tried some product.

**[00:47:15]** Maybe some of you encountered Workshop Boss back in the day,

**[00:47:18]** where we tried to package what we did in companies ourselves,

**[00:47:21]** into a physical box,

**[00:47:24]** which looked this nice.

**[00:47:27]** It contained a bunch of materials, colorful things that worked so that

**[00:47:30]** you just needed to order the box for your team and gradually unpack it,

**[00:47:33]** and in each of those boxes, which formed a set,

**[00:47:36]** you got a little closer to each other.

**[00:47:39]** And you didn't need anyone from outside, you could do it yourself.

**[00:47:42]** There was a complete IKEA-style manual,

**[00:47:45]** so you could nicely go through the workshop step by step.

**[00:47:48]** It was a product we fell in love with beautifully,

**[00:47:51]** but then it turned out there was still a big barrier to people doing it on their own,

**[00:47:54]** that they needed a push from outside.

**[00:47:57]** And we try again and again to bring that to our conference,

**[00:48:00]** but the conference is no longer for 20, 30, 50, 100 people,

**[00:48:04]** we had to move to a large hall in the congress center.

**[00:48:08]** And suddenly, we had a conference around 2018.

**[00:48:12]** There were about 600 of us.

**[00:48:15]** And we started to see that maybe a movement was emerging,

**[00:48:20]** showing that happiness at work isn't just about those IKEA-style companies in Prague,

**[00:48:24]** which we heard a bit in the early years,

**[00:48:26]** when people said, so you program in InMight at Avast,

**[00:48:31]** and you have all university graduates, you earn a lot of money,

**[00:48:34]** so you can focus on happiness at work here.

**[00:48:37]** And you have the time.

**[00:48:38]** But I'm really glad that even at the conference you can see,

**[00:48:41]** that we have more and more examples of companies

**[00:48:43]** that are truly manufacturing from tough businesses from all regions

**[00:48:47]** and from all different sectors here with us.

**[00:48:50]** And the people who come to talk about it together

**[00:48:55]** were already about 840 last year.

**[00:48:58]** And this year we are preparing another conference, which will be on October 15th,

**[00:49:02]** to which I am of course inviting you.

**[00:49:04]** We believe even more people will attend there,

**[00:49:06]** and it will be a grand celebration of the ten years.

**[00:49:09]** We still have a few tickets left, so hurry up and register,

**[00:49:13]** so we can see each other there, because if you really want depth

**[00:49:15]** and to look at it from a scientific perspective,

**[00:49:18]** this year we managed to get Sonia Lubomirsky,

**[00:49:21]** who is one of the world's leading scientists

**[00:49:23]** in the field of happiness, and has written many books,

**[00:49:26]** or from the perspective of global leaders who will also be at the conference,

**[00:49:29]** like Gary Rich from VD40, a global company,

**[00:49:33]** built on values.

**[00:49:35]** And Gary always says,

**[00:49:37]** that in his company, where he worked for 25 years,

**[00:49:40]** a company generating billion-dollar revenues,

**[00:49:44]** he always says that in his company mistakes are not made,

**[00:49:46]** there are only learning moments.

**[00:49:49]** So he fundamentally changed the company to be more innovative.

**[00:49:54]** By the way, VD40, you might know it as the lubricating oil

**[00:49:56]** you have in your garage.

**[00:49:59]** Almost everyone knows it. Few know that WD-40 actually has the company's innovative spirit hidden in its name.

**[00:50:00]** WD-40 stood for Water Displacement Formula No. 40.

**[00:50:05]** Meaning the 40th attempt to achieve what they were trying to do.

**[00:50:09]** They were so proud that after the 40th try, after 39 failures,

**[00:50:13]** they put it straight into the company name.

**[00:50:16]** So come and meet Gary. And I'll start clearing up the picture here.

**[00:50:19]** Because we started to dive into the time of Happiness at Work,

**[00:50:23]** which continues some principles that seem to be the foundation

**[00:50:27]** and things that support what I've been talking about so far.

**[00:50:31]** And the basic principles, the first seems to be meaningful results,

**[00:50:35]** that to be happy at work, and not by chance at the top,

**[00:50:39]** we need to have the opportunity to do something where we see we contribute

**[00:50:43]** to a whole we understand, where we know why our work is useful

**[00:50:47]** and what it supports. One could talk for hours about this,

**[00:50:51]** that even small things in companies, when you put people,

**[00:50:55]** call center operators, to meet the people they work with

**[00:50:59]** and have the chance to hear their stories about how their work helps them,

**[00:51:05]** it fundamentally changes how they can function at work.

**[00:51:09]** There are plenty of examples, I won't go into them now, we wouldn't have time.

**[00:51:17]** As I take pride in it.

**[00:51:20]** The second principle, which has emerged from the fog and sharpened over the years,

**[00:51:25]** and which is reflected in our conference, is deep relationships.

**[00:51:29]** After we know what we need to do and how it contributes to some results,

**[00:51:33]** and we feel that we are doing something, unfortunately without some depth and trust,

**[00:51:37]** and psychological safety, work just won't work.

**[00:51:40]** Or at least not in the long term, or at least we won't feel as good about it.

**[00:51:43]** And unfortunately, that often pushes us away from it.

**[00:51:46]** These are the two fundamental principles, results and relationships, that we need

**[00:51:50]** to feel good at work and for the company to be successful.

**[00:51:53]** And over time, as we delved deeper and deeper,

**[00:51:56]** and formed increasingly complex pictures, we realized

**[00:51:59]** that we need two more things that contribute to happiness at work.

**[00:52:02]** These are the opportunity to grow, to learn new things,

**[00:52:05]** which lead to habits that become part of our lives.

**[00:52:08]** And finally, some health and life energy.

**[00:52:11]** When we don't have health, whether physical or mental,

**[00:52:15]** well managed currently, it will be very hard for us to think

**[00:52:18]** about meaning and what role we have at work,

**[00:52:21]** because we will first have to solve this lower layer,

**[00:52:24]** the pyramid on which it all stands.

**[00:52:27]** So the picture isn't that we just say,

**[00:52:29]** we need well-being and performance at work,

**[00:52:31]** and to achieve that, we need to be satisfied,

**[00:52:34]** and satisfaction is enough with pay, career, benefits.

**[00:52:37]** It might seem that way.

**[00:52:39]** And pay, career, benefits are already significant,

**[00:52:41]** but for attracting people to your work,

**[00:52:44]** not for feeling good there afterwards.

**[00:52:47]** So the whole picture looks like this.

**[00:52:49]** External influences really work, but more for

**[00:52:52]** influencing job choice and candidate recruitment.

**[00:52:55]** But how you feel day to day at work

**[00:52:58]** is much more influenced by what you experience with the people

**[00:53:02]** you are with day to day.

**[00:53:04]** How you understand the meaning you have in that work

**[00:53:06]** and how you can connect that meaning with your own life

**[00:53:09]** that you live.

**[00:53:11]** So, if I were to redraw that picture,

**[00:53:13]** what's in the circle on the left looks something like this.

**[00:53:16]** At the bottom, the foundation is some kind of health,

**[00:53:20]** on which everything stands.

**[00:53:22]** One layer up are results and relationships,

**[00:53:24]** the two absolutely essential things.

**[00:53:26]** And on the side, what pulls us upward here

**[00:53:29]** is precisely the growth mindset and some habits,

**[00:53:32]** which become part of the company or ourselves.

**[00:53:36]** So yes, this is also my answer to the question,

**[00:53:39]** what doesn't make people happier at work.

**[00:53:41]** I always try to sneak into some media interviews

**[00:53:45]** that bananas won't make you happier at work.

**[00:53:48]** This is how artificial intelligence imagines a manager,

**[00:53:51]** showing that bananas will make you happier at work.

**[00:53:54]** That's not true.

**[00:53:55]** Because bananas work more like,

**[00:53:57]** they're nice and have vitamins.

**[00:53:59]** But after a few weeks, suddenly the bananas will look like this.

**[00:54:03]** Or even after a few days.

**[00:54:04]** And they will no longer work.

**[00:54:06]** You need to look somewhere beyond these smaller things.

**[00:54:10]** If you want to study this more,

**[00:54:12]** I recommend this book, which in Czech is called

**[00:54:14]** Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman,

**[00:54:17]** a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics,

**[00:54:20]** behavioral economics.

**[00:54:22]** He studies how we humans function.

**[00:54:24]** What he describes is that our brain works at two speeds.

**[00:54:28]** One part is the amygdala, also called the older brain,

**[00:54:32]** where we react here and now to what's happening around us.

**[00:54:36]** And the other part is the slower part of the brain,

**[00:54:38]** where we can pause and rationally evaluate

**[00:54:41]** how things really are, but in reality, we don't do it.

**[00:54:44]** Much more, how we feel and what influences our decisions

**[00:54:49]** is the here and now, the present moment.

**[00:54:52]** And that influences much more how we feel among the people

**[00:54:54]** we are currently with, how we perceive the environment

**[00:54:57]** we are moving in, in terms of meaning.

**[00:55:01]** Whereas when we sit down and make a table,

**[00:55:04]** OK, in this company I have this salary, these benefits, and this,

**[00:55:09]** In this company, I have this and this and this,

**[00:55:11]** I put it into a table and see, OK, I'll go work here.

**[00:55:13]** Unfortunately, that won't be what makes me feel better at work more often.

**[00:55:16]** It won't be the perfect company car, it won't be the free detour,

**[00:55:19]** nor will it be the high salary, where of course money plays a role,

**[00:55:23]** but only up to a certain level.

**[00:55:25]** And after you satisfy your basic needs,

**[00:55:27]** after your children have guaranteed healthcare,

**[00:55:32]** and your children can attend a good school and you have food to eat,

**[00:55:35]** then having much more money won't really make you happier in life.

**[00:55:39]** Up to that point, yes, but then, as you can see, the curve

**[00:55:42]** flattens out and then goes completely straight,

**[00:55:44]** the light blue line describes how we feel here and here.

**[00:55:48]** At least that's how Sonja Lyubomirsky describes it,

**[00:55:50]** our speaker from this year's conference,

**[00:55:52]** she explains the Setpoint Theory of Happiness, showing

**[00:55:55]** that external factors like wages, benefits, fines, or bans,

**[00:56:00]** affect us, but only temporarily.

**[00:56:03]** Then we return to our internal setting,

**[00:56:05]** to that setpoint.

**[00:56:07]** I saw some research showing

**[00:56:09]** that when you get a raise at work,

**[00:56:11]** you rate your happiness as higher,

**[00:56:14]** you'll be happier at work for about 14 days,

**[00:56:17]** and then you return to your original level.

**[00:56:20]** So you could give people raises every 14 days

**[00:56:23]** to keep them happier, but it would cost a lot of money.

**[00:56:28]** So there are four things that build happiness at work

**[00:56:31]** and that I reached through a long journey, not only around the world,

**[00:56:35]** but also to distant Čejkovice.

**[00:56:38]** Health, relationships, growth, and health.

**[00:56:41]** We nicely shortened it to the word BBRZ,

**[00:56:44]** which isn't quite in the Czech dictionary yet,

**[00:56:47]** but we always remember it

**[00:56:49]** and try to imprint the idea

**[00:56:52]** that it's necessary to keep all these things in balance.

**[00:56:55]** You can't overdo any one of them

**[00:56:57]** for it to work well long-term.

**[00:56:59]** It's good to have a company that generates big profits

**[00:57:02]** and makes a lot of money.

**[00:57:04]** And without money, a company can't function.

**[00:57:06]** But if we forget that there are people,

**[00:57:08]** who need some relationships,

**[00:57:10]** they will start leaving and we'll have to find new ones.

**[00:57:12]** And maybe we ourselves won't feel as good,

**[00:57:14]** as we could.

**[00:57:16]** Likewise, if we don't grow and get stuck in one place,

**[00:57:19]** or if we damage our health and suffer from depression,

**[00:57:22]** it will be hard to think about meaningful results

**[00:57:25]** and the big mission we're trying to achieve at work.

**[00:57:28]** By the way, this is one of the things

**[00:57:32]** we discovered in our Happiness Network.

**[00:57:35]** We found that we have a perfectly tuned team there,

**[00:57:39]** and we feel really good there.

**[00:57:41]** But just as every year, again and again,

**[00:57:43]** and almost every week,

**[00:57:45]** we teach at conferences before visitors about

**[00:57:47]** the need to keep these things integrated together,

**[00:57:50]** we often forgot about it.

**[00:57:52]** And honestly, it's been quite a few years

**[00:57:55]** since Happiness Network has held a great conference,

**[00:57:57]** but we haven't yet shown how to make big money from it.

**[00:58:00]** And we tell ourselves maybe we should learn

**[00:58:03]** to balance these things too.

**[00:58:05]** It's a long-term lesson,

**[00:58:07]** where we hold the conference simply because

**[00:58:09]** it makes huge sense to us

**[00:58:11]** and we believe it can really make a difference.

**[00:58:14]** By the way, on the paper we had at the beginning,

**[00:58:16]** it said that our mission is

**[00:58:19]** that we want people here in the Czech Republic to feel good.

**[00:58:22]** And it seems to us that the way to that

**[00:58:25]** is not by creating a Ministry of Happiness

**[00:58:27]** or by going to every individual

**[00:58:29]** and telling them to be happier and showing them how.

**[00:58:31]** We thought the way would be through companies,

**[00:58:33]** and that's why we hold the conference.

**[00:58:35]** We try to achieve that

**[00:58:37]** if things get just a little better in companies,

**[00:58:39]** it will affect tens or hundreds of people.

**[00:58:41]** and suddenly everything can jump forward all at once.

**[00:58:43]** But sometimes we forgot a bit about ourselves.

**[00:58:46]** I'll add one more story with a few lessons.

**[00:58:49]** And that's the story of Joinery, which started a few years ago

**[00:58:53]** in parallel here with the story of Happiness at Work.

**[00:58:56]** And back in the days of InMight, which I talked about,

**[00:59:01]** we were making mobile apps and also started organizing a conference

**[00:59:04]** for mobile developers, which visually looked similar,

**[00:59:08]** held in the same hall as Happiness at Work.

**[00:59:10]** And that conference was IT-focused, for programmers,

**[00:59:13]** and we always made some kind of app for it,

**[00:59:16]** so people could play around with something there.

**[00:59:20]** It was a conference for mobile developers.

**[00:59:22]** And one of our favorite jokes,

**[00:59:24]** after we made such a nice app,

**[00:59:26]** where people could create their own virtual conference on their phone,

**[00:59:29]** was that our favorite joke in 2019 was

**[00:59:32]** that next year we could make the whole conference like a game.

**[00:59:38]** So I started that conference and then COVID came.

**[00:59:41]** And suddenly it stopped being a joke,

**[00:59:44]** because it turned out that the conference,

**[00:59:47]** which was just around the corner and already being prepared,

**[00:59:50]** suddenly it turned out it wasn’t a joke,

**[00:59:53]** but we really would have to make the conference like a game,

**[00:59:56]** because suddenly there was a lockdown,

**[00:59:58]** when we already had everything ready.

**[01:00:00]** for our hall, so we really started preparing a conference that would be like a game,

**[01:00:04]** which in its first version looked like this. At that time, I was already telling the guys in the team,

**[01:00:08]** that it’s fine, let’s leave it like this, this is enough

**[01:00:11]** to hold the conference. They said no,

**[01:00:15]** and from that March, when the lockdowns started and we knew we couldn’t hold the conference in May,

**[01:00:18]** they really made an app where the conference took place,

**[01:00:23]** which looked like this, everyone chose their avatar,

**[01:00:25]** you could walk around, meet people, really, no, I wanted to say physically,

**[01:00:30]** but unfortunately not, at least virtually, whenever you met someone,

**[01:00:33]** screens popped up, you could talk right there,

**[01:00:35]** you could chat with anyone at the conference.

**[01:00:38]** And suddenly this spin-off from that conference started for us,

**[01:00:42]** which we named Joinery, a startup of the classic

**[01:00:47]** startup type, which grew steadily, after a year about 20 people worked on it

**[01:00:52]** and we created virtual worlds for Škodovka, large global events,

**[01:00:57]** where thousands of people from Škodovka participated, and maybe some of you were

**[01:01:02]** at the Rock for People in the Game festival,

**[01:01:05]** because Rock for People couldn't take place, so word got around

**[01:01:08]** and it was held here in our system, where a few thousand people

**[01:01:11]** came to the concert in our virtual world.

**[01:01:14]** It was a space where we experimented

**[01:01:17]** and explored new things, for example in learning we mentioned,

**[01:01:20]** here we went a step further in Transparency at InMight,

**[01:01:23]** although we shared salaries with each other, we didn't fully disclose

**[01:01:28]** how salaries were set and the exact amount each of us earned,

**[01:01:32]** because once a company is running, some things are hard to implement.

**[01:01:36]** But here, when we started from scratch, we said,

**[01:01:38]** we'll do it exactly how we would do it now.

**[01:01:40]** So we made a nice salary table that was public from day one.

**[01:01:45]** Anyone could edit it, anyone could look at it.

**[01:01:48]** So even during interviews, when anyone came to the company,

**[01:01:51]** we opened the shared salary table together.

**[01:01:53]** We said, this is how it looks, where do you see yourself, where could you be.

**[01:01:57]** Someone said, I want 200,000.

**[01:02:00]** Ah, that would be three times more than me.

**[01:02:02]** Unfortunately, we can't afford that.

**[01:02:04]** But suddenly it made discussions much more transparent.

**[01:02:08]** And we went a step further than we had known before.

**[01:02:13]** One of the other experiments we tried was,

**[01:02:16]** there were seven co-founders of the company.

**[01:02:19]** And we set dynamically changing shares over time.

**[01:02:27]** So depending on who contributed and who felt they contributed to the company,

**[01:02:31]** the share each person had in the company changed over time.

**[01:02:35]** So our pie was sliced a little differently each time.

**[01:02:39]** And it seemed like a good approach until we needed

**[01:02:42]** to raise money with investors who sharply told us

**[01:02:45]** that startups aren't done like that, that you can't have seven co-founders,

**[01:02:48]** all with similar shares that change over time,

**[01:02:51]** that companies aren't built that way.

**[01:02:53]** I still believe they are, and that some investors haven't yet seen

**[01:02:57]** how it might be, and I'll explain why shortly.

**[01:02:59]** But we had to restructure a bit

**[01:03:01]** to even be able to discuss with investors,

**[01:03:03]** but we learned from that.

**[01:03:05]** It was also a company that was starting with a hockey stick graph,

**[01:03:08]** that's the hockey stick in the picture, which started to grow,

**[01:03:12]** and then suddenly covid ended, which is good, of course.

**[01:03:15]** Not so much for our company, because it turned out,

**[01:03:17]** that virtual worlds are no longer what

**[01:03:19]** we thought would be used forever,

**[01:03:21]** and that companies would gladly keep meeting virtually,

**[01:03:24]** because they are global, spread all over the world.

**[01:03:27]** But the story of Joinery is one that has ended.

**[01:03:31]** The company ran well for a year, then a bit less the next year,

**[01:03:34]** but now it’s no longer around.

**[01:03:36]** But as Lukáš Partiák from Happiness and also from Joinery says,

**[01:03:41]** life is such that either it ends well,

**[01:03:44]** or you learn something from it.

**[01:03:46]** We learned something from this, even though it didn’t end well.

**[01:03:49]** We tried many new things.

**[01:03:51]** And now I’m approaching the finale in the last twelve seconds.

**[01:03:56]** The finale of the story, where I have the last logo.

**[01:04:01]** And this might be the moment when, within this story,

**[01:04:06]** I’m kind of changing teams,

**[01:04:08]** because maybe you saw this picture,

**[01:04:10]** that we had been friends with debate for a long time.

**[01:04:13]** And the story is starting to head in a slightly different direction.

**[01:04:16]** So I’ll mute myself for a moment now.

**[01:04:34]** And the rest of the story is already in red.

**[01:04:36]** I heard that, we came up with it nicely.

**[01:04:39]** This is the story of Red Button, which intertwines with our story

**[01:04:43]** of course, Happiness at Work.

**[01:04:44]** And it started much earlier than the last year,

**[01:04:47]** when we formally merged the two entities

**[01:04:50]** and merged our companies.

**[01:04:53]** It’s a story that is starting to realize,

**[01:04:55]** that over the ten years we’ve been looking at Happiness at Work,

**[01:04:59]** we are increasingly convinced that

**[01:05:02]** the fish can smell from the head,

**[01:05:05]** and that it really comes from the highest places in the company.

**[01:05:08]** And by the way, that’s one of the things we found out,

**[01:05:11]** or I found out during my travels around the world,

**[01:05:14]** together, I was in companies that are manufacturing and non-manufacturing,

**[01:05:17]** in IT companies, in companies in Australia, in companies in Spain,

**[01:05:21]** and we all had just one thing in common,

**[01:05:23]** and that was that the culture mostly came from the founder,

**[01:05:27]** the owner, CEO, the person who drove the company forward.

**[01:05:30]** And that is exactly one of our big topics within Red Button,

**[01:05:34]** where we now regularly do something we call CEO community.cz,

**[01:05:40]** where we try to bring together leaders and company heads,

**[01:05:44]** so they have space to talk about how to do it,

**[01:05:47]** meaning how to run a business-successful company,

**[01:05:50]** that also has a positive impact on the people inside and the wider environment.

**[01:05:54]** Because we are increasingly convinced

**[01:05:56]** that when people feel good in a company, which is heavily influenced by the founder

**[01:06:02]** or CEO, the driving force, the one in charge,

**[01:06:05]** then those people carry that atmosphere home,

**[01:06:08]** to their families, to their communities.

**[01:06:10]** From those communities, it spreads throughout society.

**[01:06:13]** And that might ultimately be the way for all of us to be better off,

**[01:06:16]** and how we can all maintain our democratic system,

**[01:06:21]** and how we will be better off in the years to come.

**[01:06:24]** And the questions about how to really run a company,

**[01:06:27]** so that we feel good as leaders,

**[01:06:29]** those questions buzz in my mind and will probably buzz in yours for many years.

**[01:06:33]** The question of how to build a company from scratch today,

**[01:06:36]** in a world of rapid change,

**[01:06:39]** and I like to show it on this graph,

**[01:06:42]** which shows major global apps

**[01:06:44]** and how long it took them to reach their first million users.

**[01:06:48]** For Facebook, it took three and a half years,

**[01:06:50]** for ChatGPT it took five days, exactly two years ago.

**[01:06:54]** That's how fast changes are today.

**[01:06:56]** By now, you have all probably tried ChatGPT.

**[01:06:59]** And it really took five days to reach the first million users.

**[01:07:03]** With these rapid changes, it unfortunately looks like this picture.

**[01:07:07]** It compares how we perceive it,

**[01:07:09]** that somewhere AI might be happening now,

**[01:07:12]** but it's not very visible, we have it under control,

**[01:07:14]** and then suddenly it happens.

**[01:07:16]** And it will be everywhere.

**[01:07:18]** And maybe it's the same with the topic of sustainability,

**[01:07:22]** which we should pay attention to.

**[01:07:24]** Maybe it's the same with the topic of the atmosphere,

**[01:07:27]** without a company that can change incredibly fast.

**[01:07:29]** And maybe, when you think about those states like the perfect ones,

**[01:07:32]** polished diamonds with that sharp tip,

**[01:07:35]** where the CEO sits,

**[01:07:37]** but around which life goes on,

**[01:07:39]** then suddenly something like this might happen,

**[01:07:41]** that those fragile diamonds are no longer as resilient

**[01:07:44]** to the changes that are starting to happen around us,

**[01:07:47]** and those changes will be faster and faster.

**[01:07:49]** I think the only certainty is that

**[01:07:52]** changes will happen and they will be faster and faster.

**[01:07:54]** The world seems to work in a way

**[01:07:56]** that the future and various changes have already happened.

**[01:08:00]** They are just unevenly distributed across the world

**[01:08:03]** and across the world of work.

**[01:08:05]** We even tried this a bit in one of our startups,

**[01:08:09]** which we tested in a short time within Red Button.

**[01:08:12]** And as we saw the world moving into the virtual world,

**[01:08:15]** we bought a bunch of virtual headsets with the idea

**[01:08:18]** that we would teach companies how it works, how to use it.

**[01:08:21]** We even held the first press conference in virtual reality

**[01:08:24]** and appeared on Czech television in virtual reality.

**[01:08:27]** And then suddenly it turned out it wasn't that necessary.

**[01:08:30]** We were a bit ahead of the curve.

**[01:08:32]** That unevenness isn't here yet, but it will probably come.

**[01:08:36]** We tried to approach it similarly as we did

**[01:08:39]** successfully at the time with InMight, when we made mobile apps.

**[01:08:42]** That was maybe the time when we went to companies

**[01:08:45]** and told them, everyone will use smartphones.

**[01:08:48]** It will be the most personal device you'll have in your hand.

**[01:08:51]** It will be the first thing you reach for in the morning.

**[01:08:53]** And the bosses of those companies said, what is this nonsense,

**[01:08:55]** now phones are for calling, why would we need that.

**[01:08:58]** The future was already there and then it quickly came to everyone.

**[01:09:01]** And I think similar things, maybe even bigger, are coming.

**[01:09:04]** And they are happening.

**[01:09:06]** There are also companies that, decades ago, in the 80s,

**[01:09:10]** Ricardo Semler built the company Semco and wrote several books about it,

**[01:09:13]** which operates on completely different principles.

**[01:09:16]** For example, that whenever a production plant

**[01:09:18]** It grew to 150 people, so they split it into several smaller ones,

**[01:09:21]** because they wanted people to still be close to each other.

**[01:09:24]** Similarly, at FAVy they worked on creating a network of mini-factories,

**[01:09:30]** which would communicate and be interconnected.

**[01:09:32]** And possibly in a manufacturing company in the 80s,

**[01:09:34]** changes were happening, but they were unevenly spread out

**[01:09:38]** and real shifts were indeed taking place.

**[01:09:41]** I've been using this image for about five years now,

**[01:09:44]** which shows that we might move towards some networks,

**[01:09:47]** move towards the need for experimentation, mostly towards planning,

**[01:09:51]** move towards openness.

**[01:09:53]** And there are such companies here too, and more and more of them.

**[01:09:56]** Radek Majer and his TTC Teleport and the legendary balloon method,

**[01:10:00]** work like this: this is a visualization, not a photo of nice people,

**[01:10:03]** but whenever there is a task that needs to be done,

**[01:10:06]** they imagine it as a balloon hanging somewhere from the ceiling,

**[01:10:08]** and when someone feels like it, in their company, they take it,

**[01:10:11]** pull it to themselves and work on that task, so the task gets done.

**[01:10:14]** And if no one wants to, then it won't be done.

**[01:10:16]** When asked what if it's something crucial,

**[01:10:18]** and maybe the company will pay a penalty if the task isn't done,

**[01:10:22]** he says, well, that has happened to us a few times,

**[01:10:24]** but then we learned from it and next time someone took the task.

**[01:10:27]** They leave everything to the people to manage themselves.

**[01:10:29]** Similarly, the company Uplifting here with us works this way,

**[01:10:32]** which is based on tribal principles, like I showed in the example.

**[01:10:37]** They have everything open on the internet, with only a few rules,

**[01:10:40]** which they follow, for example how to handle conflicts with a colleague,

**[01:10:42]** so they don't have to build hierarchies around it.

**[01:10:45]** And this is something Frederic Laloux wrote many years ago in the book The Future of Organizations.

**[01:10:51]** He describes three principles of companies that seem ready for this changing world.

**[01:10:57]** And the three principles are, on one hand, wholeness,

**[01:11:00]** meaning the possibility to bring your whole self everywhere,

**[01:11:03]** with your full personality, with your humanity into the work.

**[01:11:06]** On the other hand, there are evolutionary purposes,

**[01:11:09]** meaning the company reacts to what is happening around it

**[01:11:12]** and aims to contribute something bigger both to the people inside,

**[01:11:17]** and to what is happening outside.

**[01:11:19]** And the company is aware that this can change over time,

**[01:11:21]** that in a few years it might be doing something completely different than it started with.

**[01:11:23]** And finally, self-management is a big question for me.

**[01:11:27]** Whether it's the only right answer,

**[01:11:29]** the analogy within Tyrkes' organizations is,

**[01:11:32]** that the forest has been functioning for thousands of years,

**[01:11:37]** and there's no main tree saying,

**[01:11:38]** 'Hey, watch out, there's a drought coming, we need to prepare,'

**[01:11:40]** or 'Now it's raining, let's all grow.'

**[01:11:42]** The trees seem to communicate,

**[01:11:46]** we are completely different, and it works together.

**[01:11:48]** So maybe if a company is built more like a forest,

**[01:11:50]** it might be ready for something to happen,

**[01:11:52]** for something to change,

**[01:11:53]** but we will all change and be able to respond,

**[01:11:57]** and it won't all be centralized somewhere at the top.

**[01:11:59]** On the other hand, of course, there are stories of Apple and other leaders,

**[01:12:04]** where we don't know if the iPhone,

**[01:12:07]** which I've mentioned here several times,

**[01:12:08]** would have been created in a company that was in a relaxed mode,

**[01:12:12]** ready for changes,

**[01:12:14]** but without a sharp leader,

**[01:12:16]** who clearly sets the direction

**[01:12:18]** and without whom it wouldn't have happened.

**[01:12:20]** Without that VABy, none of us would have those iPhones in our pockets.

**[01:12:22]** Maybe in the end, it really is like this,

**[01:12:24]** that on one side, the CEO must be in a warrior position,

**[01:12:29]** where tough things are happening

**[01:12:31]** and it's necessary to move forward.

**[01:12:32]** And then there might be a period of peace,

**[01:12:35]** abundance, fulfillment, where we feel good

**[01:12:40]** and have time to work on the surrounding things.

**[01:12:42]** And with that, my breath is slowly but surely ending,

**[01:12:46]** with the last two images.

**[01:12:48]** And one of them is maybe the main point,

**[01:12:51]** which I always come back to again and again,

**[01:12:52]** and always forget, then return to,

**[01:12:54]** so life doesn't look like a straight line from start to finish,

**[01:12:57]** just lighting your way.

**[01:12:58]** On the contrary, it's a kind of dance going up and down,

**[01:13:03]** like inhaling and exhaling,

**[01:13:05]** with periods of freedom and periods of hard work,

**[01:13:08]** where we have to look at something,

**[01:13:10]** where there is a period of happiness at work

**[01:13:12]** and a period when work might not be going so well for us.

**[01:13:14]** But that's good, because thanks to those periods,

**[01:13:16]** when things aren't going well and we have to go through something,

**[01:13:18]** we realize even more

**[01:13:20]** that we can rise somewhere and that there can be something more.

**[01:13:22]** So I increasingly think

**[01:13:24]** that life is not a straight line,

**[01:13:28]** which, if we imagined it on an EKG,

**[01:13:30]** would rather mean that it has ended.

**[01:13:32]** That life is really about

**[01:13:34]** being alive, that something is happening,

**[01:13:36]** that the forces are together,

**[01:13:38]** somehow integrated and cooperating.

**[01:13:41]** For me, that's ultimately what happiness at work is about.

**[01:13:48]** Thank you.

**[01:13:55]** Let's move on.

**[01:13:57]** Good, thanks.

**[01:13:59]** Thank you for your lecture and your journey.

**[01:14:03]** Thank you for thanking me.

**[01:14:06]** I was born in Bílavci, you know that,

**[01:14:08]** so that's clear.

**[01:14:10]** That's where it all started.

**[01:14:12]** We definitely met somewhere.

**[01:14:14]** They definitely threw stones at us over the fence in math class.

**[01:14:19]** I'll try to focus on your questions now.

**[01:14:23]** Be sure to take your phone,

**[01:14:25]** if you want to ask Michal something,

**[01:14:27]** write it down.

**[01:14:29]** Michal and I often

**[01:14:31]** talk about those periods,

**[01:14:33]** of companies.

**[01:14:35]** That means happiness is really perceived

**[01:14:37]** as us rejoicing, hugging,

**[01:14:39]** and so on.

**[01:14:41]** But for me, the hard times,

**[01:14:43]** because every startup,

**[01:14:45]** every team is something,

**[01:14:47]** that is actually a period of growth.

**[01:14:51]** When we look back,

**[01:14:53]** a person actually evaluates,

**[01:14:55]** that this is the moment,

**[01:14:57]** that moved him or her the furthest.

**[01:14:59]** And I feel that even this

**[01:15:01]** can be a moment of happiness.

**[01:15:03]** So thank you for

**[01:15:05]** capturing it so beautifully.

**[01:15:07]** And I'll go straight to the questions.

**[01:15:09]** Honza asks,

**[01:15:11]** Are there publicly accessible sources

**[01:15:13]** that measure this?

**[01:15:15]** We need to start with that.

**[01:15:17]** Thanks for the nudge, Honza.

**[01:15:19]** I think there is no objective ranking.

**[01:15:21]** It's obviously hard to measure,

**[01:15:23]** because it's happiness,

**[01:15:25]** psychologists call it

**[01:15:27]** subjective well-being,

**[01:15:29]** the subjective feeling of happiness,

**[01:15:31]** so it's hard to measure with surveys.

**[01:15:33]** But we've been thinking about it for a few years,

**[01:15:35]** so we mostly have examples

**[01:15:37]** that we bring to conferences,

**[01:15:39]** which appear on some employer rankings.

**[01:15:41]** I'd like to wave

**[01:15:43]** and greet Adam Hazdra with Atmoskop

**[01:15:45]** from ALMC,

**[01:15:47]** who actually conducts various studies,

**[01:15:49]** some that track these companies.

**[01:15:51]** We look at it,

**[01:15:53]** and it's some kind of data source,

**[01:15:55]** but definitely not what

**[01:15:57]** Michal goes deeply into.

**[01:15:59]** But anyway, people from that company rate

**[01:16:01]** their company in certain areas,

**[01:16:03]** so Adam Hazdra

**[01:16:05]** built something like that under ALMC.

**[01:16:07]** I could once do a TV show,

**[01:16:09]** where I, Zdeněk Polaraj, would visit companies

**[01:16:11]** and tell them everything they're doing wrong

**[01:16:13]** and what they need to change, then I'll put the label

**[01:16:15]** on the door that they're a happy company.

**[01:16:17]** I'll do that once.

**[01:16:19]** I think your music does something like that.

**[01:16:23]** How did you look for companies worldwide

**[01:16:25]** that would be interesting to you as an employee?

**[01:16:29]** I searched for them on the internet.

**[01:16:31]** That's...

**[01:16:33]** I always tried

**[01:16:35]** to look at some articles,

**[01:16:37]** to google it.

**[01:16:39]** Today it would be easier with AI.

**[01:16:41]** Some machine would probably find it for me.

**[01:16:43]** But it always intersected with the company

**[01:16:45]** I could find contact info for

**[01:16:47]** and connect with

**[01:16:49]** and at the same time, a company doing something interesting.

**[01:16:51]** But it turned out, with the right constitution,

**[01:16:53]** the companies interesting to me

**[01:16:55]** are very open and love to talk about it

**[01:16:57]** and are happy to invite someone and chat about it.

**[01:16:59]** So I really searched by

**[01:17:01]** googling a lot

**[01:17:03]** and I’m also involved in a few international communities,

**[01:17:05]** where I always tried to contact people

**[01:17:07]** in those countries to recommend to me

**[01:17:09]** who I could connect with there

**[01:17:11]** or who I could meet there.

**[01:17:13]** So these communities are the most important here.

**[01:17:15]** There are two questions here.

**[01:17:17]** Jana and Anonymous

**[01:17:19]** ask, and this is normal.

**[01:17:21]** What challenges does leadership face today?

**[01:17:23]** Is there such a thing as a leadership crisis?

**[01:17:25]** What does that mean, if anything?

**[01:17:27]** And Jana adds, how should or will leadership look

**[01:17:29]** in the next decades or millennia.

**[01:17:31]** A big topic.

**[01:17:33]** And I think it's also a major theme of the conference.

**[01:17:35]** Appropriately, the theme

**[01:17:37]** of this year's conference is

**[01:17:39]** leadership for the future.

**[01:17:41]** And we didn't say leadership of the future,

**[01:17:43]** but leadership for the future.

**[01:17:45]** Because we believe that a leader today

**[01:17:47]** should think about what to do

**[01:17:49]** so that not only their company functions,

**[01:17:51]** but also the society around us for the future.

**[01:17:53]** The leadership crisis,

**[01:17:55]** will be like

**[01:17:57]** the images I showed.

**[01:17:59]** So it probably exists here, but it is

**[01:18:01]** unevenly distributed.

**[01:18:03]** So some companies will have it, some won't.

**[01:18:05]** And

**[01:18:07]** how leadership for the future should work, in my view,

**[01:18:09]** is, in my opinion, the answer.

**[01:18:11]** We will seek it at the conference, so if

**[01:18:13]** Jana

**[01:18:15]** Anonymous

**[01:18:17]** has a question,

**[01:18:19]** come. I don't have the answer yet,

**[01:18:21]** but I think

**[01:18:23]** I'm starting to reach it

**[01:18:25]** through what I showed here in

**[01:18:27]** realizing, first,

**[01:18:29]** that change will be the only certainty,

**[01:18:31]** and second, that it's necessary

**[01:18:33]** to build perhaps more dynamic

**[01:18:35]** systems, rather than believing that I'll make one

**[01:18:37]** right decision and it will always be

**[01:18:39]** correct. I think it will

**[01:18:41]** really be about pulsing, about the fact that

**[01:18:43]** I myself am starting to accept

**[01:18:45]** the idea after ten years,

**[01:18:47]** that maybe

**[01:18:49]** it's not good to focus

**[01:18:53]** purely on luck at work, for everything

**[01:18:55]** to work out and then magically suddenly we start

**[01:18:57]** to deliver great results that will keep us,

**[01:18:59]** the business afloat and running.

**[01:19:01]** That you really need the inhale

**[01:19:03]** and the exhale, the pain,

**[01:19:05]** because what hurts strengthens,

**[01:19:07]** so we can then appreciate the bright moments.

**[01:19:09]** That's right, I'll try

**[01:19:11]** to add one more thing to that,

**[01:19:13]** and that is Stephen Covey

**[01:19:15]** Jr., who wrote the book Trust.

**[01:19:17]** It's a thing that changes everything,

**[01:19:19]** and there's a beautiful

**[01:19:21]** tree visualization that basically

**[01:19:23]** relates to how Trust is built.

**[01:19:25]** And Trust stems from some

**[01:19:27]** character, some intention, those are the roots,

**[01:19:29]** and the trunk is what supports it, but then

**[01:19:31]** there are the results the person achieves.

**[01:19:33]** That means, even if the person is simply great,

**[01:19:35]** value-wise absolutely

**[01:19:37]** perfect, but in the company actually doesn't deliver

**[01:19:39]** results, then the Trust

**[01:19:41]** simply breaks down, so that's one thing.

**[01:19:43]** And when we talked about

**[01:19:45]** the leadership of the future, I think

**[01:19:47]** we kind of jumped ahead a bit

**[01:19:49]** in Red Button's time and I'd like to bridge that,

**[01:19:51]** because I notice that

**[01:19:53]** the changes cause

**[01:19:55]** people to have to learn many things

**[01:19:57]** very quickly.

**[01:20:00]** And this is the only constant. And we see that organizations so far behave as if

**[01:20:07]** they want to teach people some skills, some competencies.

**[01:20:10]** We also have that from school. That's just how it is.

**[01:20:13]** We think the future lies in something we call a learning organization.

**[01:20:17]** And in that, to push the skill, but really deeply, to be able to learn how to learn.

**[01:20:25]** Because once you master this, it doesn't matter if GDPR comes,

**[01:20:29]** artificial intelligence or anything else, but as a company you are able to handle it

**[01:20:33]** and turn it into something that has value for the company.

**[01:20:36]** So I'll just add this to that. Do you want to add anything?

**[01:20:39]** I agree. Honestly, that's what I wanted to say.

**[01:20:41]** Thank you.

**[01:20:43]** Michal, Pavel Lipovský is asking,

**[01:20:48]** how do I perceive the other side of freedom at work, responsibility?

**[01:20:51]** How to support responsibility in a team?

**[01:20:55]** How much time do we have?

**[01:20:57]** We have, we have.

**[01:20:59]** I'll pull out one of my workshops on how to do that.

**[01:21:03]** By the way, we were discussing this exact topic and wondering if we have it clear,

**[01:21:08]** but that's the deal.

**[01:21:09]** Recently, as part of testing with the community, we hold regular meetings

**[01:21:13]** with company leaders, and this was a big topic exactly about this.

**[01:21:19]** It was about ownership and responsibility.

**[01:21:21]** It was about making people in the company feel that it really depends on them.

**[01:21:27]** And that's such a big topic right now that it's hard for me to answer.

**[01:21:32]** But if anyone is following the topics startups in Silicon Valley are dealing with,

**[01:21:37]** then in the last few weeks a big topic has been something they call founder mode.

**[01:21:43]** There have been major articles about how maybe the founder

**[01:21:49]** of an American startup sometimes has to step up or be that founder

**[01:21:53]** who fully takes on the results, takes on the responsibility.

**[01:21:58]** And he holds it all because in the end he's the only one in the company who knows,

**[01:22:03]** if it doesn't get done, then he simply has to do it himself.

**[01:22:06]** And that's a big discussion in Silicon Valley now, whether that's really the case,

**[01:22:10]** whether founders really hold it all and whether it should be that way,

**[01:22:13]** that they end up being micromanagers.

**[01:22:15]** Steve Jobs was probably an example of that, I used him in slides, and he was like,

**[01:22:19]** he would come down from his floor to the team that was just, I don't know,

**[01:22:23]** working on some app, but he believed somehow, why exactly that was.

**[01:22:27]** How to transfer that so people have it?

**[01:22:29]** There are probably many things and the answer will be a bit different everywhere.

**[01:22:33]** But of course, experiments that definitely help are in startups,

**[01:22:37]** in American ones, for example, they deal a lot with stock options so everyone has a piece

**[01:22:41]** of their share in the company, so part of it is given to them as equity.

**[01:22:45]** The vision is that a person then sees that when they contribute to the company and are responsible for it,

**[01:22:50]** to help it grow, the value of their share grows, so they work harder.

**[01:22:55]** The answer goes back to meaning, that when people really understand what

**[01:23:00]** they do and how it contributes to the bigger whole, they are then able to accept responsibility.

**[01:23:05]** I have a nice story here from Amy Wrzesniewski's research in hospitals in the States.

**[01:23:11]** They found that in a specific hospital in New Jersey, the lady in charge of cleaning

**[01:23:17]** operated completely differently within this hospital than in all the others.

**[01:23:21]** And when they investigated why, they realized that the staff there truly took responsibility for their work,

**[01:23:25]** not seeing their job as just cleaning the floor and then leaving.

**[01:23:29]** They talked about the activity as something meaningful and important.

**[01:23:35]** It turned out that they perceived that by keeping the hospital environment clean,

**[01:23:39]** infections would spread less, people would feel better,

**[01:23:43]** because they would be in an environment that works around them.

**[01:23:46]** And suddenly, patients would actually spend less time in the hospital,

**[01:23:50]** recover faster, and they realized that even cleaning had a big impact on the whole hospital operation.

**[01:23:53]** And once they understood the meaning of their work and connected it to the patients,

**[01:23:57]** they naturally took responsibility for it.

**[01:24:01]** This is very similar to what Leo Šířele talks about in Solei, where they also had a big challenge

**[01:24:05]** in how to move these things forward with people. He says that before,

**[01:24:07]** when material started spilling somewhere, everyone would just walk away,

**[01:24:12]** raising their hands, saying it’s not their problem, they have work elsewhere.

**[01:24:15]** But then, when they managed to work on trust and meaning,

**[01:24:18]** and it wasn’t just about writing it on the wall or saying everyone is responsible,

**[01:24:21]** but about talking for two years about how things are and finding solutions,

**[01:24:23]** he says that now, when material starts spilling, the first person passing by

**[01:24:26]** jumps in, holds the spot, and reports that something is happening.

**[01:24:30]** Even if it’s not their job, they feel the need to act,

**[01:24:33]** because they see it’s their company. So, that’s it for now.

**[01:24:37]** I’m actually thinking this isn’t just about the company environment.

**[01:24:40]** It’s about living in a society, and when something in that society

**[01:24:43]** doesn’t work, you step in. These are... Ján Košturiak,

**[01:24:46]** my great teacher and someone I deeply respect,

**[01:24:52]** says these people are the world’s fixers. He’s a big innovator,

**[01:24:58]** and these are the people who, when they see something not working,

**[01:25:03]** step in. Sometimes they’re annoying because they step in often,

**[01:25:08]** seeing many imperfections, and we have discussions about that too.

**[01:25:12]** But the truth is, I think the responsible sphere should encourage more fixers to emerge.

**[01:25:17]** That’s exactly it.

**[01:25:21]** What makes us happier in life is something called the internal locus of control,

**[01:25:27]** that feeling that we can control life, that we can influence something.

**[01:25:48]** And we can recognize that even in work through... I had hints here

**[01:25:51]** of that freedom, that I am part of something, that I can do something.

**[01:25:54]** And these are things that, when I feel I can do something, I then actually do it.

**[01:25:58]** And when I feel I could influence something at work, then maybe I can influence it further.

**[01:26:02]** Right now, I have a case where at our school the kids came up with

**[01:26:06]** the idea of having a school parliament, and the kids are considering whether to run

**[01:26:10]** for that parliament or not. And the principle behind it is, of course, that.

**[01:26:14]** And the principal was explaining to me about it,

**[01:26:17]** that it's so they learn that even they, as students, can influence something at school.

**[01:26:22]** And maybe that’s the school teaching that citizens can influence something in society

**[01:26:26]** or employees can influence something in a company.

**[01:26:28]** An active society. Have you experienced burnout?

**[01:26:31]** Probably not, wow.

**[01:26:35]** That’s a tricky question, because several times I thought, wow,

**[01:26:39]** because most stories from others are that they were in some corporate job, worked brutally hard, then burned out, and then did everything differently.

**[01:26:42]** That didn’t happen to me. I was probably lucky that I,

**[01:26:47]** and maybe it’s the same with everything, you know, my focus on health and longevity,

**[01:26:49]** so I prefer to work many years on prevention so this doesn’t happen.

**[01:26:55]** Likewise, I was lucky to start working at Edneter, my first company,

**[01:26:59]** which guided me to see that maybe it can be a bit different. So no?

**[01:27:04]** So we probably don’t invite it.

**[01:27:09]** And I believe not. That it’s not necessary.

**[01:27:11]** Most people prefer the comfort zone in a directive structure,

**[01:27:13]** because then they don’t have to take so much responsibility. What do you think? Probably Jirka.

**[01:27:17]** Is that right?

**[01:27:22]** It is.

**[01:27:24]** Maybe everyone has their comfort zone, but unfortunately, the interesting stuff starts outside it.

**[01:27:25]** Just beyond the edge of comfort.

**[01:27:30]** And many things start there, which fuel the feeling of happiness at work.

**[01:27:33]** If you look at Csikszentmihalyi’s research from the 70s on flow,

**[01:27:36]** he says that a happier person is one who experienced flow during their workday.

**[01:27:43]** And flow comes from pushing yourself right at or just beyond the edge of comfort,

**[01:27:49]** where you do what you can, but it’s slightly uncomfortable,

**[01:27:53]** because you have to learn a lot of new things.

**[01:27:57]** But exactly in that place, that’s the skill, it’s called being in the zone.

**[01:27:59]** At work, that’s flow.

**[01:28:02]** He also showed this in manufacturing companies, that at the end of the day,

**[01:28:04]** the person who experienced flow, being at the edge of comfort, will feel happier or rate the day as better

**[01:28:06]** than the one who spent the day in the comfort zone.

**[01:28:15]** on the beach reading a book.

**[01:28:17]** In the end, he feels like he hasn't done anything very useful.

**[01:28:21]** I’m tempted to add some story to it, but I won’t,

**[01:28:25]** because our time is up.

**[01:28:28]** So, Michal, thanks again for, let’s say, the kickoff,

**[01:28:34]** because we will continue from here.

**[01:28:36]** So thank you very much for preparing this story for us,

**[01:28:39]** for your words, and especially for what you do.

**[01:28:42]** If you’re not registered for the Happiness at Work conference,

**[01:28:45]** please sign up, that’s definitely an important message.

**[01:28:50]** I’d really like to ask you to give us feedback.

**[01:28:55]** It helps us improve, so we’re switching gears.

**[01:28:58]** If you liked it, give five stars.

**[01:29:01]** If you didn’t like it and just aged this discussion,

**[01:29:04]** then also give five stars.

**[01:29:07]** We want you to do it right.

**[01:29:09]** There’s also one word that, if you enter it,

**[01:29:12]** which came to your mind while listening to us,

**[01:29:15]** especially Michal,

**[01:29:18]** we would really appreciate it.

**[01:29:21]** I encourage you to take some time,

**[01:29:26]** as is good practice, to reflect after breakfast.

**[01:29:31]** If something surprised you, if you disagree with something,

**[01:29:34]** or if there’s something you’d like to explore further,

**[01:29:37]** try sitting down in a circle, whether with your team, at work,

**[01:29:41]** or with someone you like, and try to talk about this topic,

**[01:29:45]** to go deeper into it. A lot, a lot was said.

**[01:29:48]** We have this reflection for you under this broadcast,

**[01:29:50]** so definitely do it better when you do it in a group

**[01:29:55]** and somehow talk about it.

**[01:29:58]** Maybe over a good breakfast.

**[01:30:00]** Because we know some people simply watch us alone,

**[01:30:03]** so we regularly offer you this option

**[01:30:07]** in the form of Brain and Breakfast Digestive,

**[01:30:11]** which is a discussion following this one with Michal,

**[01:30:13]** and it will be on October 1st at lunchtime,

**[01:30:17]** so if you’d like to discuss this topic more deeply,

**[01:30:19]** sign up for this discussion,

**[01:30:23]** right through the Yelp button edu platform,

**[01:30:27]** So just follow us, we'll definitely share lots of links here.

**[01:30:31]** We'll add more before then.

**[01:30:34]** I did this on purpose, Michal, you don't know,

**[01:30:36]** but I reached out to those factory managers,

**[01:30:39]** people who run the factories and such,

**[01:30:41]** to be part of this discussion.

**[01:30:43]** So we don't just agree with each other

**[01:30:45]** and say that's how it is,

**[01:30:47]** but so we can also look at the wartime perspective.

**[01:30:50]** So we can dance a little.

**[01:30:51]** Right, so we can dance together.

**[01:30:53]** For example, Láďa Veselý from Slavomat,

**[01:30:56]** who was there during very tough times,

**[01:30:58]** will be part of the Digest.

**[01:31:01]** Look forward to business breakfasts too,

**[01:31:05]** which are in a slightly different mode

**[01:31:07]** than the usual ones.

**[01:31:09]** We focus on business topics

**[01:31:11]** that companies need

**[01:31:13]** and must address in the coming decade.

**[01:31:18]** Other topics will include

**[01:31:20]** cybersecurity in the technology breakfast,

**[01:31:22]** cognitive security and future risks

**[01:31:24]** with Pepa Holý.

**[01:31:26]** In the People section, company culture,

**[01:31:28]** Olga Zimmermann will talk

**[01:31:30]** about psychological safety and building trust in teams.

**[01:31:32]** I think this nicely connects to what

**[01:31:34]** Michal was talking about.

**[01:31:35]** So if you don't have

**[01:31:37]** Brain and Breakfast business yet,

**[01:31:38]** definitely let us know.

**[01:31:40]** I think it's something we did really well.

**[01:31:43]** Book of the Month, by the way, another product

**[01:31:45]** from Red Button, which is behind all this.

**[01:31:49]** Margareta Křížová, her latest book.

**[01:31:53]** So definitely watch the video with the recommendation.

**[01:31:57]** And if you need anything from us,

**[01:32:00]** try pressing the red button.

**[01:32:02]** We made a nice page for that,

**[01:32:04]** Red Button Push.

**[01:32:05]** So you press it and you're already in the network

**[01:32:08]** and can discuss anything with us

**[01:32:10]** and ask anything.

**[01:32:11]** So that's it.

**[01:32:13]** The QR code will take you to our newsletter,

**[01:32:16]** if you'd like to stay more in touch with us.

**[01:32:19]** Now we can talk about a slightly bigger game

**[01:32:26]** or a big game.

**[01:32:28]** I was just thinking

**[01:32:30]** about how to connect what's happening in the world

**[01:32:32]** and how the situation is developing.

**[01:32:34]** After all, the US presidential elections are in October.

**[01:32:36]** So I asked Tomáš Etzler,

**[01:32:39]** a person who has experienced a lot in China,

**[01:32:43]** to primarily focus on China.

**[01:32:47]** That was the first topic.

**[01:32:50]** But as we talked and talked,

**[01:32:52]** it turned out it wouldn't be just about China,

**[01:32:54]** but that we would look at some geopolitical context

**[01:32:56]** as he sees it.

**[01:32:59]** So if you'd like to join the next breakfast,

**[01:33:01]** the October breakfast with Tomáš Etzler on 24.10,

**[01:33:04]** I'd be happy to welcome you here,

**[01:33:08]** either in Mačinč or at your receivers.

**[01:33:11]** So take care.

**[01:33:14]** Thank you very much.

**[01:33:17]** Michal, thanks to you once again too.

**[01:33:19]** Take care. Bye and see you.

**[01:33:21]** Applause