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Two Chaps - Many Cultures
Global Business Excellence Through Cultural and Emotional Intelligence (ICE-Q)
Welcome to ๐๐ฌ๐ค ๐พ๐๐๐ฅ๐จ โ ๐๐๐ฃ๐ฎ ๐พ๐ช๐ก๐ฉ๐ช๐ง๐๐จ. We help you navigate the business of culture and the culture of business. Christian Hรถferle and Brett Parry ponder many topics related to culture through a combination of short bursts and deep dives.
We feature guests from the world of business and personal development, speaking about their experiences developing a combination of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EQ), as well as it's vital importance to successful global organizations.
It's not only about culture. There are also tips and strategies for creating abundance in your professional and personal life.
Level up your ICE-Q by hitting the SUBSCRIBE button. Add your questions and comments related to culture, business, and personal growth.
Two Chaps - Many Cultures
Measuring Happiness Can Be A Misery: Beyond the World Happiness Report
Can we measure how happy big groups of people are? The World Happiness Report tries to do exactly that โ for entire nations! It is like a big mood check for countries. The WHR is a yearly ranking that looks at how happy people are around the world based on factors like income, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Basically, it tries to measure how satisfied and content people feel in different countries, giving us a snapshot of global well-being.
The challenge in a ranking like this is that happiness is probably one of the least understood and most sought-after emotions and experiences in human life. What does it mean to be happy? How do you know that you are doing well? Turns out there is no universal definition for this pleasant emotion.
Even people from countries that rank highest in the WHR are wondering how they made it to the top, like the Finnish-American professor of sociology, Jukka Savolainen (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/finland-happiness-lagom-hygge.html). Savolainen suspects his compatriots evaluate their lives and their life expectations in such a way that their actual life circumstances approximate their highest expectations. Happiness - by this definition - means that there is only a small gap between what people look for in life and what they actually find.
However, research consistently shows that different cultures around the world have unique concepts of well-being and happiness. While it is probably safe to assume that every human in any society has a desire to be happy, studies suggest that we arenโt completely alike in our happiness and that our interpretation of happiness may very well be dependent on our cultural contexts. As a result, this would affect how countries rank on the WHR.
You'll find more on this topic here: https://theculturemastery.com/2016/06/24/why-people-around-the-world-define-happiness-and-well-being-differently/
Check out the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report: https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf
๐๐ฌ๐ค ๐พ๐๐๐ฅ๐จ โ ๐๐๐ฃ๐ฎ ๐พ๐ช๐ก๐ฉ๐ช๐ง๐๐จ is the worldโs #1 show on the business of culture and the culture of business. Christian Hรถferle and Brett Parry ponder culture in short bursts and deep dives, featuring your questions and comments related to culture, business, and personal growth.
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more great content: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoChapsManyCultures
Visit https://theculturemastery.com/ for more information about the skills for working in a global context.
The music on this episode is provided courtesy of Sepalot.
โDuum Diipโ - Artist: Sepalot - Label: Eskapaden - Copyright control
Do I look happy to you? Am I a really happy camper right now? Or am I just putting on a face and make you believe that this is what happiness is? Well, maybe we'll find out in this episode where we talk about the World Happiness Report apparently ranking the happiness levels of nations around the globe. So are they the happiest? And did your country make it into the top 10? And what does that even mean? Let's find out.
Speaker 2:Welcome to 2Chap's Many Cultures. In an increasingly globally connected world, it is vital to possess the essential skills of cultural intelligence. Listen along as we present the topics, tips and strategies you can use to develop the power of cultural understanding in your personal and professional life. Here are your hosts Christian Huffala and Brett Parry.
Speaker 3:Welcome back to a happy episode of Two Chaps, many Cultures, or will it be? Yes? Well, you'll make us happy if you subscribe to our channel, listen to our podcast, hit that bell and welcome back to the show where too much culture is barely enough and perhaps too much happiness is too much, or too much sadness. How do we work that out? Well, there are rankings, apparently. Tell us how happy people are.
Speaker 1:And where do we?
Speaker 3:find those rankings mate.
Speaker 1:They are on a website. I think they're called the World Happiness Report, where nations compete in the Happiness Olympics, I guess it's the.
Speaker 1:Olympics, gold medals and bronze and silver medals, or something I don't want to make light of this. There is, and this is why we're talking about this. This is why we dedicate an episode to this, because it is heavily publicized around the world. The World Happiness Report makes it into news headlines. It is reported all over, at least in the media that Brett and I consume, and usually the highest ranking countries in that world happiness report are then looked at more vigorously. What is it about these lands that make people say they are happy, lands that make people say they are happy? And this is where my thought process begins, or our thought process begins and we wonder how do you define this happiness, and is it the same in all these countries? And how do these countries end up on the top and others in midfield and others? We don't want to talk about them. I don't know.
Speaker 3:I find it. Well, as Christian says, we are a little skeptical, not skeptical. I guess we are intrigued by these rankings because we want to look behind the curtain a little bit, we want to understand what drives them, what is the modality of the questions and things like that. And perhaps we're not the only ones, because actually the people that ended, the countries that ended up on top of this list, they seem to be the most skeptical. They're looking at that and going oh, you're calling us the happiest in the world, interesting. You're calling us the happiest in the world Interesting. Well, we could tell you the reasons why perhaps we're contented, perhaps why we don't actually aspire to much more than what we've got, but happy.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:And maybe if you're a visitor, they point out. If you're a visitor to these lands, these Nordic lands, let's talk about these. Finland hit the top, denmark hits the top, usually these countries that are in the far north of the globe, and if you go to these countries, if you walked around, probably you wouldn't see people dancing on the streets.
Speaker 1:Probably not no no.
Speaker 1:And I think the geographic location is probably not a big factor in that either, because then, if that were true, then maybe Southern Argentina and Chile or Canada or Siberia would also rank highly. But they don't. It's Finland, denmark, iceland, sweden occupy the top four spots and usually, looking at the past years and how that happiness reports ranks them, they usually make up the top five. Somehow. The nordic lands, right, nordic countries no, they're not dancing happily in the street, and so what is it? What makes them happy?
Speaker 1:Um, one of the articles that we both read about, or in response to the World Happiness Report and in response to the media craze about it, is that in recent years, at least in the Western world, mental health and work-life balance took a lot of cues from Scandinavian living standards. The Danish concept of hygge became maybe a fad, maybe a flash in the pan. Who knows? It might just give clues to a more balanced life, if that works out for the individual or within a certain region of the world where you live. But is hygge really the recipe for happiness around the world? Perhaps doubtful. How do you feel about that, brett?
Speaker 3:Interesting that they refer to this fervent embrace of hygge as a concept and it became actually a marketing tool here in the US, where we are, which is sensibly strange If we just put those in comparison with each other. Chris and I are both in the US and this is a country that perhaps arguably doesn't have the best safety net for people If you don't have a certain standard of living healthcare is tied to work your job these kind of social structures that are so taken for granted in these countries. And yet in America we have this almost fervent evangelical atmosphere where people it's like a marketing campaign every day. So they take a concept which is from another country, which seems to again give them something they might aspire to, this sense of comfort and contentment, and then they put it, then they plug it into a marketing campaign. It becomes a commercial success.
Speaker 3:But in the article in Slate we're referencing, a lot of those things have now been pushed to the discount part of the stores. But those concepts have been around for generations, centuries in those countries. They've never gone away in the countries that actually found them, like in Sweden and Finland and Denmark and places like that. But here it's flash in the pan, it's in, it's out and it's on to the next best thing.
Speaker 1:Often people make decisions on whether I want to accept an assignment. Right, I work for a global organization. The company's offering me a posting abroad. And well, they're offering me a posting in the United States, or they're offering me a posting in I don't know France, saudi Arabia, or in Denmark, sweden, finland. What am I going to choose? Which of these locations is most promising? A for my career and also for my family and social life? Right? And then if you compare Finland, denmark, according to the World Happiness Report, against the US or Germany or I don't know France, then the scale easily tips towards the Nordics. Will that be the best decision for you and your loved ones? Well, no ranking in the world will have the right answer for that right.
Speaker 1:And obviously there are certain factors that contribute to the ranking. They look at income inequality or equality. They look at working hours and they look at productivity levels in these countries. And they look at the educational system how much social climbing is possible through education. All of these are factors that contribute to an overall happiness level in a society.
Speaker 1:But if you ask a Finn who lives perhaps, depending on their location, lives in darkness for several months throughout the year, because the sun only comes up for maybe an hour or two during the winter times. Will they tell you that they are particularly happy during those periods? Perhaps not. If you look at the levels of alcoholism and drug abuse in in these parts of the world suicide rates in finland are comparatively high then you would ask yourself how does that factor into the number one ranking in the world happiness report? So with all these rankings and we had an episode about a different type of ranking a couple of weeks ago take it with a grain of salt. Make sure who's doing the data collection. How is the data collected put together and emphasized? How is the data collected put together and emphasized? Because I don't know who said it first, but I think you shouldn't trust a statistic that you didn't falsify yourself.
Speaker 3:That's a good one. Culture is really what people are used to in a country. So you know, if you're interviewing people on a one-on-one basis, you're getting people's opinions so, and we're not understanding those people and their happiness. We're just understanding what they're used to. Maybe perhaps they don't even have any perception of what it's like in a different country and that's why, as christian says, you know moving, when you're contemplating moving to a new country, you're grasping at information, any information you can get, and this is a type of ranking you might find that comes up in your feed, especially if you happen to talk about it in the earshot of your phone. But again, be very careful of it because you know it takes a lot more than that to understand what people are used to in a country and what makes them happy.
Speaker 1:And as you pointed out, it's often the cultural values within a group of people that defines how the group looks at this phenomenon of happiness. I'm not an expert on Asian languages I don't speak Mandarin or Korean or Japanese but I've read more than once that in Mandarin, or in Asian societies overall, there is no one terminology for that feeling of happiness. There are different words for different types of inner peace or elation, or contentment, or satisfaction or maybe even excitement, so that one English term that we use here happy or happiness doesn't easily translate into other thought concepts, right? So a ranking based on the definition is maybe a bit questionable given that background.
Speaker 1:And you look at the Nordics, whether it's Finland or Sweden or Denmark, what many of these Nordic cultures have in common is a cultural value of equality. In common is a cultural value of equality. In Sweden they call it, and I think in Denmark they call it Jantelagen, the law of Jante, a fictitious individual by the name of Jante. Jante is the everyman right. It's the law of the everyman. Everybody has access to the same resources, everybody has the same rights and nobody is better than anyone else. Don't you think you're special, which I think in your homeland, australia, they call it. What?
Speaker 3:Tall puppy syndrome.
Speaker 1:So if you're a puppy that grows too tall. What happens to it? You get your stem chopped off.
Speaker 3:Ah, that must hurt that sounds painful, that sounds painful, ah, that must hurt. That sounds painful, that sounds painful.
Speaker 1:So we, and which maybe won't surprise us then that Australia also made it into the top 10 of the most happy countries, right? So maybe it is how we, or how cultural values, teach us or lead us to manage our expectations Absolutely. Us, or lead us to manage our expectations Absolutely. If you look at US culture, where it is the proverbial country of unlimited resources and endless opportunity, you are raised in a mindset of, oh, anything and everything is possible. Yes, you can become CEO one day. You might be president. Yes, the world is your oyster. You have what it takes. You're just a human being like me and everything is possible for you.
Speaker 1:That is a magnificent way to motivate people, to let them aspire to higher things. And when they don't reach that one big thing of maybe, let's say, the presidency of, there is only one at a time, so there are the chances are somewhat limited to reach that goal. How do you feel about it then? Are you still going to be happy? Or will that lead to frustration because all your aspirational goals that have been held up to you like the big carrot in front of your eager, hungry mouth, you'll never reach it? Will that make you happy? Will that make you disappointed. And then compare that to, let's say, jantelagen, where nobody is supposed to have more than the neighbor, where it's socially accepted and expected that, yeah, we all have about the same and we're going to be all right with that. Those are different ways to manage your expectations in life and the expectations of your emotional well-being. Does that affect the world happiness index? I would venture to say likely so.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And we want to know are you happy if your country made it to the top? Is that a competition in and of itself? Does that make you happy if your country is at the top, or if it's down at the bottom? Do you kind of share some disappointment or don't you care? We would love to know. We have an aspiration, and that is to hear from you. And so these scores you know they are what they are and the commentary, of course, will include the commentary in the, in the description, the link to that commentary we're referring to. But, uh, we want to hear from you what's your perception of happiness? How do you see your current state, or the current state of your country, or society, or or the, even the town you live in? Um, I find that always interesting, and is it an internal thing or an external thing? That's the veryโฆ.
Speaker 1:Are you responsible for the emotion or is the world around you responsible for that emotion? That would be interesting to hear.
Speaker 3:That's right, absolutely Well, that's it. That's all we've got to do. We're asking you a question, of course we're asking you a question. Of course we're leaving you hanging and uh, we're going to um hope that you subscribe to our youtube channel and, of course, listen to the podcast, uh, wherever you may be, if you can't see us and usually that's a good thing uh, subscribe and um, yeah, I don't know what. What are you going to be doing this, uh, this week, mate, that's going to make you happy you mean people are happy when they don't have to see us All right.
Speaker 3:Well, that might be the thing. Maybe the Nordic countries don't get this show. Maybe that's what makes them happy.
Speaker 1:I'll force subscribe some of them. I hope this episode made you a bit happier or make you think about your own level of happiness, or whether you want to give it the same level of attention as the news media or the social media have given it. So give it a think, let us know in the comments.
Speaker 3:Subscribe, comment email us and share it with your friends. Make them happy. Make them happy they.
Speaker 1:We won't let you down yet another episode two chaps, many cultures. This guy's brett, my name's christian. I hope we see you next episode. Stay happy.