Career

Redefining Our Joy At Work

While in Austin, TX this past week, I had some time to kill and discovered the wonderful BookPeople store. While browsing through their business section, I stumbled across a gem called Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke. The subtitle is A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job (there’s that word ‘fun’ again).

What is most compelling about the book is Bakke’s vulnerability in talking about the ups and downs of trying to create a values-driven and profitable company where people are free to bring their full passion to their work. Simple on paper, quite the opposite in practice, particularly when your organization is a publicly traded energy company employing over 30,000 people. What I most appreciate is Bakke’s unwillingness to break from his guiding beliefs: that joyful work must be fun and challenging; that each employee - regardless of their position in the organization - must have the power to make important decisions; that a business’s prime objective should be to benefit society while continuing to pursue financial viability. And he had plenty of opportunities to deviate from these beliefs, particularly when his Board of Directors felt his ‘experiment’ was costing the company profits and neglecting the stockholders’s interests.

One of the big takeaways for me, so far, is Bakke’s reintroduction of the word opus. To me, opus is a cartoon penguin (see picture above) and a term used in classical music (though I did not know that opera is the plural form of opus). What is new for me is that opus is a latin word meaning work, especially work that is a voluntary act imbued with creativity and meaning. That’s powerful and certainly reflects that kind of work we all want to do in our lives.

Bakke continues to offer a spiritual perspective of work when we writes:

God intended that the workplace be beautiful, exciting, and satisfying. Work was to be filled with joy. Work was a major reason for our creation. It was intended to be an important act of worship. It was one of the most significant ways in which we could honor our Creator.

We are challenged to bring the sublimity of the opus into our lives rather than merely settle for the more mundane drudgery of labor. What can you do today to bring your opus to life?

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