Universities, created as an assembly of experts in 1088, are as outdated as buggy whips. The cost and rewards of a college education are increasingly under attack. To sustain great universities requires cultural transformation consisting of 5 Steps:
Heath Harding at the Illinois Leadership Center (here) sent me a link to a post in the Positive Psychology News Daily called Honda and the Joy of Engineering in which the three joys of Honda are discussed. The title and the post stuck in Heath’s mind and mine, because of the name of this blog and company and because in the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) we talked to the freshmen about three joys from the very first day: the joy of engineering, the joy of learning, and the joy of community.
in 1951 Honda’s founder, Mr Soichiro Honda, wrote a Management Policy document which spoke of 3 joys:
Of course, these joys are different from iFoundry’s three, but the post author, Bridget Grenville-Cleave, suggests that we all take a page out of Honda’s play book and articulate particular joys for our organizations:
Don’t shy away from positive emotions at work. They have a place in every successful company. If this seems a bit scary, you could start by looking at how to create a more healthy balance of right brain and left brain, feeling and thinking, intuition and analysis. Alternatively, if you had to suggest Three Joys for your company, what would they be and why?
Great question. What are your three joys at work and why?
90% of your happiness is due to internal, not external matters. Watch this video to put a smile on your face for a week.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJsdqxnZb0
Shawn Achor’s message of positive psych, gratitude, and positive action turns normal ideas of success on their head. Normally, we think that if we are successful then we will be happy, but for a variety of reasons this doesn’t work. If we are happy, through gratitude, acts of kindness, and generous thoughts, we can first be happy, then successful.
Thanks to Lesley Millar for sharing this link.
In strategic thinking circles, the SWOT model is a commonly used framework for strategic planning and stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 
The model is generative and has been helpful to many strategic planners over many years.
Having said this, there’s an alternative that is getting increasing attention called SOAR or strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results. SOAR grows out of the movement toward appreciative inquiry in which emphasis is placed on considering positive opportunities and possibilities as opposed to problems. While SWOT spends half of its distinctions on the what might go wrong, SOAR spends 100% of its categories on creating intention for future positive outcomes.
The shift from problem solving to opportunity finding is a subtle one, but results from positive psychology and innovation studies support the approach. For more on SOAR consider the Thin Book of SOAR and for more on appreciative inquiry consider the Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry.