Just out, A Culture of Happiness: How to Scale Up Happiness From People to Organizations by Tho Ha Vinh, PhD, and I’m honored to be one of the first people to receive it.
It is a treat since Tho Ha Vinh is a former program director of Bhutan’s Gross National Center, which is leading the global conversation about happiness, responsible for making Bhutan the #1 happiest country in the world.
I mean, you must have heard that according to the World Happiness Report (WHR) Finland is the number 1 happiest country in the world, while Bhutan is ranked 95th happiest country in the world (out of 156 countries), but this statistic can be misleading.
After all, WHR considers outdated socio-economic factors to calculate happiness, such as GDP / personal income. WHR, however, doesn’t measure factors like: how much people smile, enjoy their lives, social inclusion, etc.
In Bhutan, however, the national policy is fully designed around the principle of “happiness for the greatest number”, meaning that while, purely economically speaking, people are not wealthy, they are enjoying their lives way more than what we do in the Western world (or even anywhere else in the world for that matter), and Tho Ha Vinh, PhD was the leading person who made it happen.
This is why I’m so excited to read this book and I will soon write a more extensive review for those who are interested!