Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Citation

Wilson, J.P. (2011), "Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 43 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2011.03743aae.002

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Article Type: Bookshelf From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 43, Issue 1

Barbara Ehrenreich,Granta Publications,London,2009,ISBN 9781847081735,£8.99,

At first sight you might wonder why this book is being reviewed when it is not explicitly about training and development. The short answer is that it contains a lot about contemporary issues such as well-being and happiness that have increasingly become mainstream issues for those in the training and development profession.

The American Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Indeed, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan measures its success not on how well the economy is doing but on how happy its citizens are, and also Scotland has begun benchmarking the national level of happiness.

The “Have a nice day” philosophy which originated in the USA has increasingly established a stronghold in many countries. One of the main drivers for positive psychology is Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism which emphasises the benefits to be gained from looking at the world optimistically and has helped to grow the self-help industry to achieve sales of $9.6 billion.

The rationale for the smile philosophy is well founded – people generally tend to prefer to do business with cheerful people rather than with the grumpy and irascible. With almost 80 per cent of the UK working population employed in the service sector the majority of us have internal or external customers. And, importantly, it is the quality of the service delivery that influences how much we enjoy a meal at a restaurant, a room in a hotel, our interaction with a contact centre, etc.

The result is that many human resources departments have been training their employees to smile and many assess performance on their ability to do so. Indeed, staff have been told to leave when their attitude was not sufficiently positive or “can do”.

Unfortunately, being a positive employee is often equated with signing-up to whatever organizational decisions are communicated. However, it is important that HR and all employees do not slavishly follow organizational dictats without careful consideration. Debate, discussion and even dissent have the potential to create a more healthy and happy environment in which strategies and policies are carefully analysed and scrutinised.

Ehrenreich, the author, adopted the principal of smiling and being positive in the most challenging of situations - she was diagnosed with cancer. She found that it was not always possible to be positive in such circumstances and on further investigation discovered that there was little research evidence to support the widely publicised belief that positive thinking would help defeat cancer. She concluded there is a danger that people who do not overcome cancer are made to feel inadequate because they were not sufficiently positive thus beating them again while they were down.

The eight chapters of this book provide numerous arenas in which the dangers of the smile approach are described. For example, the recent banking crisis caused by the irrational exuberance of the housing and financial markets illustrates the need for a countervailing argument to the one which positively maintains that prices can continue rising indefinitely.

Pursuit of happiness is one thing achieving it is another. We owe it to ourselves, families, friends and work colleagues to seek happiness but this pursuit should be tempered with the scepticism that it is not always wise, nor healthy.

John P. WilsonUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK