This week and next some of us at Monash interacts with Tal Ben-Shahar, a psych professor at Harvard who attracts thousands of students into his class of Positive Psychology and Psychology of Leadership.
It's one of the latest trends in management research: Positive psychology movement. I had to admit the topic makes fascinating reading. Popularized by psychologists such as Martin Seligman, the concept changes radically the focus of psych research on fixing the bad elements into building the good elements within human beings.
They argue that we should not ask "Why these most people in a certaiin X condition fail?" but "Why do some of these people succeed despite the circumstance they are in?" Focusing on building one's strenghts rather than fixing one's weakness create more sustainable and higher growth in children, students, employees, and so on (a finding that enjoys more empirical research evidence in the last decade)
Some of their stuff are nicely laid out here:
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/publications.htm
More on this to come...
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