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Only recently have we been able to apply science to one of the world's oldest questions: "What is the nature of happiness?" In this edited interview, the author of the 2006 best seller Stumbling on Happiness surveys the field. Gilbert explores the sudden emergence of happiness as a discipline, reviews the major findings (including the mistakes we all make in predicting how happy or miserable we'll be), and examines the role of happiness in productivity on the job. He describes what makes us truly happy--it's not a promotion or a new house--and sketches out a "happiness diet" that emphasizes small, routine efforts. Looking forward, Gilbert discusses the breakthrough work of his colleague Matthew Killingsworth, whose iPhone-enabled real-time surveys of people's moods are providing an ultra-high-resolution picture of how our emotional states shift from minute to minute. A sidebar by Killingsworth offers a preliminary look at his findings and their implications for our personal and workplace lives.

What makes for sustainable individual and organizational performance? Employees who are thriving--not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future. The authors found that people who fit this description demonstrated 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to the organization, and 46% more job satisfaction than their peers. Thriving has two components: vitality, or the sense of being alive and excited, and learning, or the growth that comes from gaining knowledge and skills. Some people naturally build vitality and learning into their jobs, but most employees are influenced by their environment. Four mechanisms, none of which requires heroic effort or major resources, create the conditions for thriving: providing decision-making discretion, sharing information about the organization and its strategy, minimizing incivility, and offering performance feedback. Organizations such as Alaska Airlines, Zingerman's, Quicken Loans, and Caiman Consulting have found that helping people grow and remain energized at work is valiant on its own merits--but it can also boost performance in a sustainable way.

Most of us assume that success will lead to happiness. Shawn Achor, founder of the corporate strategy firm Good Think, argues that we've got it backward. In work he's done with KPMG and Pfizer, and studies he's conducted in concert with Yale's psychology department, he has seen how happiness actually precedes success. Happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better at problem solving than their unhappy peers. In this article, Achor lays out three strategies for improving your own mental well-being at work. In tough economic times, they're essential for keeping yourself--and your team--at peak performance.

In the 18th century, the Enlightenment ushered in the notion that happiness was the attainment of a worthy life. Since then the pursuit of happiness has spread to every aspect of behavior, from religion and politics to work and parenting. Today the happiness imperative creates pressures that, paradoxically, can make us miserable. Sadness is often mistaken for a pathology. Understanding the cultural commitment to good cheer as an artifact of modern history, not as an inherent feature of the human condition, opens new opportunities for understanding key facets of our social and personal experience.

Steady, predictable growth is what every big company strives for, and what investors prize above all else. McGrath set out to discover how many companies actually deliver. To meet her initial criteria, a company had to have a market capitalization of at least US$1 billion and to have grown by 5% each year over a five-year period. Only 8% of the companies in her sample of 4,793 qualified. When the five-year period was doubled, only 10 companies qualified--and of those, only five had grown both revenues and net income every year. The success of these "growth outliers" can't be explained by industry, company age or ownership structure, global location or economy (emerging versus developed). They do, however, share a lot of practices. For example, they diversify their portfolios with early, small bets, manage major resource allocations centrally, focus attention on culture and shared values, and hold on to their talent. Their practices add up to an intriguing, counterintuitive profile: Although they are nimble and adaptive, their leadership, strategy, and values are extraordinarily stable. The author concludes that this seeming paradox is a feature, not a bug: Stability is what enables these companies to innovate and to maintain steady growth.

An increasing number of social entrepreneurs and investors are realizing that social enterprises of all sorts, including many organizations regarded as charitable nonprofits, can generate returns acceptable to the financial markets. The key is to view the funding of social enterprises as a problem of financial structuring. If they treat charitable donations as a form of capital that seeks social, not financial, returns, organizations can then tap traditional sources of funding: venture capital firms, banks, mutual funds, bonds, and so on. And with access to these sources, they can make use of all the tools for transferring risk and return, allowing them to free up capital and grow. For this to succeed, the social enterprise sector will need to create greater precision and transparency around measuring and reporting social outcomes, and policy makers must build the necessary market infrastructure and legal frameworks. With these efforts, social enterprises could have a larger universe of investors than conventional businesses do. This would be a significant step toward a greener, healthier, and more equitable world.

Too many retail managers believe that they must offer bad jobs to keep prices low. As a result, almost one-fifth of American workers suffer low wages, poor benefits, constantly changing schedules, and few opportunities for advancement. The author's research reveals, however, that the presumed trade-off between investment in employees and low prices is false. To meet short-term performance targets, many retailers cut labor. The unmotivated and poorly trained employees who remain often cannot keep up with their tasks in a complex operating environment. The result is a vicious cycle, in which lower sales and profits tempt managers to cut even more employees. Retailers such as QuikTrip, Mercadona, Trader Joe's, and Costco instead create a virtuous cycle of investment in employees, stellar operational execution, higher sales and profits, and larger labor budgets. They also make work more efficient and fulfilling for employees, improve customer service, and boost sales and profits through four practices: simplify operations by offering fewer products and promotions, train employees to perform multiple tasks, eliminate waste in everything but staffing, and let employees make some decisions.

Trying to operate two business models at once often causes strategic failure. Yet LAN Airlines, a Chilean carrier, runs three models successfully. Casadesus-Masanell, of Harvard Business School, and Tarzijan, of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, explore how LAN has integrated a full-service international passenger model with a premium air-cargo business model while separately operating a no-frills passenger model for domestic flights. LAN's multimodel success comes from recognizing the complementarity of its two high-end services and the distinct, or substitute, nature of its no-frills offering. LAN came to that insight by analyzing the major assets that the models share and the compatibility of the models' operational resources and capabilities. It recognized that the more the models have in common, the more likely they are to generate greater value together than apart; the less they share, the more likely they are to be best executed separately. Nevertheless, managing multiple models is a tall order. LAN has had to face greater complexity, broaden its organizational skills, increase the flexibility of its workforce, and make other investments. But by mastering three models, the company has built formidable advantages that are difficult for competitors to overcome. Its example has shown how, properly applied, the implementation of multiple business models is not a risk but rather a new tool for strategists.

Over the past decade companies have become more global and employee groups more diverse than ever before. Organizations are less hierarchical and more collaborative. And today's offices are full of once unimaginable technological distractions. We asked experts in cross-cultural communication, information networks, and the science of attention what skills executives should cultivate to tackle these new challenges. Molinsky thinks that managers must overcome psychological barriers in order to act in ways that other cultures find appropriate. Davenport and Iyer explain why the devolution of hierarchy has increased the value of building and wielding influence through digital networks, and offer tips for how to do it. And Davidson tells managers to get over their fears about distraction and embrace the brain's natural tendency to divide attention.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the most celebrated centers in basketball history, has evolved into a successful writer, historian, and filmmaker.

Some 70% of family-owned businesses fail or are sold before the second generation gets a chance to take over. It doesn't have to be that way. Here are three pitfalls family businesses commonly face, along with emerging best practices to help businesses avoid them.

For decades economists have wondered whether inequality is good or bad for long-term growth. A detailed examination of economic data from 48 U.S. states suggests that a certain level of inequality promotes growth. Still, reducing inequality has clear benefits over time, and growth policies that ignore inequality may ultimately be self-defeating.

A new study finds no correlation between how a company's stock fares upon the announcement of a new CEO and the share price over that CEO's tenure. In fact, under certain circumstances, CEOs whose appointments cause their company's stock to drop tend to achieve better results over time than CEOs whose appointments cause the stock to rise. Directors looking to choose a new CEO should think about other criteria, such as the company's recent performance and whether candidates are insiders or outsiders.

A new study uncovers a correlation between people's spatial skills and their social intelligence. Can strengthening your ability in one area improve your aptitude in the other?

The clinical experience gained by fledgling doctors is an ideal example of how professional schools address the "knowing-doing gap." Harvard Business School is sending its entire first-year class abroad to developing markets to gain a similar kind of real-world experience.

Interviews with executives at top banks and research at 50 companies reveals that the best teams are candid with one another. Three ways to improve teamwork through candor and criticism are: (1) break meetings into smaller groups, (2) choose one person to deliver criticism and break silences, and (3) teach people to be less defensive about honest feedback.

Photographs that record the early days of Groupon, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and eBay, much as the iconic 1978 Microsoft photograph does for that company.

For business leaders, the 'new normal' is -- to borrow a phrase from the U.S. military -- a 'VUCA' environment: it is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The author shows how organizations can leverage the benefits of complexity and interconnectedness to their advantage by presenting examples from Procter & Gamble that he believes "illustrate the future of strategy." Going forward, strategic choices will extend far beyond an organization's own walls, he argues, and increasingly, the frontier of business will be populated by organizations that embrace this notion. The firms with the greatest capacity to win will be those whose relationships and strategic choices extend out to networked stakeholders, business partners, suppliers - and even to competitors, in the right circumstances.

Globalization and instant communication have changed the rules of the game for business. Today's organizations are being held to stringent and fluctuating sets of standards by unrelenting 'webs' of stakeholders who are quick to pass judgment on their behavior. In what is becoming an ultra-transparent world, every step and misstep is subject to scrutiny and every company with a brand or reputation to protect is vulnerable. The author argues that for most businesses, it increasingly makes sense to opt for openness. He describes three key elements of openness that modern organizations should embrace: transparency, opening up the business model and placing intellectual property in an open commons. In doing so, he says, a firm will embrace the three dimensions effective organizations for the 21st century.

In this interview, best-selling author and social media expert Charlene Li talks about the new openness and the implications for leaders everywhere. According to Li, these include embracing four objectives of openness: learn, dialog, support and innovate. She describes each in detail and shows that just as there is a continuum of openness for organizations, there is also a continuum of openness for leaders. She describes four 'openness archetypes' and the particular challenges faced by each, as well as the need for every organization to clearly define its 'sandbox'. In the end, she shows that leaders never really had total control over their customers and employees; what they have to give up now is the need for control.