“The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance” – Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in what was described as the most popular class at Harvard.
His research and lectures on happiness and human potential have received widespread media attention. He travels around the United States and Europe giving talks on positive psychology to Fortune 500 corporations, schools, and non-profit organizations.
He is currently CEO of Aspirant, a Cambridge-based consulting firm which conducts research to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures.
In his entertaining and though provoking TEDxBloomington presentation, he says that most modern research focuses on the average, but that “if we focus on the average, we will remain merely average.” He wants to study the positive outliers, and learn how not only to bring people up to the average, but to move the entire average up.