Character Trait Definitions

The Pursuit of Happiness: Can We Have an Economy of Well-Being?

I participated in both panels (kicking myself for not skiing at either place). Until a few years ago, I was one of a handful of economists studying happiness and questions as diverse as the well-being effects of commuting time, why cigarette taxes make smokers happier, and why the unemployed are happier when there are more unemployed people around them. We have since been joined by a host of others. There is also talk of happiness as a policy objective. Remote Bhutan replaced GNP with  Gross National Happiness years ago. In 2008, the Sarkozy Commission, chaired by two Nobel Prize winners, called for a worldwide effort to develop broader measures of well-being. Though U.S. conservatives criticized it as a “left-wing attempt to make our economy sclerotic like France’s,” the most recent effort to add well-being indicators to national statistics comes from the conservative Cameron government in Britain. China and Brazil are also considering using the metrics. , I posit that the definition of happiness that individuals select is partly determined by their capacity to pursue fulfilling lives. In the absence of that capacity—due, for instance, to lack of education and opportunity—people may place more value on day-to-day experiences, such as friendship and religious activities. Those with more capacity are likely focused—and take happiness from—pursuing some overarching objective or achievement. (Think of the scientist trying to cure cancer who sacrifices leisure and relationships in favor of time spent in the laboratory.) Some new research, including my own, supports this intuition. The need for definitional clarity raises conceptual challenges. For research purposes, we rely on an open-ended question, typically: “Generally speaking, how happy (or satisfied) are you with your life?,” with possible answers on a scale running from “not at all” to “very” happy. We then compare the variance in happiness levels based on the other information that we are able to collect, such as respondents’ income, marital status, age, and employment. The resulting patterns are remarkably consistent worldwide, including in countries of different development levels. That consistency allows us to test for the effects of variables such as inflation and governance and environmental regimes. We do not ask respondents if these phenomena make them unhappy.

Already 2 weeks as Strategic Planning Manager « krishna athal ...

The role of Strategic Planning Managers (SPM) is to unearth insights that creative teams could use to make more relevant, impactful ads. In order to do this, SPM conduct endless research into their target markets, looking for new trends, behaviours and needs that will allow the client’s message to cut through and truly connect with its audience. That’s the theory.

The SPM should be the person on the team preoccupied by ‘Will it Work?’ This issue of effectiveness, and the evaluation of the real value of advertising, is becoming ever more important with clients. Equally, there is an ever growing need for Planners to contribute new insights to the creative briefing process, to ensure we produce the most effective creative product – and to do this consistently, to get creative work right first time wherever possible.

In some agencies the role is much more strategic. It involves a lot of consulting work with clients, identifying what the real business problem is that we’re trying to solve. It involves structuring the problem in such a way that our different teams can each solve part of it – some problems need creative solutions, some problems need technological innovation, some problems need content, many need all of the above.

The role also involves working collaboratively with creative teams on media selection, because in so much of what we do the message is deeply connected to and informed by the medium. And finally it involves filtering back the work through the brief to make sure it is still on-message and on-target, and helping present and rationalise the work to the client.