The Art of Work

Csikszentmihalyi, a classic academic, has resisted many overt attempts to commercialize flow, particularly in the business world. "I'm not claiming that flow is like a magic pill," he says. "I'm always a little worried that if you ramp it up to a large company without knowing the culture and the context, it might not work." Don't bother looking for "7 Habits of Flow at Work" here: Csikszentmihalyi is the anti-Stephen Covey.

Yet plenty of others see the flow of dollar signs, either in their own company's performance or in bringing the concept to the corporate masses. Back in 2002, Stefan Falk, then the vice president of strategic business innovation at Ericsson, was given the task of integrating the merger of two huge business units worth $16 billion. Layoffs were coming, and Ericsson hoped Falk could find a way to make the remaining workers more productive. A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, Falk and a colleague had stumbled across Flow and another Csikszentmihalyi book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (HarperCollins, 1996), while conducting a multiyear study at McKinsey on human development and motivation. "I was mesmerized when I read it," Falk says. "I had a vital piece of the puzzle. I said to my friend, 'I think we should contact this guy whose name I cannot pronounce.' "

So he did (like many others, Falk calls Csikszentmihalyi "Mike" for the sake of simplicity). The two discussed Mike's belief that flow has several necessary preconditions. These include having clear goals and a reasonable expectation of completing the task at hand. People must also have the ability to concentrate, receive regular feedback on their progress, and actually possess the skills needed for that type of work.

Falk concluded that the best way to get to flow was to have Ericsson managers spend a nearly unheard-of amount of quality time with each one of their employees. Managers were asked to work with employees to draw up separate "performance contracts" that included an assessment of each worker's strengths and weaknesses and set out a very specific action plan to help improve their skills. It all sounds pretty standard, but there was a kicker: To monitor progress, managers would meet with each employee six times a year for intensive one-on-one sessions lasting as long as an hour and a half each.

At first, the managers groused at the extra work. Falk's response: "What are you managing? The only thing you really manage here is your employees. End of story." This fall, Ericsson will export the new management system to all of its offices around the world.

Falk moved on to Green Cargo, one of Scandinavia's largest transport and logistics companies, in mid-2003, and instituted an even more comprehensive flow-based management overhaul. Every single month, he required meetings between employees and managers, 150 of whom were sent Flow to read as part of a six-day training process. Performance-review contracts were drawn up to cover three-month periods, and then renegotiated. Before each meeting, workers were asked to spend at least an hour reflecting on what had transpired since the previous one and determining the content of the upcoming one.

It seems most ironic that more meetings would lead to better flow, but these aren't your normal stultifying interdepartmental snorefests. Instead, they are one-on-one intensives akin to an executive coaching session. So far so good: Last year, government-owned Green Cargo turned a profit for the first time in its 120-year history, and Falk's work gets much of the credit, says Johan Saarm, Green Cargo's deputy CEO.

In a world teeming with authors lusting for the speaking circuit, Csikszentmihalyi is a refreshing oddity. Although business is clamoring for more and more of him, his relationship with the private sector remains ambivalent; he even recently organized a conference called "Alternatives to Materialism." Csikszentmihalyi says he never really thought about business until five years ago, when he was offered the post at Drucker. He accepted it in part because he liked his potential colleagues, and also because it was a quiet place with good weather for his wife's tortured sinuses. "I lived my life in an ivory tower, and business was to be held at an arm's length," he says, Birkenstocks poking out below his slacks and blazer. That may be because none of his research has established any link between happiness and the possession of lucre.

It may also be because there is a dark side to flow, says Csikszentmihalyi. It can come while pursuing destructive activities, such as addictions or crimes. He offers the contrasting examples of Mother Teresa and Napoleon Bonaparte to show how differently the flow state can affect the world. The same is true of business; it's easy to imagine Enron's Andrew Fastow in a rapturous flow state as he plotted his next scheme.