Business, Schools, and Happiness

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Lifelong learning is not only about hard skills and applied knowledge. Modern business schools and universities teach students how to be happy and have a positive impact on other people’s lives. The way we see the outside world, interact with other people, and perceive events depends on our mental state. Our condition affects all areas of life: family, career, and health. Therefore, it is important for us to learn to be happy and think positively, which requires a lot of effort. Human science has been constantly developing and has gone through crucial changes in recent decades. Unfortunately, managerial practices have not caught up with science, but universities can help future leaders see opportunities to improve their lives. Our recent article explains why Oxford has opened a research center to study happiness and why Yale’s most popular online course focuses onwell-being.

Harvard Business School (HBS) decided to invest in teaching MBA students different ways how they can become happier. The school opened a full-fledged course with 14 sessions called Leadership and Happiness, and filled 180 seats relatively quickly, which demonstrates strong interest among students in this topic. HBS promises that students will create wish maps, learn strategies to increase life satisfaction, and learn how to lead other people to happiness.

However, Harvard is not the first university to decide to teach well-being to its students. In 2019, Coursera published a list of the platform’s most popular courses. One of them was The Science of Well-being, an online course from Yale University with 3.8 million registered students. In this course, along with the study of theoretical concepts, students learn to increase their level of happiness and implement habits that increase productivity in everyday life. In addition, the program teaches how to build communication with an individual’s environment so that it helps maintain good habits. One can conclude that this course is really about becoming a happy person and being satisfied with life.

If people know what makes them satisfied and how to achieve happiness in practice, this will increase their productivity and prevent burnout — that is why this topic is so popular among students. And that is why Oxford opened a research center dedicated to the study of happiness. Scholars analyze how global events and crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, affect people’s well-being, level of trust, and general happiness.

The theme of happiness at Oxford does not stop there: the university has several programs dedicated to well-being from a theoretical and philosophical perspective. For example, Happiness: The State of Mind, where students study happiness through the philosophy of Aristotle and Kant.

Following leading universities, other business schools also support the trend of happiness. For instance, USC Marshall School of Business launched The Business of Well-being program, aimed at understanding consumer happiness and well-being for entrepreneurs. In addition, course designers also aim to help learners understand the impact of marketing messages on their own well-being.

There is also an entire business school dedicated to happiness, Happiness Business School, which runs its programs both online and offline: in Portugal, Brazil, Australia, and Angola. Happiness Business School offers an MBA in Organizational Happiness. This program is designed for those who believe their goal is to be an agent of positive change in a company and who, regardless of their role, are interested in the topic of organizational happiness.

In general, it is easy to see how the topics of well-being and happiness are gaining popularity among students of all levels and specialties. In the 21st century, it is not difficult to learn how to increase life satisfaction, implement good habits and improve the lives of the community, whether of friends, colleagues, or customers. However, often, a person lacks something to initiate these changes, for instance, self-discipline, concentration, focus, or other factors. Therefore, universities, business schools, and research centers come to the rescue, where students and managers can learn to make themselves and the world around them better.