IT is great that along with economic prosperity is more happiness.

That’s what its all about, is it?

Survey Says: People Are Happier

What the survey found this year is that freedom of choice and social acceptance are the most powerful forces behind national moods. “Money’s pretty powerful, but it’s not the whole story,” says Inglehart, though he maintains that a strong correlation still exists between high standards of living and happiness measures.

What is the result of the ever increasing sophistication and fragmentation of the market?

It means people have more varied interests, and events are increasingly harder to fill up as people have a thousand things to do, and so little time. Moreover, because of so many other choices, more people are less likely to suffer the inconvenience to go to yours.

Even the attraction of the world’s premiere olympic event was not attractive enough for people to go — people decided not to when faced with hassles of getting a visa etc.

Many times, we are confronted with events that seemingly have more people interested as usual, and we try our best to avoid a fill-up or standing room situation. But more often than not, the problem is the other way around — increasingly more empty seats.

Empty Seats at China’s Sellout Olympics

On Aug. 11 there were 20 competitions in 18 stadiums throughout China attended by 40,000 spectators, according to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG). Only two of stadiums were more than 90% full. Six of the venues were more than 80% full. More than half had at least 30% of seats empty.

This is a big challenge.

It is easy to teach ( even if it is time consuming), but it is difficult to impart essential knowledge. As one philosopher says it, ” what is essential cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”

How to induce that learning — and impart or transfer essential knowledge I think, there is no fix formula. Every company will have to do it in a different way.

The Knowledge Handoff

“When people leave organizations today, they are potentially taking with them knowledge that’s critical to the future of the business,” says David DeLong, a business consultant and author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce. Whether it’s a key client relationship, mastery of an outdated computer language, or simply knowledge about where certain files are saved on a company server, every business has stored up bits of information and knowhow that isn’t written in a manual or recorded in a training video.