The most popular course in the 325-year history of Yale University is about happiness. When psychology professor Laurie Santos launched “Psychology and the Good Life” in 2018, nearly one in four Yale students enrolled. Within two years the online version had attracted over four million learners worldwide. The subject, it turns out, is the thing everyone actually wants to know.

Business schools have been arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction. For decades they have studied what drives performance, engagement, and productivity. Much of the data keeps coming back to how people feel. The research coming out of the world’s leading business schools on happiness is not self-help dressed in academic clothing. It is rigorous, empirically grounded, and full of findings that contradict what most ambitious people assume to be true.

Here are six of the most useful.

Stop chasing the corner office, or at least think hard before you do

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks is one of the world’s leading experts on the science of human happiness. He teaches courses on leadership, happiness and nonprofit management at Harvard Business School, and is the author of 15 books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

Brooks has spent years applying the science of happiness to professional life, and he argues that success does not reliably produce happiness. If anything, many of the habits that produce professional success – relentless optimisation, delayed gratification, comparative thinking – are precisely the habits that erode wellbeing.

His prescription is to reverse the order of operations entirely. Rather than pursuing success in the hope that happiness will follow, start with happiness, which evidence suggests will then enhance performance. Happier employees, the data consistently shows, make their organisations more successful, not the other way round.

Nowhere is this more practically relevant than in the decision about whether to seek a leadership role. Brooks cites research showing that new leaders, on average, experience a measurable dip in happiness for up to two years after taking the top job. The loneliness is real. The anger-management challenges are real. And 50 to 70 percent of new executives fail within their first two years. The corner office, he argues, should be chosen with clear eyes about its emotional costs, not simply chased as the logical next step.

Value time over money, and spend money to buy time back

At UCLA Anderson, Cassie Mogilner Holmes studies happiness, highlighting the role of time. The professor of marketing and behavioural science, and bestselling author of Happier Hour : How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most examines such questions as how focusing on time rather than money increases happiness, how the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one’s lifetime and how much happiness people enjoy from extraordinary and ordinary experiences.

Her findings highlight the high level of happiness that stems from personally connecting with people and with the present moment. “In my empirical pursuit of happiness,” she says, “I am hoping, just hoping to help people of all ages find a bit more happiness in their lives.”

In a series of experiments, she found that people primed to think about time, even subconsciously, through unscrambled word tasks subsequently chose to spend more time socialising and less time working than those primed to think about money. And those who socialised more reported being happier. People, on average, are most content when connecting with others, and least content when commuting or working in isolation. The construct we have at the front of our minds shapes which of those we choose.

Ashley Whillans, professor at Harvard Business School, extends this finding into a practical recommendation that feels counterintuitive to the frugal-minded: spend money to buy back time. Drawing on surveys of 6,271 people across four countries – the US, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands – and a field experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to spend $40 on a time-saving purchase versus a material purchase, Whillans found that those who bought time reported greater happiness, regardless of income level.

Outsourcing the things you dislike – the cleaning, the long commute, the admin – is not an indulgence. According to the research, it is an investment in wellbeing with measurable returns.

The smart and successful have a specific problem

Raj Raghunathan, the Zale Centennial Professor of Business at UT Austin’s McCombs School, explores the impact that people’s judgments and decisions have on their happiness and fulfillment. He asks the uncomfortable question, if intelligence helps with decision-making, why are many smart, successful people profoundly unhappy?

“There has been an implicit assumption that happiness is something that merely feels good, and there is nothing more that comes out of it,” he explains. “Happiness is treated like ice cream: enjoyable, but not necessarily good for you. But in fact, happiness is very functional; it has all these positive effects.”

His answer, developed across years of research and distilled in his book, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?, is that the very traits driving professional success – competitive instinct, the pursuit of superiority, the need for control – are also the primary mechanisms undermining happiness. High achievers tend to be wired to seek dominance over their peers, which generates anxiety and envy rather than satisfaction. They optimise for external markers of success such as income, status and recognition rather than the internal sense of engagement that the research consistently links to genuine contentment.

Raghunathan’s Coursera course on happiness has been taken by hundreds of thousands of students from 196 countries and was voted the top MOOC of 2015, 2016, and 2017. Among his findings is that happiness comes not from chasing superiority but from pursuing work you intrinsically enjoy. Not from seeking control over circumstances, but from accepting uncertainty as part of the texture of a full life. So don’t defer satisfaction until the next milestone, but find genuine meaning in the process itself. These are conclusions that the MBA classroom has traditionally found uncomfortable, which may be precisely why they matter.

Work needs to feel vital, not just successful

Manfred Kets de Vries, the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD and one of the most-cited voices in organisational psychology, has spent decades examining why so many outwardly successful people remain deeply unfulfilled. His diagnosis has a name: wealth fatigue syndrome. In spite of accomplishments and material comfort, something essential is missing.

His research points to what he calls the “authentizotic” organisation, a compound of the Greek authenteekos (authentic) and zoteekos (vital to life). His argument is that the best workplaces are not simply those that pay well or promote regularly, but those that make people feel genuinely alive: organisations with integrity of purpose, where individuals can bring themselves fully to their work, and where the experience of showing up each day contributes to rather than depletes a sense of self.

The practical implication for individuals is not to wait for their organisation to change, but to audit their own working life against a simple test: does this work feel vital? Does it call on who I actually am? Work that answers yes to both questions, even imperfectly, is a foundation for a happier life. Work that answers no to both is a problem no salary increment will solve.

Kets de Vries recognises that we cannot always have happiness, “but we do have the power to create happiness. In many ways, happiness is very much a regime. The happiest people don’t have the best of everything; they make the best of everything.”

Happiness as a practice, not a prize

Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University and one of the most distinctive voices in global business education, approaches happiness from what the philosophers already knew, and argues that management education has been ignoring them at its peril.

His 2023 book Philosophy Inc.: Applying Wisdom to Everyday Management makes a case that would have seemed eccentric in a business school context a generation ago: that philosophy is not an ornament to management but its foundation, and that understanding it is one of the most reliable routes to both better decisions and greater wellbeing at work.

The anchor of his thinking on happiness is Aristotle. Iñiguez argues that when we congratulate colleagues, wish friends well, or set goals for ourselves, all of these aspirations resolve into a single end: happiness. He argues that the Greek philosopher was right that happiness is the meaning and purpose of human existence. But Iñiguez is careful about what Aristotle actually meant. The word the philosopher used was eudaimonia – flourishing – a concept that bears little resemblance to the modern idea of feeling content. Eudaimonia is not a state of pleasure to be arrived at and maintained; it is an activity, a quality of life developed through the continuous exercise of virtue and reason that requires constant cultivation.

Iñiguez believes that most managers treat happiness as the reward for success, something to be enjoyed once the deal closes, the promotion comes, or the project finishes. Aristotle’s insight is that happiness comes from engaging virtuously and purposefully with the work itself, not from the outcomes it produces.

His engagement with philosophy explores the cultivation of joy as a deliberate discipline, the relationship between solitude, contemplation and renewal, and the centrality of friendship. Iñiguez has written that friends are among the most important sources of happiness in lives that we spend largely at work, and that it is worth asking seriously how professional friendships, built on shared purpose rather than utility, can sustain rather than deplete us.

Rather than ask, “what will make me happy?” ask yourself “what habits, relationships and forms of attention will help me live well?” That is a question Aristotle posed in the fourth century BC, and which the President of IE University has spent a career making newly urgent.

Your mind is lying to you about what will make you happy

Yale’s Laurie Santos, whose course, “The Science of Well-Being” course became the most popular in the university’s history, has made it her life’s work to document the specific ways in which the human mind systematically misleads us about happiness.

The central finding is what she calls the GI Joe fallacy: knowing something is not enough to change behaviour. We all know exercise improves mood, that gratitude journalling works, that social connection matters more than material acquisition. And yet most of us under-invest in all three and over-invest in things the research consistently shows deliver only transient satisfaction – salary increases, material possessions, and the pursuit of circumstances we believe will make us happy once we have them.

Santos’s evidence-based prescriptions are almost embarrassingly practical: more sleep, more exercise, more genuine social contact, and the deliberate cultivation of gratitude. Her research shows that savouring ordinary moments such as a conversation, a walk, or a good meal produces more sustained happiness than the extraordinary experiences we typically plan and defer. The hedonic treadmill, the psychological mechanism by which we rapidly adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to our baseline, means that the next promotion, the bigger house, or the longer holiday will feel transformative for about two weeks. The walk home with a friend taken today will not.

The Shared Curriculum

Social connection is not optional, it is a primary driver of wellbeing, repeatedly demonstrated. Time, consciously valued and deliberately protected, matters more than money beyond the point of basic sufficiency. Meaning and engagement at work are what determines whether work is a source of vitality or depletion. And the ambitious pursuit of external success, without attending to the internal experience of the journey, is a recipe not for happiness but for what Kets de Vries calls “the happiness conundrum”, the baffling condition of having everything and feeling empty.

Business schools are not teaching anything that Aristotle would find surprising. The question is whether the people who most need to hear it are paying attention.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.

He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.

Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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