It's a truth universally acknowledged that everyone hates managers. Managers are the people destroying your soul with pointless meetings, overly complex procedures for claiming expenses, and stupid team-building awaydays. If you're a teacher, doctor or police officer, managers are why you're always bogged down in paperwork, rather than doing what you're best at. Most of us, write Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan in their new book The Org: The Underlying Logic Of The Office, "imagine a world without managers as a kind of paradise where workers are unshackled by pointless bureaucracy… a place where stuff actually gets done". Strangely, managers tend to agree. The goal of every lumbering conglomerate is to "become more like a startup" – which usually means buying some vivid furniture, and maybe a ping-pong table, provided Jim in Purchasing can get the expenditure authorised sometime in the next five years.

I'm extremely happy – in a suitably understated way, of course – that today marks the official publication of my book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. The video above is a splendid little animation about it, made by the talented people at Scriberia; you can also read the extract published in the Guardian at the weekend, 'Happiness is a Glass Half Empty', and/or come to one of my events. Or even, you know, buy the book...