An awful great read ![]()
Only the most churlish could give this a poor review. So let me try. The style is the worst dumb downed American business guru hoopla. The story format is cheesier than the most cheese-laden cheese market in ville de cheese. The messages can mostly be found elsewhere. Charles Handy's Understanding Organisations remains the best overview and Fish Sticks clearly owe a debt to the literature on coaching. But what can you say about a book which is short, demands to be read in a single sitting, has big print summaries, excites with its combination of simple yet hugely powerful lessons, and could actually be implemented by real people in real work places. It's true, when you read it you want to tell someone about it, or even better lend it to someone immediately. Yet the ideas are simple ones. Together with the original Fish, the key notions are that you decide your attitude to the work you do (selling fish has its drawbacks), it's important to have fun at work and to extend this to include your customers, and focus on customer expectations and how to exceed them; then in Fish Sticks, notions of sustaining change by encouraging everybody to identify, personalise and keep discussing your organisational vision. These are healthy messages for organisational renewal and resurgance. And yet how boring and unmemorable that bald summary sounds. It's much better in the orginals which are cheap, quick, cheesey, relevant and above all endearingly irreverent. Fish, like cheese, can definitely be good for you.
A Good Read! ![]()
You're back in the fishing boat with the crew that brought you the successful Fish! and Fish! Tales. Offering another finny fable, Stephen C. Lundin, John Christensen and Harry Paul present a business parable based on creating and sustaining successful change. The book uses the same fictitious approach as the other two Fish!ing trips, but this time the story is set at a hospital's nursing station. The agent-of-change head nurse has departed and the new head nurse feels that the group is losing its vision. Then, she discovers that a local sushi restaurant is a model of excellence, and all goes swimmingly after that. Although the advice offered isn't particularly unique, some may find a certain charm in the story. Given that this is round three, the format may seem a little repetitive to those who have already Fish!ed. If you want to catch the core of the message on your first cast, look for the highlights on the occasional pages in whale-size type. We recommend the basic common sense of these messages, even if the storytelling is a little fishy.