Are We Having Fun Yet?
(Page 2 of 7)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Matt Labash, from the Weekly Standard
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Since the advent of modern management consulting, a chapter that arguably began with the founding of the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, McKinsey & Company, in the 1920s, the business world has cleaved into two halves: those who are paid to work for a living and those who are paid to come to your office, take lots of notes, run up expenses on your dime, and then file reports in impenetrable consultantese describing your shortcomings.
These days, there’s a consultant for everything. In House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, author and professional consultant-basher Martin Kihn, who himself was a consultant, writes about everything from flag consultants to compost consultants to Satanic consultants who don’t actually worship Lucifer (consultants tend not to believe in anything). So it stands to reason that with the new core value of fun on the ascent, there would be fun consultants, also known as, among other things, funsultants or funcilitators.
A considerable corpus of literature on their discipline is amassing (I use the word literature loosely, to mean a series of often ungrammatical double-spaced sentences put on paper, slapped between festively colored covers, and sold to mouth readers with too much discretionary income). These books are thick with instances of how successful businesspeople keep things loosey-goosey at work. Forget industriousness, talent, and know-how—the wellspring of employees’ satisfaction, creativity, and prosperity is fun. In Mike Veeck’s Fun Is Good, for instance, the cofounder of Hooters restaurants reveals, “I don’t know if we would have survived without humor.” (To the untrained eye it looked like Buffalo Chicken Strips served with large sides of waitresses’ breasts were the secret to his success. But whatever.)
If you thought there were only 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, as suggested by the smash book that’s been translated into six languages, then you’re shortchanging yourself because, technically, there are 602 ways (see 301 More Ways to Have Fun at Work). Using examples culled from real companies in real office parks throughout America, the authors suggest using fun as “an organizational strategy—a strategic weapon to achieve extraordinary results” by training your people to learn the “fun-damentals” so as “to create fun-atics” (most funsultants appear to be paid by the pun).
Here’s an abbreviated list of the jollity that will ensue at your place of business if you follow their advice: “joy lists,” koosh balls, office-chair relay races, marshmallow fights, funny caption contests, job interviews conducted in Groucho glasses, wacky Olympics, memos by Frisbee, voice mails in cartoon-character voices, rap songs to convey what’s learned at leadership institutes, “breakathons,” bunny teeth, and asking job prospects to bring show-and-tell items such as “a stuffed Tigger doll symbolizing the interviewee’s energetic and upbeat attitude.”
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