Product Description

Yerkes offers tips, examples, and motivation to help readers, their coworkers, and their customers unleash the power of fun in the workplace. Through real-life case studies and interviews with dozens of leading authors and everyday people, the author illustrates 11 principles of what she calls "The Work/Fun Fusion."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #359114 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-09
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Book Info
Guide to making the workplace a more spontaneous, enjoyable place to be, showing how to unleash some fun and watch morale go up. Details how 11 successful companies, including Southwest Airlines and Prudential integrated fun into daily business in ways that has translated into team motivation, improved productivity, and a sense of community. Softcover. DLC: Personnel management.

About the Author
Leslie Yerkes is President of Catalyst Consulting Group, a change management consulting firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is coauthor of the bestselling book 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work.

Customer Reviews

All the original eleven companies featured have continued to thrive
FUN WORKS: CREATING PLACES WERE PEOPLE LOVE TO WORK appears in its second updated, expanded edition to explore connections between work and fun. The original book detailed how eleven different companies blended fun into the course of business for improved results: this revised second edition includes follow-up interviews with all the companies in the first edition to see how they have maintained a fun environment in the face of recession, 911, and natural disaster alike. All the original eleven companies featured have continued to thrive - largely because of their 'fun and work' atmosphere - and business libraries will appreciate a book which documents a series of real-life success stories.

I was wrong!
In reading the second edition of Fun Works I expected little change from the first edition I reviewed in 2001. I was wrong!

In her revised edition Leslie Yerkes coins the term "hard science," to include great products, effective strategy, work process improvement, service orientation and strict financial controls, as a fundamental requirement for any successful organization. She applies the term "soft science," including the way people in organizations interact and their culture, as the principal requirement for any sustainable organization.

Leslie Yerkes then revisits eleven companies she first examined in 1999 as examples of her eleven principles for effectively integrating fun and work. Two companies in particular, Southwest Airlines and Isle of Capri Casino, survived & prospered after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Their "hard science" positioned them to survive, but it was their "soft science" that actually saw them through these events.

This book is a must read if your goal is to create and sustain a culture in your organization where people are allowed to and want to do their very best.

New 2nd edition improves on excellent 1st edition
Remember what happened to many of the companies featured in Peter's On Search of Excellence? For various reasons many of those companies ended up under-performing and others did much worse.

Contrast this with the track record of the companies Leslie Yerkes profiled and studied six years ago. Of eleven, two were snapped up outright, and the other nine have continued their successful ways. Even Isle of Capri, a resort and casino business battered by Katrina, leveraged its advanced organizational culture to survive and thrive through catastrophe.

Fun Works is a hybrid: it uses the case company approach to derive eleven accessible and practical principles (of organizational development.) Fun Works 2 is not an academic book but it's not "all principle," (and no meat !) either.

For the second edition, Ms. Yerkes has latched upon the distinction between hard and soft organizational science to help her elaborate on the positive, high performance culture she discovered in her research on the featured companies.

It's this 'soft,' human-centered, science she's neatly described in this very worthwhile revision of Fun Works. "Fun" in the workplace, as she points out, has unfortunate connotations going back to the industrial revolution. Smartly, this time around, she's developed a much larger and more nuanced picture of how it is high-performance companies rely on positive and appreciative company culture to synergize and support the so-called hard science.

Another important aspect to Fun Works is that it is not just about corporate behemoths. She's cast her trained eye on companies ranging in scale from a regional architecture firm, to a large university dining service to, admittedly, a paragon of large-scale organizational innovation, Southwest Airlines. It's a great strength of Fun Works that the book's testable principles--obviously--can be tried out in any sized business environment.

It seems five years later many more businesses are coming to understand how critical are the people side of performance and the interpersonal side of positive culture. Yerkes's hybrid of case study and practical manual remains in its second edition, a keystone kind of book about organizational development and, yes, fun at work.

The new edition's updating improves on the first go-round. Heck, the original was the best book on fun at work, so I guess the new version is better than best!