A few years ago, a friend recommended Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results for me to read and I really enjoyed reading this intriguing book thoroughly at that time and I read the book again today.
In this parable, it tells a fictional manager who reluctantly accepted a promotion to be a manager of a department in her company which was famous for being chronically unresponsive and unhelpful, known throughout the company as "toxic energy dump".
However a fortuitous encounter at Seattle's real-life Pike Place Fish and interactions with its fishmongers made her realised that no workplace would be a dreary place to work in anymore if people applied the 4 essential "ingredients" to their workplace.
Reading this book, it convinced me that practically no one likes working.
We work for numerous reasons - to put food on our table, to pay our bills, to send our children to the best schools possible etcetera and oh yes, to pay or taxes and most importantly, we hope to save enough for retirement and a little bit of enjoyment in life.
Seriously, if we do a worldwide survey on who likes to work or who likes their jobs, I would say less than 10% will say yes, and so a "surprising" 90% dislike working or dislike their jobs and that make us a very unhappy bunch of people. No wonder everyone likes reading comics and manga.
Therefore, the question we need to ask ourselves is "What can be we do about it?" Well, we obviously can't quit our jobs for the numerous reasons we have but we can change the way we do things at our workplace by implementing the following 4 "ingredients".
4 Key Ingredients In Brief
Ingredient Number 1: Choose Your Attitude
There is always a choice about the way you do work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself. We can choose the attitude we bring to our work.
Ingredient Number 2: Play
Have fun while working as fun is energising. Identify ways on how everyone at the workplace can have fun and create more energy.
Ingredient Number 3: Make Their Day
Include your customers in your good time. Engage your customers in ways which create energy and goodwill. Identify who are your customers and how can you engage them to make their day. Identify ways to make your colleagues' days.
Ingredient Number 4: Be Present
Be fully present at work and focussed on your customers (internal meaning colleagues and external meaning clients).
Well, it is better for you to read the book yourself to get the gist of what the authors meant to say.
Where Can I Get The Book?
You can get the book at your local book stores like Borders, Kinokuniya or Popular etc, or you can get it from Amazon.
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