Just a few minutes into Fish Camp, I have an important decision to make. I am sitting in the lodge-themed conference room of a Marriott hotel outside Minneapolis with 140 people - many of them human-resources managers - whose companies have paid $850 for their presence here.
At my table are five women, mostly middle-aged, all strangers to one another. Our first assignment is to come up with a name for our team, which will spend the next two days collaborating with other teams in the quest for joyous collegiality. Best name wins a stuffed fish. Maybe you've heard of the Fish thing - or more precisely, the Fish! It's a management phenomenon that started out quietly. In 1998, ChartHouse Learning, a small company in Burnsville, Minn., produced a videotape extolling the happy work environment of Pike Place Fish, an even smaller outfit doing business in Seattle's famous Pike Place open-air market.
The video Fish! Led to a book (same title), which was published to little fanfare in early 2000. Inc reviewed it dismissively. Most publications didn't review it at all. Fish joins a long tradition of management-advice franchises that purport to engage not just their readers' minds but also their hearts and spirits by way of parable, metaphor, or some easily swallowed conceit. Only a few of those usually book-based movements ( The One Minute Manager; Jesus, CEO; Who Moved My Cheese?) have actually taken off. A common theme among the successes, according to Andrew J.
DuBrin, an industrial psychologist and professor of management at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is that they speak to values - 'values that people think they should have.' That's a general observation, of course. DuBrin adds that if it were possible to isolate the characteristics of management books that generate million-copy sales, he'd write one himself.
Clad in fluorescent orange shirts, Stephen Lundin (camp director and 'big tuna') and Carr Hagerman (head counselor and 'action figure') haul a flip chart to the front of the room. Hagerman draws a series of lines to suggest a graph. But it is not a graph of anything. The graph is there, Lundin explains dismissively, 'for people who need data,' and although it is meaningless, 'we'll point to it from time to time.'
Lundin tells us he has his Ph.D., and Hagerman instructs us to say 'Ooooooh' every time Lundin mentions that credential. We get the point: Fish Camp is a haven from number crunching, bullet points, endless objectives, and purely symbolic authority. One advantage that Fish has over similar movements is the case study at its core. In 1997, John Christensen, CEO of ChartHouse Learning, which makes educational videos, took a business trip to Seattle and found himself wandering around the Pike Place market.
Fishmongering is tough work, done in 12-hour shifts and marked by stench, scales, blood, and exposure to the elements. To Christensen's surprise, however, the workers at Pike Place Fish did not appear beaten down by their environment. In fact, they were positively giddy. In their fish-tossing antics, their theatrical clowning, their energy, and their fun, Christensen saw something magic.
It was not a paradigm, but a paragon: the way work ought to be. 'It was a gift,' says Christensen, 43, who has the unassuming manner and trim beard of an English-lit professor. Certainly, the timing was fortunate for his then-ailing company. ChartHouse, which Christensen's father founded in 1958 and built into a successful seller of business-philosophy films, had shrunk to just 20 employees following a messy break with a collaborator who sued the company in a copyright dispute. (The suit was finally settled.) 'Let's not dwell on that stuff,' Christensen says mildly. 'The company needed a new center.'
The resulting 17-minute film is entertaining, and it's hard to watch the 'fish guys,' some of whom are wildly charismatic, without feeling a certain envy. They do indeed appear to be having the time of their life, as do the laughing, adoring mobs that surround their stand. And they're obviously selling a lot of fish. Who wouldn't want to be like them? Then there's the chemistry thing. ChartHouse's core audience of trainers and human-resources managers is at least 60% female (the percentage of women at Fish Camp was even higher), so it probably doesn't hurt the film's popularity that many Pike Place workers are strapping young men who are adept at physical labor and warm in conversation. It's late morning on day two of Fish Camp, and the campers are bearing witness.
Hagerman, a handsome fellow with thick, dark hair, darts around the room, thrusting his microphone into the faces of those wishing to testify. Seizing the mike, camper Mike Pierce commands the crowd's attention with the confidence of a professional talk-show host. He is, in fact, the California director of recruiting and training for SCI, a large funeral and cemetery company. Pierce tells us that last summer he made Fish the centerpiece of his portion of a presentation for 150 senior managers, including board members. He decided to do so at the last second, largely improvising his performance - about the power of playfulness - in front of a buttoned-down, traditional, non-fish-tossing crowd. 'It's like that movie - build it and they will come,' Pierce says.
'I'm just gonna be this, and they'll come. I'm not going to worry about whether people are buying in.' The applause swells. Bugg Shadrick takes the floor and dramatically describes the glum atmosphere at the company where she works. 'A group of us started doing Fish two years ago,' she says.
'It's not 'sanctioned' ' - she makes the quote marks with her fingers - 'by the corporation.' But Shadrick got the video from a coworker, and someone else borrowed it and 'disseminated the information.' Hagerman chimes in to endorse the idea that one person can begin to make the change. That is 'where the fires begin,' he says. 'It becomes a grassroots sort of movement.' The Fish movement is built around four axioms derived by Christensen from the fishmongers' example. The first is Choose Your Attitude.
You may have no control over what job you have, but you do control how you approach that job. Second: Make Their Day. Engage and delight customers and coworkers instead of grudgingly doing the bare minimum. Third: Be Present. Don't daydream about where you aren't; instead, make the most of where you are. Look customers and coworkers in the eye and always believe, 'This moment exists for you and me.
Let's make the most of it.' And fourth: Play. Have as much fun as you can at whatever it is you're doing, so as to cultivate a spirit of innovation and creativity. Depending on what attitude you're choosing right about now, this all sounds either seductively simple or incredibly banal. But work-advice books tend to succeed not on the basis of original ideas but rather on the skillful articulation of basic truths that no one could seriously disagree with.
The Fish philosophers' thesis is twofold. First, a positive attitude is a good thing - for you, for your coworkers, and for your customers. In other words, the world would be a happier place if the world were a happier place.
The attractiveness of that timeless message is almost certainly enhanced by the fact that it cuts against the ruthless, numbers-driven, efficiency-obsessed, maximize-shareholder-value ideology enforced by Six Sigma black belts and the like. The second argument represents an even greater break from conventional business-think. 'It is fashionable today to believe that we should not settle for anything less than doing what we love,' the introduction to the Fish! Book tells us.
It's true: work has come to be seen as a source of meaning. But Fish acknowledges implicitly that in the modern service economy most jobs are meaningless. At the very least, it's a challenge to find meaning in being a cashier or a telemarketer. So Fish advises adherents to stop worrying about the quest to 'do what you love' and instead learn to love what you do. There's something admirably pragmatic in that sentiment but also something almost fatalistic.
After all, the American idea of business - if not the American idea of America - is based on striving for something better, not learning to be happy with what you've got. And neither tenet of the Fish thesis is universally appealing. 'I worked for a company who force-fed us this philosophy. Book, tape, and all,' begins a review of the book posted on Amazon.com. The posting goes on to describe the program as 'cornball,' 'ridiculous,' and 'contrived.' 'What's sad,' the reviewer continues, 'is that companies actually think that throwing fish around is something that should be done (the company I worked for had a fish throw. An actual afternoon dedicated to throwing dead fish at each other).
I was burned out on the philosophy after two days of training, and I voluntarily left the company two months after being hired.' I had assumed that I'd find someone like that at Fish Camp - an unabashed skeptic who had been forced by some manager to attend. The camp's attendees were like a band of self-styled rebels - pep-istas, the radical happy - waging an uphill battle against the forces of grumpiness. The only negative words I heard spoken at camp, or in follow-up conversations with training and human-resources directors who use Fish materials, were directed at malcontents like the unknown reviewer: 'Attitudinal vampires.' 'Resister sisters.' 'Toxic-energy centers.' All that left me feeling conflicted.
On the one hand, who could possibly object to a happier workplace? I spent a decade managing and being managed in various office situations, and none was remotely as joyous as Pike Place Fish.
But when I saw - on one of the Fish! Video sequels - a gang of crazily dressed call-center operators dancing in a conga line around their cubicles, I cringed. Such workplace antics would only have hastened my decision to become what I am today: a person who works at home, alone, and prefers it that way. Am I cynical?
An attitudinal vampire? So what was the training that Yokoyama received? The film doesn't say, and the answer isn't in any of the voluminous printed material in our camp packs. In fact, it was EST: the human-potential program created in the early 1970s by Werner Erhard.
Dogged by various controversies, some of which were reportedly stoked by Dianetics partisans, Erhard walked away from his business in 1991. But the underlying 'technology' lives on through the Landmark Forum, which claims that its programs still draw 125,000 participants a year. That is not to say that Fish is a reformulation of, or is even based on, EST ideas, and Christensen insists that the movements take different approaches. Only the film Fish!
Sticks, with its mantra of 'Commit; Be it; Coach it,' echoes the language of EST and its successor, the Landmark Forum. 'We're on delicate ground on that one,' Christensen says when asked about the association. 'We stay away from saying it because Landmark in some areas has a really, really negative connotation. People either love it or they think it's a cult.' The EST connection certainly doesn't bother Fish's followers, most of whom are apparently unfamiliar with Landmark.
Checking in with some fellow campers after the event, I found them, by and large, ebullient. Mike Pierce expressed total confidence that Fish would 'take on a life of its own' at his company. Judy Harlow, who works for a small accounting firm in Denver, said her coworkers responded enthusiastically to her report about the camp experience. Carolyn Butler, one of my tablemates and a high school assistant principal from Fredrick County, Va., left 'totally energized' and made a Fish presentation for her colleagues.
So did another fellow Crappie, Kathy A. Dunn, who works for the 350-employee First Essex Bank, in Andover, Mass., which is many months into a full-out Fish embrace.
How Long Is The Fish Philosophy Video
As a result, customers mention the bankers' sunny attitudes, and employees are getting along better, she assured me.