Editorial Review:
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".
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Customer Reviews
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All the original eleven companies featured have continued to thrive  2007-07-07
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! 2007-06-26
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 2007-05-01
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!
A Fun Guide to a Fun Workplace - Also see WorkLaughs 2006-12-29
This is not only a fun book to read but, if you take it's advice, it will show you, through examples,
how to put more fun into your workplace. And if you like this book, you are sure to enjoy
WorkLaughs: Quips, Quotes, and Anecdotes about Making a Buck. (also available on Amazon).
Fun most definitely works! 2006-12-02
Fun and work might not always seem to fit in the same sentence. However, this book by Leslie Yerkes makes fun at work seem all the more likely. Combining the ideas of fun at work with emphasizing a productive and successful company is the perfect mix for this one of a kind book.
Ms. Yerkes' work/fun fusion is brings the relaxed atmosphere of a get together with friends together with driving the success of a business. She does this with eight simple principles to fuse work with fun. Impossible? Think again! Not to spoil the book for you, but with a principle entitled "Celebrate", who wouldn't be enticed to read such a book? Ms. Yerkes' gives employees and management the courage to be themselves and to the best that they can be. The line between management and employee is blurred with the brilliance of Yerkes' ideas. This book encourages an equal playing field amongst all in the office without creating a fantasty, this can really happen! The days of chains of command and lack of communication with upper management could be on their way out the door with the ideas presented in this book.
The principles, examples, and tests in this book provide an unbelievable amount of insight as to how to integrate fun and work. This 200 page book is overflowing with ideas that could easily provide employees with a whole new outlook on your company and work in general. Fun/work inventories allow readers to find out their current view of fun at work. Examples from well-known, successful companies also provides proof that fun at work really does work!
This book is a must read regardless of your position in a company. Entry-level career to president of a major corporation, we all can learn a lot from Leslie Yerkes. She encourages us all not to be so serious at work and let fun happen!
Ms. Yerkes' talks about risk taking in her book, so why not take a risk and go out and read this book. I assure you, you will not be disappointed! Fun most definitely works!
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