Dear Wayne,

Lately I’ve been skimming through the CMM shows, and I realised why: the shows lately have been too much insightful and not enough irreverent. But given my favourite business author is Scott Adams, I guess that’s just my personal bias showing!

But that segues into my comment on the show with the slacker manager guy, which I skimmed through this morning. One of our HR folks attempted to trot out that trite FISH! crap with the group I was in a few years back while I was based in the US. Now, my comic-book philosophy about being in the workplace has always been “you don’t have to act seriously to take it seriously”. I mean, most of us are stuck there for a goodly proportion of the hours in our week and hence our life, and if work was so great that we just wanted to be there, they wouldn’t need to pay us, right? But though we’re all stuck there, there’s no need for us all to run around spending all day making it any more miserable than it needs to be. I work in a highly regulated industry, and the compliance police seem intent on killing any joy or enjoyment they come across. But I don’t buy that – we must take it seriously, not wander around with solemn looks on our dials.

So, back to the FISH! thing. When the HR person showed us the film, we were then asked how we “felt” about a workplace like that (maybe “employee feelings” were the theme that month in HR-land). I said, maybe it was because I’m a “furriner an’ all”, but if I ever saw such engineered hype and BS, I’d run a mile in the opposite direction. Kind of an asshole thing to say, in hindsight, but she did ask how it made me “feel”! I think that came up in your show: you can’t force that kind of stuff – you have to create the right environment, and let it grow on its own. And tangentially to being an asshole or not, forcing it is like what Bob Sutton calls “sham participation”.

This sort of sums it up for me….

Greg, I try to balance irreverence and being polite to my guests…. but I’m glad you’re hanging in there with us. As for FISH, i admit to feeling about it the same way I feel about New Year’s Eve….. If you need me i’ll be in my office- call me when it’s over.

WWT