Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Anybody who works for a living. Its stories support practical principles that can be utilized by managers and their teams and all employees.

Q: What is the book about?
A: Fun Works is about leveraging the “soft science” of organizational development to support and reinforce positive, inspired performance. The book’s powerful perspective concerns the connection between happy, empowered employees, and the cogent and vital principles that underlie how it is successful companies create enthusiastic, passionate, and energized workplaces. The second edition of Fun Works, Creating Places Where People Love to Work, revisits eleven case studies five years after the original research to find that they all have continued to prosper and advance the cause of fun at work. Many of these companies simply out-perform their competition and, nowadays, their high performance cultures exemplify what other companies can do to be more competitive.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I don’t think of myself as the best person to write this book. I’m part of a wide spectrum of people who are researching, theorizing, and developing practical methods for the sake of developing innovative, high performance workplaces. This said, I’m the only one who could write this particular book! I’m passionate about the nature of successful companies and have been investigating the relationship between business success and what I term, ‘bringing the whole person to work and the Fun-Work Fusion,’ ever since I noted, in my consulting, how unhappy and (often) conflict-filled workplaces are immensely counter-productive to achievement and success. This is a book about what I’ve learned and what I understand may help companies be more successful. I’ve revamped what already was the most practical and accessible book on this important topic.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: This second edition represents a deepening and evolution of my research and findings. It struck me that the original emphasis on a variety of positive principles and practices coheres into a soft and human science of workplace development. I’ve centered the revision around the idea that real organizational synergy requires just as much attention to the soft science as it does to the ‘hard,’ usually quantitative, conventions of management science. Fun Works, Creating Places Where People Love to Work, is different because it both tightly argues for its research findings while, at the same time, it provides simple and accessible practices that can be tried out and put to the test in any business. I don’t know of another book that puts it all together in one place like Fun Works does!

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: When Fun Works first was released it was among a handful of books about viewing employees as whole persons rather than cogs in a hard science driven machine. The global business space is more competitive today, and the cost of finding and hiring personnel has grown. Some companies will churn through employees at great expense and do so in an unforgiving and uncaring manner. But, because anybody who works would rather wake up and run to work rather than drag themselves out of bed and slink off to an unpleasant workplace, it is my mission to point out what successful companies do to inspire people to love to come to work. The Fun Works page on my web site contains an excerpt, comments, and links to what others have said about the book.

MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth

Dan Janal: I loved reading this book. Each page had an example of a tactic or strategy that could change your business for the better. Everyone talks about going outside the box. This book is your road map for charting that territory!

Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Executives in companies looking for new growth vehicles

Q: What is the book about?
A: The book is about how companies, even in tough industries (think cement) or industries that are written off as hopelessly mature (think plastic packaging) or industries where it looks as if everything that can be done has been done (think auto insurance) can nonetheless discover fantastic vehicles for growth. The book looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts, then creates five ‘lenses’ that the reader can use as tools to help them find their own pathways to growth.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: Because I’m a growth and innovation junkie! More seriously, what we bring to bear is both a fascination with the real phenomenon and the discipline that comes from serious social-science training (my Ph.D. is from the Wharton School).

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: Firstly, we don’t just take examples of success and report on those - we look at the failures, too, so you won’t be getting the bias that often comes into stories where only the successes are evaluated. Secondly, we tell you exactly what to do to apply the approach for real. No waving our hands around and saying “oh, now you change the temperature of the sea”. Thirdly, we provide tons of real-life carefully researched examples, many of which can provide inspiration to you. Lastly, the book is meant to be used, so we don’t care if you start with chapter 5 and only get to the rest later. We want it to work for you. And it has, as our success in many workshops has proven.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: We had enormous fun researching and writing it, and I think that comes through on the page. It also has a web site (MarketBusting.com) with an author’s blog and many additional tools and cases you can download.