Friday, November 22, 2002
The Serious Business of Fun
In her article "The Serious Business of Fun," Nancy Lee Hutchin makes a case for engineering fun into business process design. She writes:
There are two serious issues related to BPR and fun. The first deals with how fun can be injected into the project itself in order to create team building, optimistic kickoff and synergy. The second looks at how the organization undergoing redesign can be engineered to encourage fun and benefit from the positive results that follow.
For both items, the key word is permission. One can't mandate fun, but setting up the atmosphere in which it can happen is usually all that is needed. Bob Filipczak, in Training (4/95), points out that most employees "don't need to be taught what humor is or what fun is or how to have some of it." The most important thing is for executives to set examples.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, for instance, has a Grand Poobah of the Joy Gang, while CEO Steve Siegel (of an accounting firm doing standard traditional business) is known to be deadly with a water balloon. Strangely enough, two items that are most correlated with a "fun" environment happen to be ice cream and a relaxed clothes policy, like the one just instituted by IBM CEO Leo Gerstner.
There are two serious issues related to BPR and fun. The first deals with how fun can be injected into the project itself in order to create team building, optimistic kickoff and synergy. The second looks at how the organization undergoing redesign can be engineered to encourage fun and benefit from the positive results that follow.
For both items, the key word is permission. One can't mandate fun, but setting up the atmosphere in which it can happen is usually all that is needed. Bob Filipczak, in Training (4/95), points out that most employees "don't need to be taught what humor is or what fun is or how to have some of it." The most important thing is for executives to set examples.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, for instance, has a Grand Poobah of the Joy Gang, while CEO Steve Siegel (of an accounting firm doing standard traditional business) is known to be deadly with a water balloon. Strangely enough, two items that are most correlated with a "fun" environment happen to be ice cream and a relaxed clothes policy, like the one just instituted by IBM CEO Leo Gerstner.
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