From Publishers Weekly
If Veeck is right, most employees in the American workplace lead lives of quiet desperation, working in mind-numbing, joyless jobs alongside uninspiring bosses and boring co-workers. In this sometimes amusing, but often repetitive, self-help guide, Veeck, part owner of six minor league baseball teams, offers his own program for making the workplace fun with a cheerleader's enthusiasm and a baseball coach's motivational gumption. Veeck advocates a host of familiar tactics, including embracing failure, laughing at adversity, never losing childhood curiosity, being less self-centered and more other-centered, knowing that money can have little relationship to enjoying life. Veeck includes vignettes of workers who have incorporated his tenets successfully into their companies, and he provides helpful summaries of the method's principles at the end of each chapter. Veeck's program will likely be most effective in service-oriented businesses where the joy of work diminishes in the struggles with disgruntled customers and demanding bosses. (Apr. 23) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Maverick marketing whiz Mike Veeck presents his simple, no-fail formula for business success: make work fun and you'll create a culture where the best people will want to work and customers will want to spend their money.
Mike Veeck runs six minor-league baseball teams, and for each of them he's drafted a business plan that begins with three simple words: "Fun is good." The fun-is-good philosophy not only has worked to make an evening at one of his ballparks--full of laughs, zany promotions, and free giveaways--enjoyable for everyone; it has transformed a half-dozen money-losing or start-up teams into a thriving $25 million business.
In this book Veeck, son of legendary baseball owner Bill Veeck, shows why an injection of fun, creativity, and passion is so essential to business success. We learn:
o Why customer service, the lifeblood of any business, suffers when employees aren't having fun at work
o How just a few people with the fun-is-good attitude can transform an entire workplace
o What companies should look for when hiring people and how employees can forge a fun-is-good career path.
Throughout, the book is peppered with vignettes, where we hear firsthand from people who have benefited professionally and personally from the fun-is-good philosophy and how they have applied it specifically to their own industries and careers.
About the Author
MIKE VEECK is president and part owner of six wildly successful minor-league baseball teams. Son of the late Hall of Fame club owner Bill Veeck, he has followed his father's lead, with innovative promotions that have been profiled by 60 Minutes, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, People, and countless other media outlets. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.
PETE WILLIAMS is a veteran journalist who writes about sports, business, and fitness. He is a contributing writer to USA Today, Sports Weekly, and Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal, and is coauthor (with Mark Verstegen) of the Rodale book Core Performance. He lives in Safety Harbor, Florida.
Fun Is Good: How to Create Joy & Passion into Your Workplace & Career FROM THE PUBLISHER
Maverick marketing whiz Mike Veeck presents his simple, no-fail formula for business success: make work fun and you'll create a culture where the best people will want to work and customers will want to spend their money.
Mike Veeck runs six minor-league baseball teams, and for each of them he's drafted a business plan that begins with three simple words: "Fun is good." The fun-is-good philosophy not only has worked to make an evening at one of his ballparks--full of laughs, zany promotions, and free giveaways--enjoyable for everyone; it has transformed a half-dozen money-losing or start-up teams into a thriving $25 million business.
In this book Veeck, son of legendary baseball owner Bill Veeck, shows why an injection of fun, creativity, and passion is so essential to business success. We learn:
* Why customer service, the lifeblood of any business, suffers when employees aren't having fun at work
* How just a few people with the fun-is-good attitude can transform an entire workplace
* What companies should look for when hiring people and how employees can forge a fun-is-good career path.
Throughout, the book is peppered with vignettes, where we hear firsthand from people who have benefited professionally and personally from the fun-is-good philosophy and how they have applied it specifically to their own industries and careers.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
If Veeck is right, most employees in the American workplace lead lives of quiet desperation, working in mind-numbing, joyless jobs alongside uninspiring bosses and boring co-workers. In this sometimes amusing, but often repetitive, self-help guide, Veeck, part owner of six minor league baseball teams, offers his own program for making the workplace fun with a cheerleader's enthusiasm and a baseball coach's motivational gumption. Veeck advocates a host of familiar tactics, including embracing failure, laughing at adversity, never losing childhood curiosity, being less self-centered and more other-centered, knowing that money can have little relationship to enjoying life. Veeck includes vignettes of workers who have incorporated his tenets successfully into their companies, and he provides helpful summaries of the method's principles at the end of each chapter. Veeck's program will likely be most effective in service-oriented businesses where the joy of work diminishes in the struggles with disgruntled customers and demanding bosses. (Apr. 23) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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