Just a few minutes into Fish Camp, I have an important decision to make. I am sitting in the lodge-themed conference room of a Marriott hotel outside Minneapolis with 140 people -- many of them human-resources managers -- whose companies have paid $850 for their presence here. At my table are five women, mostly middle-aged, all strangers to one another. Our first assignment is to come up with a name for our team, which will spend the next two days collaborating with other teams in the quest for joyous collegiality. Best name wins a stuffed fish.
My teammates and I settle on Crappie, a kind of spiny sunfish whose name is pronounced "croppy." Our message, of course, is that we have a good sense of humor and not a bad attitude. Then someone suggests that when we announce our name, we stand up, pucker, and flap our hands against our necks as though we have gills. My tablemates are all giggles at the idea. But I am here as a journalist, an observer, and they know it. "Are you going to do it?" one of them asks me.
It is a Ken Kesey moment. Am I on the bus or off the bus? Do I want to be part of the fun or an outsider? I understand the choice I have to make. I stand and pucker and flap. We don't win the big prize. But although I don't yet know it, I am a little bit closer to understanding Fish.
Maybe you've heard of the Fish thing -- or more precisely, the Fish! thing. It's a management phenomenon that started out quietly. In 1998, ChartHouse Learning, a small company in Burnsville, Minn., produced a videotape extolling the happy work environment of Pike Place Fish, an even smaller outfit doing business in Seattle's famous Pike Place open-air market. The video Fish! led to a book (same title), which was published to little fanfare in early 2000. Inc reviewed it dismissively. Most publications didn't review it at all.
Two years later more than 1 million copies of Fish! are in print, the book has been translated into 10 languages, and it is a consistent best-seller on Amazon.com's business-books list. A sequel, Fish! Tales, was released in April. The video sells and rents at a brisk pace; so do spin-off products (workbooks, hats, stuffed fish, even a CD of the "Fish! Song") and coaching and seminar services.
Fish joins a long tradition of management-advice franchises that purport to engage not just their readers' minds but also their hearts and spirits by way of parable, metaphor, or some easily swallowed conceit. Only a few of those usually book-based movements ( The One Minute Manager; Jesus, CEO; Who Moved My Cheese?) have actually taken off. A common theme among the successes, according to Andrew J. DuBrin, an industrial psychologist and professor of management at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is that they speak to values -- "values that people think they should have." That's a general observation, of course. DuBrin adds that if it were possible to isolate the characteristics of management books that generate million-copy sales, he'd write one himself.
Fish appears poised to join the elite ranks of work-think success stories. I had come to the Lodge room at the Marriott to find out why. What is it, exactly, that the Fish sellers are selling? And who is buying it?
Clad in fluorescent orange shirts, Stephen Lundin (camp director and "big tuna") and Carr Hagerman (head counselor and "action figure") haul a flip chart to the front of the room. Hagerman draws a series of lines to suggest a graph. But it is not a graph of anything. The graph is there, Lundin explains dismissively, "for people who need data," and although it is meaningless, "we'll point to it from time to time." Lundin tells us he has his Ph.D., and Hagerman instructs us to say "Ooooooh" every time Lundin mentions that credential. We get the point: Fish Camp is a haven from number crunching, bullet points, endless objectives, and purely symbolic authority.
Although a show of hands indicates that almost everyone has seen the video Fish!, we spend a few minutes watching a highlights reel. The remainder of the morning will be devoted to stories told by camp leaders and campers alike. The morning's focal tale is the story of Fish itself.
One advantage that Fish has over similar movements is the case study at its core. In 1997, John Christensen, CEO of ChartHouse Learning, which makes educational videos, took a business trip to Seattle and found himself wandering around the Pike Place market. Fishmongering is tough work, done in 12-hour shifts and marked by stench, scales, blood, and exposure to the elements. To Christensen's surprise, however, the workers at Pike Place Fish did not appear beaten down by their environment. In fact, they were positively giddy. In their fish-tossing antics, their theatrical clowning, their energy, and their fun, Christensen saw something magic. It was not a paradigm, but a paragon: the way work ought to be.
"It was a gift," says Christensen, 43, who has the unassuming manner and trim beard of an English-lit professor. Certainly, the timing was fortunate for his then-ailing company. ChartHouse, which Christensen's father founded in 1958 and built into a successful seller of business-philosophy films, had shrunk to just 20 employees following a messy break with a collaborator who sued the company in a copyright dispute. (The suit was finally settled.) "Let's not dwell on that stuff," Christensen says mildly. "The company needed a new center."
Thinking he might have found that center, Christensen struck up a conversation with one of the fishmongers, met the owner of Pike Place Fish, and ultimately returned to shoot 24 hours of film. Drawing on his own business-training background, he distilled the Pike Place crew's observations and anecdotes into a handful of slogan-simple ideas that could be applied to any workplace where morale and service needed a boost.
The resulting 17-minute film is entertaining, and it's hard to watch the "fish guys," some of whom are wildly charismatic, without feeling a certain envy. They do indeed appear to be having the time of their life, as do the laughing, adoring mobs that surround their stand. And they're obviously selling a lot of fish. Who wouldn't want to be like them? Then there's the chemistry thing. ChartHouse's core audience of trainers and human-resources managers is at least 60% female (the percentage of women at Fish Camp was even higher), so it probably doesn't hurt the film's popularity that many Pike Place workers are strapping young men who are adept at physical labor and warm in conversation.
