Released by ChartHouse in 1998, the film Fish! won a dedicated following during the next few years thanks largely to word of mouth. The video has been translated into 17 languages and has been purchased by 15,000 organizations at $590 a pop. Companies ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations have carried out its prescriptions. Southwest Airlines, for example, screens the video as part of its ongoing "soft skills" training.
In 2000, Hyperion published the book Fish!, which restates the video's lessons by way of a parable about a female manager at a fictitious Seattle financial institution. Inspired by the fishmongers, the manager converts the "toxic-energy dump" operations group into a high-morale, high-quality department. (She also gets engaged to a fish guy.)
Today ChartHouse is back up to 41 employees and revenue growth of 35% to 40% a year. Almost all of that growth can be traced to the Fish franchise. "Fish is helping people," Christensen says. "It's a message whose time, I think, has definitely come."
It's late morning on day two of Fish Camp, and the campers are bearing witness. Hagerman, a handsome fellow with thick, dark hair, darts around the room, thrusting his microphone into the faces of those wishing to testify. Seizing the mike, camper Mike Pierce commands the crowd's attention with the confidence of a professional talk-show host. He is, in fact, the California director of recruiting and training for SCI, a large funeral and cemetery company. Pierce tells us that last summer he made Fish the centerpiece of his portion of a presentation for 150 senior managers, including board members. He decided to do so at the last second, largely improvising his performance -- about the power of playfulness -- in front of a buttoned-down, traditional, non-fish-tossing crowd. "It's like that movie -- build it and they will come," Pierce says. "I'm just gonna be this, and they'll come. I'm not going to worry about whether people are buying in." The applause swells.
Lois M. Bugg Shadrick takes the floor and dramatically describes the glum atmosphere at the company where she works. "A group of us started doing Fish two years ago," she says. "It's not 'sanctioned' " -- she makes the quote marks with her fingers -- "by the corporation." But Shadrick got the video from a coworker, and someone else borrowed it and "disseminated the information." Hagerman chimes in to endorse the idea that one person can begin to make the change. That is "where the fires begin," he says. "It becomes a grassroots sort of movement."
The Fish movement is built around four axioms derived by Christensen from the fishmongers' example. The first is Choose Your Attitude. You may have no control over what job you have, but you do control how you approach that job. Second: Make Their Day. Engage and delight customers and coworkers instead of grudgingly doing the bare minimum. Third: Be Present. Don't daydream about where you aren't; instead, make the most of where you are. Look customers and coworkers in the eye and always believe, "This moment exists for you and me. Let's make the most of it." And fourth: Play. Have as much fun as you can at whatever it is you're doing, so as to cultivate a spirit of innovation and creativity.
Depending on what attitude you're choosing right about now, this all sounds either seductively simple or incredibly banal. But work-advice books tend to succeed not on the basis of original ideas but rather on the skillful articulation of basic truths that no one could seriously disagree with. The Fish philosophers' thesis is twofold. First, a positive attitude is a good thing -- for you, for your coworkers, and for your customers. In other words, the world would be a happier place if the world were a happier place. The attractiveness of that timeless message is almost certainly enhanced by the fact that it cuts against the ruthless, numbers-driven, efficiency-obsessed, maximize-shareholder-value ideology enforced by Six Sigma black belts and the like.
The second argument represents an even greater break from conventional business-think. "It is fashionable today to believe that we should not settle for anything less than doing what we love," the introduction to the Fish! book tells us. It's true: work has come to be seen as a source of meaning. But Fish acknowledges implicitly that in the modern service economy most jobs are meaningless. At the very least, it's a challenge to find meaning in being a cashier or a telemarketer. So Fish advises adherents to stop worrying about the quest to "do what you love" and instead learn to love what you do. There's something admirably pragmatic in that sentiment but also something almost fatalistic. After all, the American idea of business -- if not the American idea of America -- is based on striving for something better, not learning to be happy with what you've got.
And neither tenet of the Fish thesis is universally appealing. "I worked for a company who force-fed us this philosophy ... book, tape, and all," begins a review of the book posted on Amazon .com. The posting goes on to describe the program as "cornball," "ridiculous," and "contrived." "What's sad," the reviewer continues, "is that companies actually think that throwing fish around is something that should be done (the company I worked for had a fish throw ... an actual afternoon dedicated to throwing dead fish at each other).... I was burned out on the philosophy after two days of training, and I voluntarily left the company two months after being hired."
I had assumed that I'd find someone like that at Fish Camp -- an unabashed skeptic who had been forced by some manager to attend. But no. The camp's attendees were like a band of self-styled rebels -- pep-istas, the radical happy -- waging an uphill battle against the forces of grumpiness. The only negative words I heard spoken at camp, or in follow-up conversations with training and human-resources directors who use Fish materials, were directed at malcontents like the unknown reviewer: "Attitudinal vampires." "Resister sisters." "Toxic-energy centers." Outsiders.
