Work is good. Work gives our lives meaning, and if we choose to work a lot, well, we’re probably happier for it.

Work is important. You would never accept a romantic relationship that was “sort of OK” or stay with a spouse who is “you know, nothing special, but I’m used to him/her”. So why should you accept anything less than true fullfilment on the job?

Work is changing. From long-term commitment and slowly and predictably climbing the career-ladder to a gold watch after 25 years of faithful service to rapid job changes, lateral career moves, free agents and entreprenurism.

And this is all good.

This is basically the point of Richard Reeves’ book Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work. You’d be hard pressed to find an author more determinedly and forcefully optimistic about the changing work environment, and I think his book is an important and valid contribution to our efforts to construct the future of work.

My long-distance friend Mike Wagner put me onto this book, and I was very glad to read it – especially as a counter-weight to The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett, which looks at the exact same phenomena and basically concludes that it’s all bad – as you may have guessed from the title.
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If you’re interested in Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook by David L. Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jacqueline M. Starvos is the book to read, because:
* It’s edited by the foremost AI people on the planet
* It’s relevant to every level of AI user from novice to expert
* It covers both the theory and the practice of AI
* It’s clear, readable and very thorough
* You can read it as a book or use it as the ultimate AI reference

If you don’t know AI already, you should consider looking into it – it’s one of the two most important tools I know of for creating positive organizational change (the other being Open Space Technology).

There’s more on AI here and here.

Almost anybody who works with HR, organizational development, motivation or similar areas has heard of the Pike Place Fish Market. This is basically a fish shop, that one day decided to be world famous. As the owner tells it:
The first step for us at Pike Place Fish was to decide who we wanted to be. In the words of John Yokoyama:?In one of our early Pike Place Fish meetings with Jim (our coach from bizFutures), we began an inquiry into “who do we want to be? We wanted to create a new future for ourselves. One of the young kids working for me said, ?Hey! Let’s be World Famous!? At first I thought, ?World Famous?what a stupid thing to say!? But the more we talked about it, the more we all got excited about being World Famous. So we committed to it. We added ?World Famous? to our logo and had it printed on our shipping boxes.

This got picked up by some consultants, who created the Fish! concept, including a video and a series of books. But now, the Pike Place Fishmongers have told their own story in their own words, in the book Catch!: A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness by Cyndi Crother. And their version ain’t bad either.
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