Fun Is Good

March 14, 2005
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.