Bob Nelson and Mario Tamayo seem to be, for lack of a better word, awesome. They have an almost overwhelming affability to their writing style, a kind of acerbic wit and irreverence for the traditional approaches of the leadership advice book that makes their read – Work Made Fun Gets Done!: Easy Ways to Boost Energy, Morale, and Results – all the more complimentary to its point. Their new brand of corporate and post-modernist leadership policy is borne out of something akin to a trend, albeit not belonging in such a superficial category. With Toyota reimplementing the Lean system and various other premier corporations and company endeavors introducing holistic and even Eastern spiritualist-derived elements into their employee doctrines, Nelson and Tamayo forgo any of the aforementioned formalities for something far more empathetic. Fun. The word and the concept attached to the word feel almost sinful to use in a professional context.
Even a little embarrassing. But these two accomplished corporate leaders know their stuff. Their credentials provide both the glue for their argument and the buffering for the reader’s ensured trust of their pitched methodologies. As far as both men are concerned, fun is one of the single most critical elements to incorporate into the lives of one’s employee base. It engages each and every member of the team – and such engagement is pragmatic from a business standpoint! After all, the name of the game is company unity, and unity means full solidification of the company reaching its fullest potential. As a result, this kind of perspective has a sort of refreshing legitimacy that, when it comes down to the cruxes of relevant ‘data’ so to speak, should send the haters packing and running for the hills.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Work-Made-Fun-Gets-Done/dp/1523092351
Such ideals prove particularly pertinent to a professional landscape altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Project leaders getting creative with respect to the remote work settings is a particular literary highlight of both Nelson and Tamayo. “Many organizations are finding creative ways to deliver fun experiences to their remote workers,” they have written. “And your efforts can go beyond popular videoconferencing platforms and apps such as Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, BuzzFeed, Houseparty, and so on. During the pandemic (Jennifer) tuned into a short weekly ‘dance party’ at 2 p.m. on Fridays on Instagram. ‘It’s high-energy and fun—the perfect pick-me-up to end the week!’ she said.” They go on to elaborate, “GitLab, a web-based repository management company from San Francisco, California, encourages its remote employees to spend a few hours every week taking coffee breaks together through a video call…
Education company General Assembly, headquartered in New York City, hosts a video chat room for workers to join in the morning for watercooler chat over coffee.” It’s through the humanization of workplace processes that Nelson and Tamayo strip the excess high-handedness out of the culture and make things accessible. The results are more than worth it. The classic mantra of leadership and respect through fear has not only become outdated in a post-pandemic world, but also is downright anti-pragmatic. Ultimately it’s that surprising, observational seriousness within Nelson and Tamayo’s otherwise warm-hearted, quick-witted literary conduit that helps it stand out as wheat separated from the chaff…
Garth Thomas