SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
To Buy or Not to Buy: LeaderFish (DVD)
November 11, 2008
By Bill Ellet
Product: LeaderFish (DVD)
Rating: 4 stars out of 4
Company: ChartHouse International Learning Corp.
800-328-3789
www.charthouse.com
Price:$279
Reviewed by Bill Ellet, Training Media Review
I've never quite known what to think of the Fish family of products. The first video had a compact message centered on one unlikely business, the Fulton Fish Market in Seattle.
The market is now world famous. And Fish isn't just a video anymore but a brand. Taking a cue from Hollywood producers, Charthouse Learning merchandised the content. Want a logoed hat or tee shirt? How about a lapel pin? You can buy them online.
I'm not saying that merchandising training videos isn't smart. Video vendors serving the industry are desperately looking for ways to make money besides selling a video license. But it does raise the question of whether the content is just the hook for selling higher-margin items.
Four Reasons for Using it
LeaderFish brings together many strands of the Fish "philosophy" in a six-part video and lengthy, slick "Personal Guide." After watching the video and reading through the guide, I have to say I like and admire the materials.
Reason #1:
Leadership theorists and gurus with trademarked approaches will probably not think much of LeaderFish. It is all about practice—practice that can begin as soon as you've been exposed to the LeaderFish ideas. They're a mash up of various ideas that happen to work together and are easy to understand.
Reason #2
LeaderFish puts human values before work. That doesn't mean work isn't important. The reasoning is that good work begins with human beings who have particular needs and capabilities. However, the latter—the needs and capabilities part—isn't elaborated as something complex. LeaderFish keeps it simple and actionable. For example, work should be fun, but fun doesn't necessarily depend on the work itself.
Reason #3
LeaderFish is the teasing antidote to MBA business models and other ways of looking at an organization that lack one thing: people. The people are assumed. They will do what they are told to do as required by the chosen model.
Reason #4:
LeaderFish is about leadership, not about leaders, and leadership is not a solo performance but a collaboration built on good relationships. In the LeaderFish video, you see plenty of CEOs, owners, and presidents, but it gives even more attention to the rank and file—as it should. It's also about the benefits of relationships that have little or nothing to do with work.
I once said I had a problem with the Fish philosophy because it seemed to ignore the organizational context. I felt the early videos implied that the burden of having fun was on employees—they just needed to change their attitude, no matter how the company might treat them.
Any hint of that lopsided responsibility is long gone. The executives and managers in this program are more than just humble. They realize that the individuals who usually have to make the biggest adjustments for an organization to be both fun and productive are the executives and managers.
Culture is Crucial
Sadly, the companies that can make the Fish philosophy work are the exception. They take the risk of remaking their culture and are willing to build the top-to-bottom commitment to make and sustain the change.
I have been reading some case studies recently about troubled companies, and their cultures are typically a root cause of the trouble. Unfortunately, changing a culture is hard and time consuming. The difficulty should be given more attention in this program, not to spoil the fun but to set realistic expectations.
LeaderFish is not for every company and organization. It has to be positively scary for many executives to even contemplate. They like things tightly controlled and the prerogatives of power.
Power makes everything in an organization simple. Those who have power can compel those who don't to do what the powerful want. The venerable John Gardner, former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, makes the point nicely. (He makes cameo appearances at the beginning of each segment.)
The power to compel doesn't mean the power to compel good performance. The powerless often don't do things well, especially when what they've been asked to do is stupid—which is often true because the "leaders" aren't ever as close to the work as the people who do the work and would never think to ask them what they think.
Toyota got this a long time ago. Its leadership realized that thousands upon thousands of small changes on a continuous basis and conceived by the people who know the work best compound to big changes. That's nothing like the one-off top-down changes conceived by management gurus that rain down on people in many organizations.
Worn Icon, Excellent Performances
The LeaderFish video presents people, companies, and even some stories that will be familiar to viewers of previous Fish videos. I personally am tired of Southwest Airlines as the preferred icon of a business that takes relationships seriously.
The example is a little worn, and Southwest has been shown to have some serious people issues, namely risking customer safety by deferring maintenance.
The mix of companies is wide, from sprawling corporations like Sprint to small local businesses like a roofing company.
The people captured in the video are great. They are often amazingly articulate and insightful. My favorite is the roofing supervisor, a reformed curmudgeon. He learned to care about his charges, which meant that instead of yelling at them like a drill instructor he coached them on skills and stressed safety.
His crew isn't going to be falling off roofs. When he talks about the transformation he's gone through, his emotion is moving.
I'm not sure the LeaderFish model is as coherent as other models. However, that might be imposing academic standards on an approach that doesn't want to fit into neat categories.
Recommendation
LeaderFish isn't for everyone. It is for companies, large and small, that are willing to give up conventional top-down leadership—really give it up—and think not in terms of hierarchy but of relationships. It's for companies that are willing to change the culture, which means a long-term commitment. It's for people who want to put human values at the forefront of work. Does that sound like your organization?
Bill Ellet (wellet@tmreview.com) is editor of Training Media Review and a writing consultant at Harvard Business School. His book, "The Case Study Handbook: How to Read, Discuss, and Write Persuasively about Cases," was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2007.
Training Media Review (www.tmreview.com) helps training and HR professionals find quality off-the-shelf products through practitioner reviews. A TMR subscription:
• Saves time—your time—on searches for off-the-shelf products.
• Saves money by speeding up the decision-making process.
• Saves money by finding high-quality, lower-cost products.
• Increases ROI by helping you make better final choices.
TMR also keeps you abreast of new products such as using social networking and virtual reality tools to enhance learning. Subscribers receive free reports, including Leading Authoring Tools, Best Training Products, and Best Books on Training. Subscribe for as little as $49.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Presentations Index |
|
|
