Fish! Sticks: A Remarkable Way to Adapt to Changing Times and Keep Your Work Fresh

The 'o-FISH!-al' follow-up to the phenomenal bestselling Fish! and Fish! Tales, Fish! Sticks is a stand-alone business parable that shows you how to come up with a vision for your business and how to keep it alive, vital, and renewed through tough times, such as turnover in management and staff or a troubled economy. Using the example of a hugely successful, fictional sushi restaurant as a model for a vision of continual renewal, Fish! Sticks employs the same kind of easy-to-read story that was used in Fish! to illustrate its three major principals of continued success: Commit, Be It, and Coach It.

When Stephanie, a new manager, takes over from a wildly popular and now promoted boss, she is faced with the problem of how to keep spirits up in a corporate unit that has, frankly, started to get bored and cranky and revert to its old ways. But then she visits the amazing Taka Sushi (formerly Taka Teriyaki), with its lines of customers cheerfully waiting for hours to get in. Soon, she realizes that the way to keep her employees motivated and her customers delighted can be learned from a bunch of waiters who teach one another everything they need to know. And when she finds out just how the owner of Taka knew to switch her main bill of fare from teriyaki to sushi long before anyone else, what she really discovers is the secret of keeping your work fresh.

In this third installment in the popular Fish! series, the authors examine change as a necessary, ongoing process that should never stop--at least not if one wants to keep the workplace vital and fully alive. Using a fictitious sushi restaurant as an example, this fable examines the three principles that Lundin, Christensen, and Paul believe are necessary for continuing success: Find It ("it" being each employee's personal vision of the business), Live It, and Coach It. Readers of the authors' previous books--Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results and Fish! Tales--should find its familiarity comforting. For those new to the series, this standalone volume is easy to read and highly valuable. --David Bombeck

Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D., is a filmmaker, graduate business school professor, and professional speaker. He runs a corporate membership seminar series as part of the Institute for Management Studies and leads the Institute for Creativity and Innovation at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He lives in Minnesota.