The 8 Characteristics of a Fad.

Miller, Hartwick, and Breton-Miller published an excellent academic article on business management fads (Bus. Horizons 47:7-16), and described eight common characteristics of a fad. Let's see how fun in business rates on these criteria:

• 1. Simple, straightforward. As I've explained above, understanding fun is certainly simple and straightforward, but, unlike other business fads, the execution (as you'll see) requires focused efforts, institutional buy-in, flexible solutions tailored for specific situations – and many of the processes aren't particularly simple or intuitive.
• 2. Promising results. While fun is great, particularly for innovation, creativity, and morale, it isn't a solution for everything (the common claim of a fad). Fun emerges organically from a finely tuned organization and leads to a quantum leap in performance, but it can't be applied like a coat of paint over a rotting structure.
• 3. Universality. Spreading fun all over your organization may have overall positive results, but there are high-leverage areas where a little fun will go a long way – and places where fun won't do much, or is inappropriate to a particular area, group, or person. Even if it was desirable, it's too much work to get to fun to make it worthwhile for every situation.
• 4. Step-down capability. Fun is just the opposite of something that can be "implemented in ritualistic and superficial ways." This is the basis of the observation that things labeled "fun," or activities imposed on people intended to make them have fun, are so very rarely fun.
• 5. In tune with zeitgeist. Yes, fun is in tune. The rise of positive psychology and the recent burst of popular interest in happiness and authenticity, to name just two, are other parts of the wave that fun is surfing in on. Interestingly, this characteristic is shared by almost all of the management "classics" identified in the Miller, et al. study, so it's not a downcheck by itself. Fun is also quite distinct from many of the other popularized products of positive psychology (say that ten times fast) as I'll explain later.
• 6. Novel, not radical. I agree in part that fun is a "rediscovery and repackaging of older ideas, values, and approaches," except for the "repackaging" and "values" parts. Fun is a very old idea, but until very recently it's never been a focus of business management (a value). Fun can't be a repackaging of something that was never part of the package.

• 7. Legitimacy via gurus and star examples. Fun is too young to have developed into a religion, but I do agree that caution is in order. There are some star examples, i.e., Google, but few gurus have emerged preaching the gospel. Lucky for me that fun tends to sell itself, since I've never aspired to be a guru of anything. I want to be a fun expert.
• 8. Lively, entertaining. Sorry, I'm going to stick with a lively, entertaining approach, but I hope you'll see as we proceed that it's not just sweet frosting spread over a hot-air balloon. Fun is serious business, and, like most desirable goals, getting fun to emerge from your work is challenging, though the rewards are commensurate. I won't bury you in acronyms or tedious text, and there's plenty of real beer under the foam.

By my analysis, fun in business rates better (1/8) than the best of the "classics" identified in Miller, et al., Management Information Systems and Supply Chain Management (2/8).

Fun as a serious part of modern life also has a considerable base in recent research. I've already mentioned ‎Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (it's pronounced Mee-hi-cheek Saz-me-haye) and his groundbreaking work on flow, and the books by McGonigal and Chatfield on how the gaming industry has funded research on fun in gaming. Fun in business has recently attracted attention, as you can see for yourself by a Web search for "how to have fun at work." Hemsath and Yerkes' 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work has been around since 1997, though this book and the many 15-, 21-, and 52-ways-to-have-fun screeds on the Web are at best collections of examples from companies that have something fun going on in the workplace. They're essentially lists of suggestions for fun activities that you can bring to work, rather than methods for making the work itself fun. Organizations like Google Inc. have directly demonstrated the value of a fun workplace, but most see Google as a special case where fun can be allowed when your workplace is staffed with super-intelligent overachievers whose goof-offs are valuable intellectual property. The idea that your janitors should be having fun is not on the agenda . . . yet. Research has established that fun (at least solo fun, or flow) is an important part of high performance, but research on the application of fun to business management is in its infancy. This book is the first report of our research on fun and how to encourage it at work, but before we examine why fun is good for work and how to get to it, let's parse the mathematical expression: [Fun ≠ Play ^ Play ⊂ Fun ^ Fun ≠ Funny, the title of the next chapter . . . ]

Read another draft chapter, Fun ≠ Play ^ Play ⊂ Fun ^ Fun ≠ Funny, or see even more on the Funshop Blog!