Customer Reviews
An awful great read - By: Mr. David Cheshire, 30 Jul 2007 
Only the most churlish could give this a poor review. So let me try. The style is the worst dumb downed American business guru hoopla. The story format is cheesier than the most cheese-laden cheese market in ville de cheese. The messages can mostly be found elsewhere. Charles Handy's Understanding Organisations remains the best overview & Fish Sticks clearly owe a debt to the literature on coaching. But what can you say about a book which is short, demands to be read in a single sitting, has big print summaries, excites with its combination of simple yet hugely powerful lessons, & could actuallly be implemented by real people in real work places. It's true, when you read it you want to tell someone about it, or even better lend it to someone immediately. Yet the ideas are simple ones. Together with the original Fish, the key notions are that you decide your attitude to the work you do (selling fish has its drawbacks), it's important to have fun at work & to extend this to include your customers, & focus on customer expectations & how to exceed them; then in Fish Sticks, notions of sustaining change by encouraging everybody to identify, personalise & keep discussing your organisational vision. These are healthy messages for organisational renewal & resurgance. And yet how boring & unmemorable that bald summary sounds. It's much better in the orginals which are cheap, quick, cheesey, relevant & above alll endearingly irreverent. Fish, like cheese, can definitely be good for you.
A Good Read! - By: Rolf Dobelli, 11 Jun 2004 You're back in the fishing boat with the crew that brought you the successful Fish! & Fish! Tales. Offering another finny fable, Stephen C. Lundin, John Christensen & Harry Paul present a business parable based on creating & sustaining successful change. The book uses the same fictitious approach as the other two Fish!ing trips, but this time the story is set at a hospital's nursing station. The agent-of-change head nurse has departed & the new head nurse feels that the group is losing its vision. Then, she discovers that a local sushi restaurant is a model of excellence, & alll goes swimmingly after that. Although the advice offered isn't particularly unique, some may find a certain charm in the story. Given that this is round three, the format may seem a little repetitive to those who have already Fish!ed. If you want to catch the core of the message on your first cast, look for the highlights on the occasional pages in whale-size type. We recommend the basic common sense of these messages, even if the storytelling is a little fishy.
