Reviewed by the World Famous If You Write It Blog
During a recent meeting our Boss asked us-How many of you want to work here next year? One person out of ten raised their hand. There is a lot of money here, just not for us. There is a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours-that is for us. As with most companies, the front line people, the ones that the actual customers get to interact with-are the ones that get paid the least and have the least reason to make a good impression.
The Home Office gets their money, and that is all these companies care about. It could be argued that all companies exist to make money, right? Which brings me to When Fish Fly. This is a very interesting little book. Money is not the be all and end all for the World Famous Pike Plaza Fish Market. This is a kind of a self help book for people who want to write successful self help books. The story is an amazing one of an old fish market in Seattle that no one cared about and how it became the World Famous Pike Plaza Fish Market.
The One Minute Manager was the first little business book-little in that it is a small format hardback, but it still cost twenty dollars to buy. This makes sense, as it is not the physical book that matters but the ideas contained within. Fish!,Fish Tales!, and Fish Sticks! are all little business books in the One Minute Manager model. When Fish Fly tells the story of the Pike Place Market and how these books came into being. It is pretty interesting stuff.
The most important bit of information to come out of When Fish Fly is that you can change the company when you are the owner of said company. The owner can impose his ideals and anyone that doesn’t like those ideals is free to find other employment. I can see how this works well on the level of a fish market. It is possible that the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market has hundreds of employees, but it seems a bit unlikely. The point of most self help is to remind us that we are all responsible for our lives. It is a message worth repeating. We are where we are at this moment through our own actions.
This meeting the other day-the usual dead, dull and pointless kind of meeting telling us what we already know and how we should be doing it better-drained the life out of us. This was not a When Fish Fly kind of meeting where they talked about empowerment and self-actualization. It was more along the lines of-do what we tell you to do or find another job. It motivated us, alright- it motivated us to look for another job.
Could I use the self help tips offered in When Fish Fly and do my job better? Sure, I can improve my portraits and my interaction with the customers. I could get a better world view and start living the life of a World Famous Photographer-but it would still be a dead end job and I would never get any of the money or the fame.
So how about applying some of these tips to If You Write It? How do I make my blog World Famous? Well, there is a Geo-Tracker on eXtreMe Tracking-my blog is already world famous. Going international is pretty easy with a blog these days. True the vast bulk of my hits come from United States, but I have a few readers in the United Kingdom and Canada. There are the odd scattered hits from all over the world. Of course, this is does not exactly make my blog world famous, still it is fun to see where people are at when they read my blog. Don’t you just love useless stats?
When Fish Fly is a good book, and if you own your own company, I think that it could help you reach the greater world. Can it help bloggers see the larger picture? Maybe, maybe not. It’s an easy read, but still a pretty profound one. There is that whole idea that once you start to move in the right direction the star line up and you become unstoppable. For me, and a lot of other people, the problem comes with whole right direction thing. How do you find what you are meant to do?
With the Pike Plaza Fish Market-the author of When Fish Fly had the opportunity to buy the fish market thrust upon him. He could have said-No, I don’t want to own this place. Instead he turned it into a tourist attraction and a gold mine. As with all self-help books, the real message is:Hey, I did it, so can you. It’s a good read, even if it doesn’t make you world famous. And if it does make you rich and famous-be sure to fly out to Seattle and have the fishmongers toss a fish over your head.
