The unit has gone through several managers in the last two years and reports to a senior manager who is a well-known bully. Her confidence has been drained out of her. Mary-Jane herself is a single mother with two children – her husband died unexpected from a blood clot in the brain – and she is not financially secure and she is worried about her future and that of her children. Staff in this backroom unit are bored, demotivated and unhelpful to the internal clients that they serve. Prior to her arrival has been known as a “toxic energy dump”. Meaning: However, neither Fish! nor Cheese questions whether the organizations involved are doing the right thing – both are concerned whether lower level managers and employees are doing it right.įish! concerns the story of mid-level manager, Mary-Jane, at First Guarantee Financial and her efforts to introduce to introduce a playfully productive atmosphere in the operations group, to which she has just been promoted.

Fish! thus offers the possibility of a somewhat more uplifting moral message than Cheese. Message: Unlike Cheese, which is essentially about passively accepting whatever change Fate hands out to you, Fish! tackles one of the challenges of leadership – how to transform a poorly performing unit of a large corporation and make the workplace more playfully productive. Reality: Like Cheese, Fish! is a fictional story, but here it is based on an actual fish market – the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle,Washington. Story: But unlike Cheese, Fish! is a genuine story, in terms of having somewhat believable characters, with a protagonist who has a past as well as a present, a fairly realistic setting in a financial company. Like Cheese, Fish! remains a best-seller, even though it is now four years since it was published. Rank: Fish! is currently #4 on BusinessWeek's 'Long-Running Best-Sellers'. Size: Fish! is similar in physical size to Cheese! Again, we are dealing with a very slender book of a mere 107 pages printed in a large font – a volume of scarcely more than 10,000 words. Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen (Hyperion Press, 2000): (This isn't the only area of the book market where quantity and quality are at odds.)īut if there is a runner-up to Cheese in terms of sales, it would surely be Fish! a book by Stephen C.

Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen (Hyperion Press, 2000):įish! isn’t Who Moved My Cheese? which dwarfs all competition in sales of business fiction books, though not in terms of quality. Storytelling In The News: #163 Book review of Fish! A book by Stephen C.

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