The Play Ethic, Pat Kane
Pat Kane in this book started with the very serious question, “If the “work ethic” made industrial workers duteous, time-keeping, diligent and self-disciplined, what would be the equivalent for information workers in an internet enabled informalised world”. His answer of course is the “play ethic”, which would just as effectively “shape informational workers to make them resourceful, able to shift tasks and learn new skills, willing to deploy their imaginations to solve problems in their organisations.”
Play is fun that producers a sense of lively optimism, it is something that helps us through tough challenges. Developing a sense of fun and play is core to drive innovation. Play and fun create optimism and energy, they allow us to experiment and explore new rules. So we should ask are these not of real value to modern organisations, as they grapple with information overload, globalisation and seismic change?
Kane describes the Internet as an enormous playground, and shows how new technology is creating a whole new ecosystem of new players. Kane’s background is in journalism and also in music (band member for 80’s band Hue and Cry) and so perhaps he is well placed to observe and make sense of trends in new and social media and how the internet as an enormous playground is changing news, music and business.
What I like is the exploration of how our organisations can bring more fun and play into what they do. Play brings benefits to delivering customer value, innovation and developing employee creativity, motivation and well-being. On finishing reading the book we should all ask why not? Why not experiment with making you work more fun, as it needs no special ability to come up with reasons to say it will not work, but it takes someone really special to show how it could work.
Pat has researched his topic thoroughly. However, and perhaps ironically, Pat Kane seems to take the subject of play far too seriously at times and dresses it up too much in social theory or hides it behind academic prose. That is not to say that this book does no makes an important, timely and worthwhile contribution because it does.
I would like to thank Colin Burns of Pentacle (www.pentaclethevbs.com) for recommending this book to me. Now in my opinion Pentacle are a company who get the balance of what I call serious play just right, and as such are right up there in winning the jeux sans frontieres of creativity, insight and innovation.
Please see more about fun, play and the pursuit of happiness in our Goal Setting Course. The course covers how fun and play is used by companies to achieve extraordinary positive results and also how building more of these ingredients into our lives can help us find and achieve inspirational goals.
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