Foreword The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it s not fun, you re wasting your life. Tom Peters When it came to leveraging the humor advantage to help brand a business, I knew there was one person I needed to talk to: Mr. Brand. (I mean, seriously, who else could it possibly have been?) Although the company Nicholas Brand so successfully branded uses the cheeky tagline, No peeking, he was kind enough to offer me a glance under his kilt, so to speak. The company that Brand founded, you see, was the highly successful window-washing business, Men In Kilts. Ready to launch his solo endeavor in 2002, Brand knew he needed a name and a hook something, anything, that would help him stand out from his competitors. After seeing a report on the evening news of a window washer dressed like Spiderman (we ll return to window-washing superheroes later), one of Brand s friends suggested he wear a kilt at work, to pay homage to his Scottish ancestry. A self-described introvert, the scheme sounded a bit disconcerting to Brand, to say the least. Sure, he was looking for exposure, but that s not what he had in mind! But Brand agreed that wearing a kilt would definitely make him memorable. So after his wife hand-sewed him one (which now hangs in his office), all he needed was a name to accompany the unconventional look. After tossing about various Scottish-sounding generic names, he landed upon Men In Kilts, drawing inspiration from the blockbuster movie, Men In Black. vii
Brand s brand was well received from the start, but it exploded to dizzying heights once he traded his rusting Honda Accord for a van featuring the image of a kilt-wearing window washer. The playful branding caught the eye of the media, and before long Men In Kilts was being featured in magazines, newspapers and on television. Men In Kilts is now a thriving and rapidly growing franchise business, with locations throughout North America. It s easy to dismiss Men In Kilts as just another story about gimmicky marketing. Yes, the humorous brand helped them attract untold amounts of free publicity. But as Brand points out, The word gimmick can have a bad connotation. But it shouldn t! It s really about standing out from the crowd. It s about what makes you different than your competitors. And it really would be a mere gimmick if there was nothing under the kilt. Fortunately for its customers, Men In Kilts has a stated policy that their employees must wear something under there at all times. Metaphorically speaking, Brand also understands that the best branding in the world won t sustain success unless there s a highly professional, service-oriented business behind it all. Yes, we take ourselves lightly and have a lot of fun, but we take our business and our customers needs seriously. We want to earn the reputation as being the #1 window-washing company in the world, but we want to make it fun for us and our customers at the same time. It s not a choice between fun and professionalism for us, it s about choosing to have both. The fun brand has helped them attract more than free media attention. They ve also attracted employees who don t take themselves too seriously (they ll be climbing ladders wearing a kilt, after all). In fact, Brand has found that the kilts act as a built-in hiring filter, screening out potential fun-suckers. Even better: The brand attracts customers who are easy to work with and want to have a bit of fun as well. Men In Kilts is just one of hundreds of success stories that demonstrate that work doesn t always resemble a Dilbert cartoon and yes, it really is possible to laugh all the way to the bank. But before we dive into more of those outrageous success stories from around the globe, let s get real for a moment: Work can, at times, be a real drag. There, I said it. Feel better? viii / THE HUMOR ADVANTAGE
Yes, the humor advantage is all about the power of having more fun at work and purposefully using humor to help you, your team and your business succeed maybe even to laugh all the way to the bank. But, let s not sugarcoat things. There s a reason it s called work and a reason you get a paycheck it s not always a barrel of laughs. Work can be difficult, insanely challenging, or at times maddeningly boring. Work can be mentally and physically draining. Work can be full of petty politics, pain-in-the-posterior coworkers and meetings about meetings where, as Star Trek s Captain Kirk once wryly observed, Minutes are taken and hours wasted. And don t forget what got you there in the first place: Yes, that confounding daily ritual known as The Commute. Have you seen the way some people drive? As George Carlin once observed, everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and everyone who drives faster is a maniac. Chances are you ve pumped out more stress hormones during your morning commute than a three-legged gazelle at a watering hole and you haven t even started work yet! Then there are The Customers. You know the ones... The high-maintenance ones. The ones who breathe heavily and smell like cheese. The ones who won t leave you alone... and the ones you don t want to be alone with. Fortunately, back at the office you can escape The Customers and immerse yourself in fun stuff like mergers and downsizings and rightsizings and change initiatives that never change and reorganizations that never seem to end up with anything remotely organized so why do they keep calling it a reorganization when it didn t seem to be very organized to begin with? And don t get me started on PowerPoint presentations that seem to be neither powerful nor make a point. Finally (you may have noticed), work is just a wee bit of a time sucker. For many of us, 70% of our waking hours are spent at work. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there s a very good chance you ll spend more time with your boss and co-workers than with your own family. Add this all together and it s not particularly surprising to learn Foreword / ix
that, according to a 2013 Gallup poll, only 13% of employees worldwide are fully engaged in their jobs. ¹ Ouch. So work is a soul-sucking, fun-sucking, Dilbert-like experience. Scratch that. Work is a soul-sucking, fun-sucking, Dilbert-like experience for some people. Fortunately, as you ll soon discover, there are islands of hope out there, islands you don t want to be voted off of even on days when you feel like you re in survivor mode. These workplaces are thriving, even laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Because they ve tapped into the humor advantage. The great news is that anyone, whether at the individual, team, or corporate level, can learn how to tap into their own version of the humor advantage. Why The Humor Advantage? This book had its genesis more than eighteen years ago, after I voted myself off my own island, a dysfunctional workplace I originally thought was Utopia. Okay, so maybe not quite Utopia. But for several years, I truly loved my job. I looked forward to coming to work every Monday morning. I worked with a great group of people. We worked hard and we had fun doing it. As a manager, I practiced a healthy dose of humor as often as I could. My sense of humor was a life raft whenever the seas of organizational life got too choppy. And because of our collective sense of humor, we communicated better, performed better as a team and were more creative. Then, as I hear from so many of my clients, the organization lost its, well, mojo. People quit having fun. Employees lost their sense of humor. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the absence of humor in the workplace was the first sign that the organization was headed for troubled waters. It was time to vote myself off the island. So now, as a recovering manager who witnessed first-hand the highs and lows of the professional world, I ve dedicated my career to seeking out, writing about and speaking about leaders, workplaces and businesses that dare to be different, that dare to have fun and put people and humanity first. The Humor Advantage is about the intersection between play x / THE HUMOR ADVANTAGE
and purpose, seriousness and silliness, business and fun. It s about how a healthy sense of humor, passion and fun can help your organization drive outrageous results. Is The Humor Advantage a magic elixir that will instantly transform your workplace? Of course not. This is not a travel guide to Utopia Inc., where employees clasp hands and belt out We Are The World every Monday morning while puppies and unicorns frolic under rainbows. But it s my sincere hope that this book will challenge your conventional thinking about work and inspire you to change some (or perhaps lots) of the ways you do things in your business. If the stories, tips, ideas and inspiration in The Humor Advantage don t help you laugh all the way to the bank, then ask yourself one simple question: All things being equal, would you rather have the same level of success you currently have but with a little more fun thrown into the mix, or the same level of success but with less fun? After all, no one on their death bed ever said, Boy... if I had to do it all over again I d have less fun, take myself more seriously and work in a more stressful workplace. It seems like an obvious choice to me. As Mike Argus, CEO of Argus Industries, told me, Work is hard enough as it is without making it any harder! That being said, I hope you have as much fun reading The Humor Advantage as I had writing it. Foreword / xi