Chapter Review "Play" by Daniel Pink

PLAY
CHAPTER REVIEW
By Karen Wrenn
According to Pink, Play is essential because it activates the right side of the brain. Since the right side is unlimited a person can be who they want to be.

Movement of Laughter Clubs which spring up out of India and spread to other parts of world through Mandan Kataria, a physician in Mumbai, India. His plan is to change the world by making it laugh.

1. Today there are over 2,500 laughter clubs throughout the world.
2. Fastest growing venue for the laughter clubs is the workplace.
3. Pink reflects in contrast to the movement, the Ford Company of the 1930’s and 1940’s considered laughing, humming whistling or smiling a disciplinary offense and was evidence of insubordination. The overall philosophy of Henry Ford was when we are at work, we ought to work and when we are at play, we out to play.
   
   Professor of education at University of Pennsylvania states, “The opposite of play isn’t work, its depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.” In the Conceptual Age however some corporations included play as a corporate strategy. Southwest Airlines mission statement says, “ People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it.”

According to the Wall Street Journal more than 50 European companies including Nokia, Daimler-Crysler, and Alcatel have brought in consultants in “Serious Play” a technique that uses Lego building blocks to train corporate executives. British airways have hired its own “corporate jester” to give the airline a greater sense of fun.



According to Pink: Play is becoming more important part of work business, and personal well-being. 3 main ways : games, humor, and joyfulness.

Games especially through the use of computer and video games in teaching a whole-minded lessons to produce a whole-minded worker.

1. In an effort to recruit military, Wardynski, a West Point professor presented a plan to the pentagon and formulated a game that would include Army life, be engaging, and challenging to play. Released it on GOARMY.com in 2002 and today is distributed to recruiting offices and now has more than 2 million registered users. Players learn teamwork and responsibility. They earn points for protecting fellow soldiers, rescuing prisoners, stopping weapon sales to terrorist and so on. The Army sold the game and earned about 600 million in the first year.

2. Playing Games resulted in over half of Americans over age 6 play computer and video games. In U.S., the video games business is larger than that of motion picture.

3. James Paul Gee, a professor at University of Wisconsin author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy argues that games are the ultimate learning machine. He states that “The fact that kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful for of learning than when they’re in the classroom. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolate facts. It’s about connection and manipulating them”.

4. One study found that Physicians who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play.

5. Many arts schools now offer degrees in game art and design. DIGIPEN Institute of Technology awards four year degree in video gaming is “fast becoming the Harvard among joystick-clenching students fresh out of high school” according to USA Today.


Humor is proving to assist in managerial effectiveness, emotional intelligence and thinking style in the right hemisphere.


1. Two neuroscientists, Prabita Shammi and Donald Stuss conducted an experiment in which they administer this pick-the punch-line test to a series of subjects. They wanted to test the role of the two hemispheres of the bran play in processing humor. Neuroscientists concluded that the right hemisphere plays an essential role in understanding and appreciating humor.

2. They concluded when the right hemisphere is impaired, the brains ability to process even semi sophisticated comedy suffers.


3. Humor embodies many of the right hemisphere’s most powerful attributes that make this aspect of Play increasingly valuable to the world of work:

a. the ability to place situations in context
b. to glimpse the big picture
c. to combine differing perspectives into new alignments


FABIO Sala wrote in the Harvard Business Review that humor used skillfully, greases the management wheels. It reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.

Negative humor, for instance, can be destructive. It can divide and organization and make it difficult to bridge the gap.

Instead of disciplining the joke crackers, organizations should be seeking them out and treating a sense of humor as an asset.


Joyfulness is demonstrating its power to make us more productive and fulfilled.

Pink expounds on how Kataria got started with the Laugh clubs.

Kataria says there is a difference between joyfulness and happiness. Happiness is conditional and joyfulness is unconditional. When you depend on someone to make you laugh, it’s conditional and the laughter does not belong to you. But in laughter clubs, the source of laughter is not outside of the body, it is within us.

Kataria point out that children really do not grasp humor but they laughter.

Laughter can decrease stress hormones and boost the immune system.

Book Laughter: Scientific Investigation: Laughter has aerobic benefits. It activates the cardiovascular system, increases the heart rate, and pumps more blood to internal organs.

William Fry laugh researcher found that it took 10 minutes of rowing on his home exercise machine to reach the heart rate produced by one minute of laughter.


Kataria believes that laughter can play a major role in reducing stress in the workplace; laughing people are more creative people; more productive; people who laugh together can work together; laughter can lead to joyfulness which in turn can lead to greater creativity, productivity, and collaboration

A few websites to explore play:

www.tinyurl.com/6t7ff
http://www.inventionatplay.org/

for the gamers:
http://www.newsgaming.com/
http://www.womengamers.com/
http://www.games.yahoo.com/
http://www.childrensmuseums.org/
http://www.blueavawireless.com/