Praise for The ROI of LOL

Steve Cody understands the profound power of humor in building human connections in business. Steve’s a funny guy, and he applies that talent in a purpose-driven way: to forge meaningful relationships with employees, customers, industry leaders, and others who are essential to his company’s business. His humor creates stronger bonds; he never chases a laugh at others’ expense. I guarantee a strong ROI if you invest the time to read this book and see the magic come to life.

—PAT FORD, professional-in-residence, University of Florida

The geniuses of comedy! Steve Cody and Clayton Fletcher share hilarious stories and evidence-based insights of turnkey techniques—based on stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy—to demonstrate the power of and desperate need for fusing humor into the workplace to strengthen leaders and organizational outcomes. I loved the book. However, it is missing the ‘Top 10 List of Funny Leaders,’ of which I would expect top billing.

—TINA McCORKINDALE, chairman and CEO, the Institute for Public Relations

Steve Cody has done a great service for workplaces by reminding us of the value that humor brings to work. It defuses tensions, enhances teamwork, and often makes new perspectives possible to hear. He’ll inspire many to see work and levity in a new light.

—OSCAR SURIS, SVP, chief communications officer, Duke Energy Corporation

Indulge in the laughter, embrace the lessons, and embark on a profound leadership transformation. Steve Cody and Clayton Fletcher have gifted us with a book that is timely, thought-provoking, and a catalyst for positive change.

—CHARLENE WHEELESS, award-winning author of You Are Enough

At the heart of good communication is wit and wisdom—and at its best a good laugh. In these contentious days, a little levity can go a long way toward creating a more caring and open workplace. Steve Cody and Clayton Fletcher remind us of that fact and show us how.

—MIKE FERNANDEZ, cohost of The Crux podcast and senior vice president of Enbridge

COPYRIGHT

© 2023 Steve Cody and Clayton Fletcher

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

Epub Edition OCTOBER 2023 978-1-40-024376-1

ISBN 978-1-40-024370-9 (TP)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943214

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To our personal and professional families and friends, without whose support we’d still be editing the first paragraph.

To all the organizations who have trusted us to infuse comedy into their cultures and help them overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles with a smile.

And to anyone who’s ever laughed through the madness.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Linda Rutherford

Part One—The 411 of LOL: The Case for Comedy at Work

1. Introduction: The Need for Laughter in an Uncertain World

2. Peppercomm’s History with Comedy Training

3. The Power of Laughter

4. Five Characteristics of a Healthy Workplace Culture

Part Two—The FYI of LOL: Three Different Types of Comedy

5. Stand-Up Comedy

6. Improvisational Comedy

7. Sketch Comedy

Part Three—The DIY of LOL: How to Use Comedy Skills in Business

8. Stand-Up Comedy in Business

9. Improvisational Comedy in Business

10. Sketch Comedy in Business

11. Bottom-Line Results

12. Self-Assessment Diagnostics

Afterword: Breathing New Life into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training

Resources

Notes

Index

About the Authors

Foreword

Note to reader: Linda Rutherford and Steve Cody have known and worked together for many years. They serve on two of the PR profession’s most influential industry boards, and Linda has always been ready to provide insights, case studies, and observations on any and all Peppercomm-branded research over the years. Her company is of, by, and for love and laughter. In fact, even their stock symbol on the NYSE is LUV.

Southwest Airlines’ beloved founder and chairman emeritus, Herb Kelleher, used to say that the secret sauce of our workplace culture is that our people (whom we call Employees, and we capitalize the E because they are important) take their work seriously but don’t take themselves too seriously—that no one needed to shed their personality when they came to work. He took great pride in espousing the terms love (or LUV if you’re familiar with the Southwest Airlines stock symbol) and laughter as key cornerstones of our culture. He used to say that Wall Street thought using those terms was heresy in corporate America—and he spent his career proving them wrong. If you look back at our airline’s record of no layoffs, strong balance sheets, investment-grade credit rating, iconic corporate culture, employer brand, stock price, and so on, you will see there is a strong correlation between our commitment to love and laughter and our operational and financial excellence as a New York Stock Exchange–traded company.

It’s the power of those intangibles that Steve Cody and Clayton Fletcher explore in this work: the spaces where business and humor intersect and when and why it’s important. Steve’s study of comedians and the comedic process nets an important insight—that comedians are, at their heart, highly effective communicators. I always marveled at Herb’s ability to connect with any human being, from a US congressperson to a university janitor, and make them feel important. He had a gift to immediately engage through his wit, humor, and gift of storytelling.

I remember some years back escorting Herb to a speaking engagement at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. It was going to be a less-than-friendly audience with no off-the-record option. Armed with the knowledge that the attendees might be adversarial, Herb began in true Herb fashion. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having me here today. I’m not sure what qualifies me to stand up here today and be your featured speaker other than the National Press Club found my skill at projectile vomiting and ability to keep marinara sauce off my tie compelling. To say he disarmed the audience was an understatement. He had them eating out of his hand, with one softball question after another. The resulting headlines were a PR dream. Humor had both engaged and disarmed them. What CEO starts off a speech using projectile vomiting in a sentence?

Through his example, he taught that skill to our Southwest people, who have carried that mission on for more than fifty years. If you’ve ever been on a LUV aircraft, you might have heard the public safety announcements rapped, sung, or injected with a joke or two. Early in my career at Southwest, I remember a complaint that was filed with our governmental regulatory agency that it was unprofessional and risky to mix humor with our preflight public safety announcements. As a result, the agency did a study—and guess what they determined? That passengers actually paid more attention to the safety announcements because they were entertaining, compelling, and funny. One of my favorites? Did anyone drop a wallet? Everyone look to see if this is your wallet I’m holding up.….….…. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now that I have your attention, I’d like to point out the safety features of this Boeing 737. Another: There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only six ways off this aircraft in the event of an emergency. Our flight attendants follow the rules and regulations and then use their own humor and creativity to get the job done.

Steve and Clayton will take you on their own journey, and that of their agency, to point out that there is power in humor—in business, in talent attraction, in managing a dynamic workforce, in change management, and in brand differentiation. If you’re trying to create a workplace that stands out from the competition, manages through uncertainty, and is just plain fun—this is a great read. Dig in, learn lots, and laugh often!

Linda Rutherford

Chief administration officer

and chief communications officer,

Southwest Airlines Company

Part One

The 411 of LOL

The Case for Comedy at Work

1

Introduction

The Need for Laughter in an Uncertain World

If you opened this book hoping to find a quick fix or an exact percentage increase in revenues that you will get from laughing at work, we suggest instead you pick up a copy of Harry Potter Goes to Washington. We actually don’t know whether Harry’s ever been to Washington, or if he’s even ever left London. We’ve never even met him. What we do know is that the true effect of laughter in the workplace is achieved only in the long term. The ROI of LOL is the culmination of learning about what comedians know that businesspeople should know. It’s achieved over time, much like a wizard’s education at Hogwarts (see Dumbledore for more info).

Realizing the results of a comedy-infused culture is akin to building a World Series winner from a perpetual last-place laughing stock (note: the ’69 Mets are a textbook example). It takes the intentional laying of a lot of groundwork and the commitment of a dedicated C-suite that really wants to become an employer of choice.

We’re not giving you a shot of progesterone to increase your home run count but rather a nutrition plan that you can implement to enrich your corporate body and achieve better results in the long run. Of course, there are short-term benefits to laughing today, and we’ll explore them herein, but the real return on investment here is the World Series ring that comes from infusing your workplace with a steady diet of ha ha ha. As a bonus, if you fall on hard times, you can always hock the ring for a pretty penny on eBay.

We all know how the world changed forever in March 2020. The global pandemic arrived and with it that most cringeworthy of phrases, the new normal. Virtually overnight, the ways in which organizations viewed their responsibilities to the planet changed. So did the relationship between the company and the employee. And it’s never going back to the old normal. And even as Labor Department statistics ebb and flow, and the pendulum swings from a labor advantage to a management advantage, the facts about laughter don’t change. Employees care about much more than profits, and so do smart companies that want to retain them.

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko tells his minions, Greed is good. We see his point, but we think laughter is gooder. Regardless of how greedy the investment community is, the fact remains you’ll never achieve your top- and bottom-line financial goals without a focus first on your people. Culture trumps innovation, strategy, creativity, and everything else you might think it takes to become the next big disruptor in your industry. And Clayton in particular knows a thing or two about disruptors; he’s handled more hecklers than a traffic cop in Midtown Manhattan.

Steve sees himself as a medieval alchemist and has actually transformed hay into gold in his backyard. We’re convinced that the workplace, while often stressful and at times as unpleasant as a tour of a Trenton sewage plant, should be healthy, and that when it is, productivity skyrockets. It seems to us we need laughter now more than ever. Moshe Waldoks, author of The Big Book of Jewish Humor, is quoted as saying, A sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the unbearable.

The role of comedy in the business world is evolving as we speak. Not only are we spending more time in our home offices, we now have artificial intelligence threatening our jobs! By the way, this entire chapter was written by R2-D2. Nice job, R2. He’s a hard worker, but he’s useless before his second cup of espresso. Although the robots may eventually take over, one thing artificial intelligence can’t do is read a room. The robots may be able to respond to text, but they will never be able to deal with a stag party heckler in a comedy club or to sense whether or not the client is buying what you’re selling. Being in the room, in the moment, and feeling what’s happening is an advantage that only a human will ever have. A sense of humor, a sense of people, and a sense of the moment requires an actual heart, which the robots don’t have. No offense, R2; here’s another shot of espresso.

At our company, Peppercomm, we’ve been cultivating our comedy-based culture for more than fifteen years. During that time, we’ve transformed from a small, uptight, top-down organization to one in which the senior management team is always open to poking fun at themselves in the name of laughter. Our culture is based on the idea that a sense of humor is a secret weapon that bonds us in a way that no training program, magazine article, or prescription painkiller ever could.

Years ago, Steve pulled a prank on an employee we’ll call Sabrina. Upon her return to NYC from a nice beach vacation, we congratulated her on being transferred to our San Francisco office, a move that she knew nothing about. There were balloons, greeting cards, a banner reading Go West, Young Woman, and lots of emails thanking her for all of her excellent work here on the East Coast. She was simply gobsmacked at the outpouring of well-wishes and shocked that we would relocate her without even as much as a word of conversation about the move. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, and we instantly let her off the hook Ashton Kutcher–style. She laughed out loud at how thoroughly we’d committed to the bit and immediately began plotting her revenge.

Steve, a few weeks later, was on a vacation of his own (what else is new?), and Sabrina went to work, whipping up a wicked brew her namesake teenage witch would envy. With the emotional roller coaster she’d ridden still fresh in her mind, she conspired with a few coworkers to stuff five thousand plastic balls that one might find in a local Chuck E. Cheese into Steve’s office closet. When he returned to work, they waited for him to open that door, but as luck would have it, it was a warm day with no jacket required. The anticipation built and built, and it started to look like he’d never open that door and the payoff was not forthcoming. Never fear, though. Another employee, who was well known for always shivering at work in any temperature, asked the boss for a sweater to borrow. We all got our cameras ready as Steve proceeded to the closet to rescue this hypothermic colleague, and when he opened the door, it rained a deluge of plastic balls all over him that even Noah would have found intimidating. The