JOY, INC.

The CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations—an award-winning, unconventional software company—shares his discovery of the profitable, sustainable business value of joy.

In 2011, 168 tour groups (1,300 visitors) came to visit software company Menlo Innovations in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. They didn’t come to see how new software was built. Instead, they came to witness a radically different approach to culture. Menlo has garnered praise from Inc. magazine (“The Top Small Company Workplace”), the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and bestselling authors Patrick Lencioni and Kerry Patterson, who see in Menlo a new way of building strong businesses without bureaucracy.

All of these visitors came to see something that no one believed could exist at work: joy. Menlo, led by CEO and cofounder Richard Sheridan, was a grand experiment in removing the fear and miscommunication found in his industry and many others.

With joy as the goal, both for his employees and their customers, Sheridan evaluated everything about how software is designed and developed—and turned the conventional wisdom on its head.

For instance: • Build a physical space that suits your culture. At Menlo, this means pairs working side by side at one workspace so that no one person is a “tower of knowledge.” • Make mistakes faster. If any member of the team sees a possibility for improvement, Menlo encourages them to comment on process flaws and run an experiment for a proposed design. • Eliminate meetings. At Menlo, a daily, 15-minute stand-up gathering of all team members sets the tone for the day, as pairs quickly describe the progress of their given projects. • Remove ambiguity from decision-making. At Menlo, all tasks and project requirements for every member of the team are written out on index cards that define the task at hand and the desired output. Anyone can pick up a card and understand the project’s direction. JOY, INC. is a playbook for the new-world manager, who understands that joy at work is essential for a successful business. Richard Sheridan is CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations, a small software firm of 40 people with revenues around $6,000,000. He and his team frequently speak at conference such as SHRM, ASQ, Agile, and Inc. Leadership, and to corporations including Mercedes Benz, Nike, 3M, GE, and others.