Richard Sheridan On Building A Life And Company Filled With Joy

[01:35] Paul: Today I'm talking with Rich Sheridan, who co-founded Menlo Innovations in 2001 with a goal of ending human suffering in the workplace. He's also the author of two books, Joy Inc., and Chief Joy Officer. Welcome to the podcast, Rich.

[01:59] Rich Sheridan: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me, Paul.

[02:02] Paul: So you talk a lot about joy, and let's dive into that. You wrote a bit about how you only realized coding and creating software was in fact something you were experiencing as joy in your childhood. But maybe tell us about learning how to code in the '70s and then your reflections on what joy was and when you realized that later.

[02:26] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, a lot of people have wondered because I've written these books, where does joy come from for me? And I had to self-reflect on that. And I thought back to this little kid experience I had when I was 13 years old and I typed a 2-line program into a computer for the first time back in 1971. A lot of young people are surprised that there were even computers you could access when when you were kids back then, but in fact, our high school offered programming classes when I was a freshman for the first time back then. And I typed in this 2-line program and it came back on a roll of paper and clacked out "Hi Rich," because that's what I told it to do. And I was hooked.

And I found a canvas that I could be an artist on. I wasn't very good at art at that point in my life, and so All of a sudden I had something I could manipulate that I could make do what I wanted to do. And very quickly, I think I wouldn't have used this term back then, but in reflecting back on it, there was no question that creativity, the imagination, the invention that is software created joy for me. So I kind of thought that's where the joy came from, but as I dug deeper, I realized it was much more meaningful and purposeful, this word joy for me. Actually, I had to go back to an earlier version of my life when I was about 10 years old and my mom and dad bought a bookshelf, kind of like you'd get from IKEA, came in a box, it was in the garage.

Mom and dad went out to dinner one night and I was on my own and my 10-year-old inner engineer kicked in and I went out in the garage and I built that bookshelf. And this thing was about 8 feet wide, about 6 feet tall. Probably had 100 pieces and 200 little nuts, bolts, and screws. And I was so proud of myself for having been able to put this together. And I knew mom and dad would be proud of me and they'd be pleased, but then it dawned on me, I built it in the garage and mom wanted it in the living room. And so I inched that thing out of the front of the garage, down the sidewalk, through the family room, the kitchen, pushed it right into the living room where mom wanted it.

My 10-year-old memory said I didn't harm it a bit. And I set up dad's books and mom's knickknacks. I wired up the stereo and I had mom's favorite album playing when she walked in the door and she cried. And for me, I realized in that moment, that's actually where the joy comes from for me. When we use the work of our hearts, our hands, and our minds to serve others, to delight other people, to, you know, when you're doing programming, there's a cleverness to it that people who don't know about programming are kind of, they kind of marvel. They're like, oh, I can't believe you know how to do that.

But it isn't until they look at what you've done and say, I love this thing, you made my life better because of it. That's when we get to joy in software. And that's what I remember from that story with my mom, that there was just pure joy for her that I had done something that was so pleasing to her. And it was, you know, and obviously someone I loved dearly. And, you know, and that kind of for me encapsulates this idea of why we do what we do at work. No matter what we do, whether it's software or hardware or some kind of product or service, but it isn't until we serve others and delight them that we actually get to that inner joy of why we would do something, anything hard work.

[06:00] Paul: Yeah, it's that connection of creating and then also having an impact to others. Not to mention that you're being the world's best son in that story.

[06:10] Rich Sheridan: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Heroic, really. And I'm sure my dad was relieved that I put it together and it wasn't his job to do it.

[06:20] Paul: So you talk a lot about that experience and then talk about going to school, doing well, starting to see that you can actually be a programmer, right? Industries are emerging. It's actually a great time for you to be going to school. You start your career, you're probably experiencing some of those similar things in the working world of being able to do things and see how they impact the world. Maybe talk to me about how you were thinking about everything as you started your career.

[06:52] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, I won an international programming contest when I was just in 10th grade for what would now be termed fantasy baseball. But I just wanted to play baseball in the cold winter Michigan months. And so I typed all the baseball players into the computer so my friends and I could play lineups, our favorite teams. Mine was the Detroit Tigers, of course. And that programming contest win actually landed me my first job as a programmer. And I couldn't believe I could, you know, here I was just, I wasn't even old enough to drive yet.

And I'm programming for money. And I thought, oh, this is cool. And I stayed working for a while, right through high school graduation, but eventually came up to Michigan, the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, and got 2 degrees in computer science, computer engineering, launched a career in 1982, which quite frankly, that was one of the biggest inflection points in the history of computing because the PC was just coming out. So suddenly we were going from just having a handful of computers around the world to everyone's going to have one on their desktop. And so here I am, you know, kind of 11 years into programming, getting a degree, a couple of degrees from a pretty prestigious university. I love the work.

I'm pretty good at it. The world needs what I'm capable of doing. And I thought, man, this career will carry me for a lifetime.

[08:21] Paul: We'll definitely dig into how long that actually carried you. So talk to me about where you go from there, right? You keep getting promoted, you do well at your company. Eventually you face this moment when you're trying to get promoted away and you're thinking of walking away.

[08:42] Rich Sheridan: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I had from 1982 college graduation to 1997 when I got promoted to vice president of R&D at Intel, interface systems, had what the world would describe as this beautifully perfect career rise. You know, every year promotions, more stock options, greater authority, bigger title, bigger team size, bigger office, everything the world measures as success I had. My wife was happy with me. I was making good money. We could afford nice vacations.

We were reworking a house that we bought in 1983. My parents were very proud of me. So everything the world measures as success, I had. But it wasn't too long, certainly by my mid-30s, I was getting a little bit despondent and disillusioned. I didn't want to be in the industry anymore. And a lot of people wonder like, how can you have all the worldly success and be unhappy?

And it was actually pretty easy for me because what I saw was I wasn't producing that kind of joy that I had experienced in my early career and with my mom and that bookshelf. The systems we were creating weren't working right. They weren't serving the people we were building them for. The marketing team said, "Hey, you didn't build the right product." The customers were like, "We don't know how to use this." The support team was like, "Why are all these bugs coming back?" And I started to think, "Man, maybe I'm not cut out for this industry. Maybe I'm not good enough at this. Maybe this is for people much smarter than me." But as I looked around the industry, I thought, oh my gosh, there's no escape here.

Everybody's suffering the same kind of chaos I was. And I was putting in a lot of long days, long nights, sometimes all-nighters, sometimes through the weekend. And I'd come home from those days and my wife would look at me and I usually missed another family dinner. And she'd say, honey, you look really tired. Did you get a lot done today? And suddenly I'd be like, "Oh no, no, I got nothing done today.

I was running from one fire to the next, one phone call to the next, one meeting to the next, but got absolutely nothing done." And I will tell you that by my mid-30s, I kind of, I don't know, I just probably, we all do this from time to time, you kind of look ahead and you say, "Can I do this another 30 years?" And I wasn't sure I could. And I got scared. I didn't know what else I could do to support the family I loved and the life I wanted to enjoy. And now I feel trapped. Now I feel like I'm in a— I'm like a caged animal kind of thing. And I was really thinking hard, like, how do I escape this world?

And, you know, and that in some ways is the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say.

[11:41] Paul: Yeah, I, I think that feeling, a lot of people experience it, right? Especially after achieving some sort of success. They're almost trapped by that success because it's who they are. It's their friends. It's a lot of times a high income, which is paying for a lot of the things in their life, right? Did you have other people to talk to about these feelings?

Because I get the sense that there just wasn't as much conversation around maybe you should should be happy at work then.

[12:10] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, the, you know, a lot of the conversations were often lunchtime conversations with either fellow programmers in my earlier days or people who worked for me as I moved up the management ladder. And, um, yeah, they were, they were hard conversations because everybody was seeing the same thing. Uh, they were seeing all these quality issues. There were people on my team who were desperately trying to help me figure out how could we do a better job at this. But typically what would the result would be was moving from chaos to bureaucracy, going to lots of meetings and having forms to fill out. And we thought, you know, approval signatures, we were, you know, because everybody was trying to fight for the same thing.

They were trying in the software industry, it was pretty easy to to boil it down to one word, how do we control scope? Because most software projects are actually killed by one simple phrase, just one more thing. Just one more thing. Just one more thing. Just one more thing. Just one more thing.

And so, you know, most of us tried to build these bureaucratic systems to prevent those just one more things to come in. And that produced a whole different kind of frustration. And so that wasn't working. And so, yeah, there were a lot of people I was talking to, mainly about improving process. And, and what I recognize now is that what we were really wanting to do was improve culture, where process and practices and related to people, related to work and all that sort of thing are going to make a big difference. But we have to think about it in terms of culture and purpose.

[13:57] Paul: Yeah, so take me into that conversation when you tell your boss you're not going to take the promotion and you are carving a different path. I'd love to also know just like what were your emotions during that stretch? That must have been a very kind of uncertain period. I mean, you may have had some financial security, but I think just being in that uncertainty of kind of not really knowing what the future looks like, it must have been pretty intense for you.

[14:28] Rich Sheridan: It was. The first time I noticed it was probably I was maybe 36, 37 years old. And most of us take this really efficient route to work, right? As we figure out our drive to work, you find what's the best path? How do I hit the lights the easiest? Which expressway do I get on and which exit do I get off on?

And eventually settle on this like perfectly efficient route to get to work every day. And I certainly had that. I worked about 20 minutes west of where I lived. And, but one day I woke up and I decided to take a different route to work. And I said, I'm going to take some country roads. There's a back way to get to work.

And that became a new pattern for me. And There was some day in the weeks that followed where I kind of woke up while I was driving and I realized I'd driven about 5 miles past where I worked. And I was out on this beautiful dirt road called Liberty here in Ann Arbor. And down that road, there were all these little sheep farms, steepled churches and everything. And it kind of hit me like, oh, you don't want to go to work, do you? What are you doing way out here?

And I started showing up later and later to work every day. And I started leaving earlier and earlier. And often in the middle of busy, what should have been busy productive days, I was turning my monitor away from the doorway of my office and I was playing Freestyle.

[16:07] Paul: Yeah, it's a great game.

[16:09] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, it's a great game. Yeah, I still play it, but not during work hours. And, you know, and I realized that, wait a minute, you're one of the leaders. You're supposed to be this high-energy guy that's leading other people, and this is where you're at? And so that's when a lot of this started to settle in on me, kind of a dread, actually. And so, but weirdly, I kept getting all these promotions.

And finally, we got a new CEO who was You know, very, he was very passionate about turning around the company that was troubled at this point. And somehow he rooted around in the organization and he found me. And I was a couple of levels down from him at that point. And he pulled me into his office and he started having discussions with me about growing me. And I was, quite frankly, I was disinterested. I was probably, still hurting from all the other pain that I've experienced up to that point.

But he, in his gentle way, his name is Bob Nero, still a great personal friend of mine. And Bob kept coaching me, kept sort of nudging me, but eventually got to the point where he wanted to promote me to vice president of R&D. This was his plan. And when he sat down and told me, I looked at him and thought about it for a couple of seconds. I said, not interested. And boy, oh boy, he was upset with me.

He remembers it differently than I do, but I told him he threw me out of his office yelling at me as I walked away, which is very unusual for Bob. So that's probably why he doesn't remember it that way. And my guess is he's such a gentle guy anyways that he just raised his voice a little bit and it felt like yelling.

[17:55] Paul: Right.

[17:56] Rich Sheridan: And, And so, I turned down this promotion because I looked ahead again and I said, "You know what? My kids are still young." They were like 12, 10, and 8 at the time. And I thought, "I don't want to wake up a decade from now and realize I missed the best part of being a dad." You wake up and they're all graduating from high school, going off to college. I'm like, "Where did all those years go?" And so, I didn't want to sign up for the uncapped personal commitment of being an executive at a troubled public company. And then I went home that night and I reflected on all of the dreams I had as a kid, all the things I thought were possible in the industry. And I realized that this was an opportunity to change everything.

And I did. And I went back in the next morning and I told Bob, I said, I've changed my mind. I'll take the job on one condition, which was an odd thing to say to a guy that just yelled at you the night before for having turned him down. And he said, "What's the condition?" I said, "I'm going to build the best damn soccer team Ann Arbor has ever seen, and I need your help." And we had a long talk that morning about what my dreams were, and he was right on board with me, and he supported me every step of the way. And every time I slowed down in the future, he would put his gentle hand on my shoulder and whisper in my ear, "Keep going, Rich. You're doing the right thing." So I had great support from Bob.

Literally over the next 2 years, 2 to 4 years actually as it turned out, I changed everything about the way software is designed and developed. You're looking over my shoulder here and you're seeing in the video that you can see, you know, Menlo. This is what we created at Interface Systems between 1999 and 2001. And so I had, I took the risk and it wasn't that big a risk for me because I realized in that moment with all the fears I had, all the dread I had, that the risk of staying the same for me was far greater than the risk of change. And so I wasn't running towards risk. I was running towards safety.

I was running away from risk. I was running away from the thing where I thought, I'm not going to be able to support my family for the rest of my career. But at this point, I'm about 42 years old and I'm like, I can't do it another 20, 30 years. I just can't. And so, you know, I'm happy to say since 2001 or 1999, actually, when I began this whole process back at Interface Systems, the joy is back for me. My kids are now convinced I will never retire.

They're certain they will They will drag a smiling 97-year-old guy out of Menlo someday. And it's been a delightful journey since then.

[20:51] Paul: It seems like a pretty dramatic shift, at least deciding that overnight, but I'm sure a lot of kind of dreaming and a lot of frustration led to that point. Was there a moment before that when you kind of decided, all right, I want to try and be a different person from here on out, or was it really that inflection point of the job offer?

[21:13] Rich Sheridan: You know, it was certainly, that was a critical moment. But up to that time, because of all those conversations I was having with my, either my peers or the people who had worked for me about how could we do this better, I found myself drawn to reading a lot of business books. And it's probably why I appreciate now the opportunity to share what I've learned with others because I was so impacted by books I read, you know, way back in the old days, books like Tom Peters' "In Search of Excellence," Peter Drucker's books on management, Peter Senge's book, "The Fifth Discipline," on the art and practice of building a learning organization. And all of these books were telling me there was a better way of doing things than was customary. You didn't have to settle for second place. You could be excellent, in Tom Peters' words.

It was gonna be a lot of work and you would have to figure it out yourself. So I was inspired by examples of other companies along the way. What I realized though was, as I kept searching, the problems I faced were not technological problems, but human problems. How do you better organize human beings? How do you design a better organization? How do you honor the people you intend to serve through design thinking?

All of these things were roiling around in my head, And there was actually a critical moment 2 years after I'd become VP, where suddenly all of the preparation had become clear. Because those first 2 years, when I said yes to Bob, for some reason my energy was suddenly renewed. I thought, I have this great opportunity, I have the perch, I can make big changes. But quite frankly, for the 2— first 2 years, all I did was work harder. All I did was, you know, just, you know, bring my energized self back to work. And quite frankly, working harder wasn't gonna be the answer.

I was still producing maybe slightly better results, but nowhere near where I wanted to get. And then it was in 1999 when I read a book by a guy named Kent Beck on something called extreme programming. And I saw the video that Nightline did on IDEO, the deep dive where they watched him do the shopping cart over 5 days. And it was as if like this, that all of this preparation, all of this pain had crystallized in a single moment. And Franz Johansen calls this a click moment where suddenly all becomes clear. And I don't think you get to click moments without tremendous preparation ahead of time.

And, you know, and I always tell my kids, you know, they complain about whatever's going on in their work lives. And I say, well, understand, Memla was birthed out of pain. I don't think Memla would exist were it not for the pain I'd had in my career. And so, you know, pain can be a wonderful teacher. You know, you can't learn everything from pain, but you can learn a lot. And so in that moment, I changed everything.

And from, you know, 1999, we built the Java Factored Interface systems, a lot of stories about how we got it started. It was a tremendous amount of personal energy for the first 6 months to do what I call changing the paths in the carpet because what I realized is, and I still realize to this day, that the biggest change, the hardest change for any of us to make is behavioral change. Changing human behavior is probably the hardest thing to change on the planet. And quite frankly, that had to start with me. I had to become a different kind of boss. Yeah.

[24:44] Paul: So this may be an interesting way to bring in Peter Senge, which I was Totally not surprised when I saw he was an influence of yours. But, and I love his idea of the learning organization, right? And learning is something that every executive says, our organization cares about learning, right? And then you ask like what they actually do, it's nothing close to really creating the environment for learning. But how do you think about that gap and, in terms of actually making that change, right? It's one thing to have the intention of thinking you care about learning, but how do you actually get there?

And I think it's because of organizations like yours experimenting in the '90s and early 2000s that actually tried to put some of these ideas like Senge and others were putting out there that there were some examples, but they weren't really, it wasn't super clear how you did it, right?

[25:48] Rich Sheridan: Yeah. So the first change I would tell, I tell people who come to visit here, we get between 3,000 and 4,000 visitors a year come from all over the world just to see how all this works here. And I tell them that, you know, if you really want significant change in your organization, you need look no further than your own heart and your own mind. Start with yourself, and I had to. You know, it was kind of a fun moment for me when I first became VP. There's this program in Ann Arbor where you take your kids to work for a day so they can see what their parents do for a living to maybe spur on their ideas of what might they do in their career.

So I brought my youngest daughter, Sarah, and she was about 8 years old at the time, on this Take Your Daughter to Work Day. And she watched her VP dad work all day long. Can you imagine anything more boring than that, right? Let's go observe a VP working, you know. So she wisely brought crayons and coloring books and stickers and that sort of thing, sat at my task table while I did the work of VP. And at the end of the day, I asked her, I said, you know, Sarah, what'd you think of the day?

What did you learn today? And she said something that I'll never forget. She said, you know, Dad, what I learned is you're really important here. And I said, oh my gosh, what, what did you see? And she said, well, what I saw is that no one can make a decision here without asking you first. She says, I just saw people lined up outside your door all day long.

And of course she was very proud of her dad. But in that moment it was convicting for me because I was mortified. I realized that I built an organization that could not move faster than me. And so I had to figure out How do I let go of that thing that got me to the place I'm at now? And I'm guessing you've experienced this in your own career that you rise often because you're seen as the smartest guy or gal in the room, right? You're the answer person.

You're the one who comes up with the idea fastest. Maybe you subtly but cleverly push others out of the way so that your idea will be promoted. And then you eventually get promoted. And you, you get this continuous reinforcement that says being the answer guy is the right thing to do. Well, of course, what, what are you actually doing as that kind of leader is you're stealing every opportunity you can for those around you to learn. Will people raise their hand?

Will they try things? And so, uh, within a few months of that conversation and a few months of making some of the big changes that I'd made, I remember this one gentleman walking down the hall and he waved to me, said, "Hey, Rich, we had an emergency today. Everything's all taken care of. Catch me if you can, you know, I'll bring you up to date if you want to know." And I thought, wow, what a difference, right? Now all of a sudden, I didn't even know about the emergency. I'd never been brought into the conversation.

They had taken care of it and so on. And so, you know, what I really got out of Senge's book though was this idea of systems thinking.

[28:54] Paul: Right.

[28:54] Rich Sheridan: That, you know, that what systems really— the systems that thrive have short communication and feedback loops. And most corporate systems have anything but short communication feedback loops. You know, you think, oh no, this decision has to go up 5 levels, over, down 5 levels before we ever hear back. I always tell people, if you want to suck human energy out of a room, make sure you have a lot of meetings. For goodness' sake, don't make any decisions in those meetings. And if you do happen to make a decision, for goodness' sake, please don't act on that decision.

And then you'll suck all the energy out of the organization.

[29:34] Paul: Yeah, it was actually interesting. I did my master's in systems engineering at MIT, and we study a lot of these things, right? And we study Jay Forrester stuff and Sengay stuff, and it's all about designing systems. And a lot of, a big thing organizations miss today is their second-order effects of the first-order things you do. And a lot of business today is still run on nice intention. Like, our intention is to do X, so let's create an X program.

But you don't think about the second-order effects. And it was just total madness to think that we're not really applying any logic whatsoever or any of the thinking or things we know into our modern organizations. But it's— I've seen more companies try to embrace these things, but it still seems early days, which is, uh, it's just troubling.

[30:31] Rich Sheridan: Well, I, I was really, um, struck by, uh, a book by Everett Rogers called The Diffusion of Innovation. And it was in there that the model that Geoffrey Moore uses in Crossing the Chasm was really birthed out of Everett Rogers' research about early adopters and that sort of thing. And what Rogers tells us in his book is a little frightening. He talks about how long it takes for new innovation to take hold. And he uses this one fairly simple example in history where it took, The British Navy ran an experiment to prove that citrus could prevent scurvy on ocean-going trips. And they did it by having one ship with limes on it and the other two ships without.

And the ship with the green limes on it, the sailors would chew on one every day and they got no scurvy. And the other two ships, so many men died from scurvy that they had to stop the experiment halfway across the ocean so they could transfer healthy sailors to the other two ships. So they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that citrus on ocean-going vessels would prevent scurvy. And then it took the Navy, the British Navy, 300 years after that experiment to standardize putting citrus on ocean-going vessels. So, uh, I, people often ask me like, why aren't the ideas at Menlo taking off? And I tell them the British Navy I'd say, well, maybe 300 years from now, this will look more normal.

But you know, I had a student in here yesterday asking me about entrepreneurship ideas and that sort of thing. And she did a delightful thing that I appreciate when people come and visit. She called us a startup company. And I said, well, yeah, I guess we are, but we were born in 2001. So if we can still be a startup at 18 years old, she just looked around the space. "Well, it just feels like a startup here." I said, "Yeah, that's intentional." I said, "My co-founder and I still sit out in the room with everybody else.

We could afford a gifted C-suite now if we wanted it." And I think that's often where we go wrong in organizations. That's that second-order effect you talked about, where when you hit a certain level of success like we've had, it would be natural for us to start throwing up walls and building palaces for the senior executives. But yet James and I have specifically chosen, no, we're gonna sit at 5-foot tables out in the room with everybody else. And we don't even choose where we sit. The team places our tables in the room. And, you know, for us, what we remember from our early days is the number of companies we worked for that were amazing startups.

And then at a certain point, you had a bunch of old-timers sitting in the lunchroom one day saying, "Hey, Paul, you remember the old days? Remember when it was fun here? Remember when we sat shoulder to shoulder and just got a ton of stuff done? Don't you miss those days?" And James and I looked at it like, why throw up the walls? Why, why put ourselves apart from the rest of the team? And so we've just stayed in that mode and we will always stay in that mode.

[33:45] Paul: So you also experiment with partner programming. I'm curious to hear a bit more about this idea, especially if you do it in other domains of the work you're doing. And maybe just tell us a little how it works. I'm fascinated by this idea.

[34:00] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, this was one of the concepts that Kent Beck talked about in Extreme Programming Explained. And quite frankly, of all the things he talked about in there, that was the one that struck me as probably the one I'd avoid. It's like, of all the things he talked about, I'm like, really putting two people on one computer working on the same task at the same time? But Kent also said something in that book where he said, you know, the reason I bring this up in this book is that I looked back over my own career, and I think he was as frustrated a programmer as I was in his early days. And he said, when was I the most productive? When did I produce the best work?

And he was reflecting on those times like I had, where, you know, it wasn't always chaos. There were some times where I produced some really good work. And I remembered one time, For me, it was me and a fellow programmer named Frank, and we had to— we were producing a data communication system in an old IBM protocol, and it was for a bank, and this thing had to work. These were banking transactions. And so I pulled Frank in, and we sat together, and we created that code. And I will tell you, it's probably some of the best code I ever wrote in my life, and it worked the first time, and it worked every time, and it never had any fanfare, never had an emergency.

It was, it was efficient, it was effective, it was high quality, and it worked every single day without failure. And that was what Kent's proposition was. If those things worked under times of stress, maybe they'd also work at other times. Maybe we could actually escape the chaos, because typically we were doing those things right on the verge of chaos, right? We were hitting up against a deadline, or we had a big bug to fix, and I pull somebody in. And his answer, or his question was to us, why don't we try doing it all the time and see if it has a system effect, a better second-order effect?

And so I was intrigued enough to try it, and it began working, working way better than I ever thought it would. And we standardized on it very early on at the Java Factored Interface Systems, and I've never looked back since. In fact, at Menlo, when we started in 2001, the only people we paired were our programmers. And in our world, we pair them for up to a week, and then the pairs switch so we don't get too used to one another. And this is born out of a system that the National Transportation Safety Board uses for what's called cockpit resource management. You never want the pilot and the copilot even too familiar with one another, or they stop asking each other important questions.

And so, it was so effective though for programming, we decided to try it in other roles, and we saw the same effect everywhere in the organization. And now I will tell you, while we don't pair strictly every role at every minute at Menlo, most of the roles do pair all day every day. And the places where I see weakness at Menlo is the places where we aren't pairing all the time.

[37:07] Paul: How come you're not pairing your podcast interviews yet?

[37:12] Rich Sheridan: You know, it is interesting. There are many times where a peer partner will be with me And I would be delighted to do that. There are certain things they trust me to do on my own, but I actually think there would be some value. We could try it because, look, I get it. I'm the author, I'm the founder. Of course, I'm gonna say wonderful things about Menlo from beginning of day to end.

But I think it's really valuable to have people pair in on these. We've actually done pair podcasts where it'd be two Menlonians. So if you ever wanted to try that, you could ask them, "So what's it really like to work at Menlo?" You know?

[37:55] Paul: That'd be really cool to try. I'm definitely down to do that. On the pair programming and just pair working style, I'm playing the role of skeptical businessman because I've met many of them. And they're thinking, well, Rich, how do you judge their performance if you don't know who's working on what, right?

[38:19] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, well, again, talk about second-order effect of bad systems. How often do you hear a company tout teamwork is our most important element, right? We want a great team here. In fact, Patrick Lencioni opened his famous book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, with a with a line we've emblazoned in a conference room here that says, "Not finance, not technology, not strategy. It is teamwork alone that is the most powerful competitive advantage, both because it's so powerful and so rare." And so you see all these organizations just tout their team. We love our team.

We've got a great team. And yet every measurement system of the corporation is focused on individual performance. And James and I are kind of provocative on this, my co-founder and I. We look at people and say, we don't care about individual performance because it typically comes at the expense of the team. And that's confounding to people. They're like, well, but, but, but, you know, and James always uses this great model.

He says, yeah, well, let's assume we've got a really high-performing rower on a sculling team and everybody else is just average. That boat's going around in circles all day long. You know, and you need teamwork. And so the way we judge how we're doing is what's the effect the team is having. And now, I will tell you that, you know, if you and I pair together for a week, I'm going to get a pretty good sense of you, and you're going to get a pretty good sense of me. And when we switch the pairs every week, we're going to continually get a good sense of one another.

Now, my job should be to help you succeed. If I see you struggling, I should be there to help you out. Well, what's interesting about pairing is it's no longer a, it's not like a zero-sum game, right? Because what we're not doing in pairing, here's what pairing is not, is, hey Paul, come help me with my work. No, this is our work together. So if you're slowing me down, my job is to help you go faster, to teach you some methods or some strategies for going faster.

And my job is also to listen because I should always be suspicious that maybe I'm going too fast. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I've not thought through the algorithm we're trying to get done as completely as I should. And you, by you asking me questions and slowing me down, we're actually getting better work done. Because programming has never ever been a typing speed contest, ever. It has always been a problem-solving contest.

And our fundamental belief is that two people are always better solving problems together than individuals working apart. But I think the structure where it is our work together makes all the difference.

[41:05] Paul: How does that influence who you don't hire? And how do you think about who not to hire? Because one thing I've noticed in great performing teams and companies is they're all obsessed around who is not going to fit here. And if they have people that just don't fit, how do we, how do we help them leave the company but in a compassionate way? So how does that resonate with how you're thinking about talent?

[41:34] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, you know, we have a very unusual interview practice here in that we don't ask questions and we don't really look at resumes. And it's born out of a core value of ours, which is take a chance on people. Because our industry has been so myopic in how we hire, right? You look for the Oracle 9.1.1.3 Service Pack 2 expert, right? And, you know, we do this buzzword mania resume search for talent as if, you know, we will find that we'll get— if we get the right technical skills, we'll get the right talent. And quite frankly, I— we can teach technical skills in our paired environment all day long.

But what we look for first in our interview practice is simply, are you a good kindergartner? Do you play well with others? Do you share? Are you willing to support the person sitting next to you? That is our core value as a team. So we're not looking for individual heroes.

And so, you know, and so we also realize that this strange work environment, this big open room, the fact that we're not wearing earbuds while we're working, the fact that we work normal work hours during the course of a fairly normal a normal-sized day. We work 40-hour work weeks. All of these are very, very different constructs from where the software industry is, you know, has gone in the last 20 years or so. And so we need a socialization exercise to say not just are you the right fit for us, but are we the right fit for you? And are we going to give you a chance to test it out? Because you could come, you could read my book, You could come in and tour.

You could listen to this podcast. You could conclude personally, I think this would be a great place to work, but until you actually experience it, it probably won't work for you. So what we do during our interview process, the very first one, we just did one of these a couple of weeks ago. We brought 27 people in all at once. We added a Mennonite to round it out to an even number of 28, and we created 14 pairs of people. The candidates themselves, 14 pairs to work on a simple task together, paper-based task.

It's not a programming task per se, although it's related to our work. And you work together for 20 minutes while a Minlonian observes the two of you working together. And they're just taking notes, basically asking themselves the question, how would I feel if I paired with this person, these people I'm watching for, you know, for 20 minutes? Then we switch the pairs because that's the way we work. And again, you're paired with another candidate, another 20 minutes, different observer, different task. We do that 3 times.

That was the first interview. We send you all home. It takes about 2 hours to interview 28 people. And then we go through and we talk about what we saw. And I, I will tell you, when we have that conversation, it's probably one of the most delightful conversations we ever have at Menlo and the most thoughtful, um, because we're not looking at technical skills. We're not like, is this going to be the best programmer ever or anything like that?

We're just simply saying, would they fit in our environment? Would they, you know, and I know a lot of people are really worried that we're going to get a bunch of clones. If you walk through our room, you'd find out these are not clones of one another. It's really, I think the part that really causes us to get a high degree of cognitive diversity is the fact that we aren't reviewing resumes to make that first-order decision. And so we have the most eclectic mix of resumes out here. So the cognitive diversity is very high.

The second interview, if you make it through that first round, we invite you in for a full day and you work. You work in the morning with one Mendelian, you work in the afternoon with another one doing real work on a client project, and we pay you. And then the third trial, if you make it through that day, and again, that day is as much about you deciding is as comfortable as it is for us deciding. And if that day works, then we invite you in for a paid 3-week trial. And again, just doing real work on real client projects to see what does it really feel like to work here. And we will start giving you feedback.

We don't expect perfect Mendelonians right out of the gate. There's been a couple of dramatic stories of people that quite frankly didn't make it, but for some reason the team saw enough to extend the 3 weeks to more. And it's a paid engagement, so it's not that big a deal. People at that time in their lives. And I will tell you that it's counterintuitive, the people we get. This place is filled with introverts, some of them deeply so.

And yet they are, as you know, what we found out, our view of introversion isn't that introverts prefer sensory deprivation and isolation. What they prefer are fewer, safer, deeper relationships, and they get that here. And the arguments they have with one another, the conflicts are typically not with each other, even though that happens too, but more about how to solve a problem together. And if once you turn your attention away from each other and towards the problem you're trying to solve, it creates a, I think, a dramatic change of attitude about what it means to work with another human being so closely.

[46:50] Paul: So you wrote a second book called Chief Joy Officer. Why is the corporate world so scared of words like joy? And why are we so comfortable with words instead like agile, lean, leadership, all these other kind of more technical or fluffy words? Why don't we just get to the heart of it and use words like joy?

[47:17] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, you know, this will probably be my mission in life. Now, given I've written 2 books with the words joy, and one had the word love on the COVID the second one had the whole chapter on how great leaders are loving leaders. And so we've taken a lot of chances on this. But here's my encouragement to your listeners. What we need more than anything these days is to bring our most human selves to work. And I choose that word human very carefully.

You know, we are a complex creature. There's a reptile part of our brain, there's a habitual part of our brain that's pretty close to reptile, and then there's this part of our brain that literally sets us aside from almost the rest of all creation. And it's the part that is responsible for creativity. Imagination, invention, innovation, which is what every company on the planet is striving for right now. And here is the rub. As soon as any one of us gets pushed into fear mode and that adrenaline cortisol hits our bloodstream, and that can be a raised eyebrow by an executive in a meeting or a pound of a fist on a table, we're into reptile brain mode.

We literally have drained the oxygen from the most human part of our brain. And channeled it to our muscles. And now we're in reptile mode, and now we're going to not get all that stuff. And so the companies that are going to succeed are the ones that learn what does it mean to be human. And I think joy goes to the heart of it. And when I challenge people on this concept, when they come here, I define joy through a purpose-driven organization by asking two simple questions.

Easy to ask, not necessarily easy to answer. Who do you serve and what would delight look like for them? And so, you know, I think back to that bookshelf story with my mom. I think back to those early times when I had great success as a programmer. When I saw people who used whatever it was that I had created with my heart, my hands, and my mind, there was this just inner joy from realizing that I had served others through some talents and gifts that I was given. And If we can get that regularly, to happen regularly inside of our human teams, we will fly to heights and distances that were previously unimaginable.

And this is, you know, I think why it is important for us to talk about joy in the context of work, because the results joy produces are far in excess of anything we could achieve through fear-managed organizations.

[50:09] Paul: So a lot of companies talk about leadership. They talk about wanting to create a great place to work. A lot actually are adopting the word human, but I think a big challenge they face is actually just structural as well. They, from the way they promote and structure an organization, right, they don't question those things. They don't question it in terms of the culture. But how do you think about Elevating someone that is kind of on a path to become a chief joy officer or even a joy manager, right?

That is not the most technically competent person because I think organizations say, well, this person's great, but they're not the best at finance, so we can't promote them. And this person's frustrated, they're going to go to another company and it's so much untapped human potential for leading and inspiring other people. How do you think about that trade-off in your company?

[51:10] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, we have 18 different published pay grades here from Associate 1, 2, 3, Consultant 1 through 5, Senior 1 through 5, Principal 1 through 5. So there is definitely a path here to make more money. And as you rise through those ranks, that's how you, that's how you get raises here. The bridge between Consultant 5 and Senior 1 is an important one to cross here because that is the— and all of these promotions are done by the team. I have zero say in who gets promoted here. I delight in that because it took me out of the equation entirely.

And you can imagine in a pair-based environment when you're pairing with your peers, who better to assess how you're doing in our culture and our environment than the people you work with shoulder to shoulder every day. I see it from afar. I can, I can add commentary for sure. They do appreciate my opinion, but I don't get the say into who gets moved up here. But that move from Consultant 5 to Senior 1 is the team declaring. If they move Paul up from Consultant 5 to Senior 1, Paul, we are anointing you a teacher.

You are now officially a servant leader here at Menlo. Your What we've recognized in you, Paul, is that every time you join a team, for some reason, everyone around you gets better. We're not even sure why. There's something you bring to that conversation, to that table, that simply lifts the spirit and energy of the people around you. And often that means you're stepping back, you're, you're taking less limelight for you and giving more of it to the people around you. And that could be a difficult bridged across even in our environment.

But it is the team assessing that and you saying, we really appreciate having you here. You may not be the greatest technical contributor. You might not be able to come up with the cleverest algorithm, but for some reason we just love having you on the team. You make us better because of your presence.

[53:11] Paul: I think the peer aspect of that is so key because when you're on a great team and you have a great teammate, You never want to lose that person, right? And if they're helping you be better, you want them to be promoted so they can stick around and don't have to go to another company. So I love that mechanism for just— it kind of transcends a lot of the power dynamics that happen in traditional organizations.

[53:36] Rich Sheridan: Absolutely. Yeah. And we're public with our pay grade, so everybody knows what everybody's making here. We actually have it posted on our chart on the wall. It doesn't show the dollars, but everybody knows what they are. And, but it just simply, if there's a, if you're a Consultant 3 here and you have a sticky note in the Consultant 3 box, you know every other Consultant 3 here makes exactly the amount of money you do, regardless of degree, regardless of gender, regardless of how many years you've been at Menlo, regardless of role.

We don't pay our programmers any more than we pay our QA people, which again is confounding a lot of traditions in our industry, as you can imagine. And, you know, somebody asked me once, they said, well, how are you guys doing on the gender equity front? And I didn't know. So I looked at this chart, I was standing there with them. I said, well, I'm going to read you the names of the people from top to bottom. So I'm reading backwards and I can still remember, you know, the names there.

It was Carol, Carol, Michelle, Keely, Lisa, Emily, Those were the top 6 names on the chart as I read backwards down the levels. And finally, I got to Ted and Ian. I said, whew, okay, maybe we're not doing that great with gender equity. But, you know, it's interesting to— people have asked me, why is it that the women are rising here faster than the guys are? And again, remember, it's all peer-based. So, the team is deciding to elevate the women here.

And we're not quite 50/50 between men and women, but we're pretty darn close, and which is unusual, as you know, for a tech firm to be that close to that ratio between men and women. And I, you know, my conclusion, and it isn't a strong one, it isn't based on any scientific research, it's just anecdotal, is it may be possible that women thrive in a collaborative environment more than men do. I don't know. But what I recognize is that the women are rising here faster in the system and not exclusively. There's no, there's no glass ceiling for the guys here. They can keep rising too.

But, you know, it's been a fascinating journey to watch how all this works, especially when you put it out in a public display. Takes so much anxiety off the table because everybody knows what everybody's making here.

[56:01] Paul: Well, there's a hidden benefit there. Having worked at companies where there was a lot of mystery about compensation, it is unbelievable how many hours are spent trying to figure out what people make and what people's ranks are. It eliminates a lot of that talking where you can perhaps talk about things that are bringing you a little more joy in life.

[56:22] Rich Sheridan: I have a simple management construct that has borne true in my entire career, and that is When you don't share information, people make stuff up in its absence and they never make up a better story. They always make up a worse one.

[56:40] Paul: It's spot on. It's, uh, it definitely resonates with several situations I've been in in the past. Um, so I'd love to ask about Ann Arbor and especially, I think people are just looking to places like Ann Arbor increasingly as some of the cities just become absolutely unaffordable and also just really congested. Are you noticing it's easier to keep people there or recruit people to Ann Arbor?

[57:11] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, it's a delightful town. I came to school here in 1978, fell in love with the town, never left. Part of it for me was I grew up 60 miles from here, so family was close and I wanted to be close to family, so that was important to me. It's also, you know, I think what we've seen in the last 20 years is that the economic spotlight of our nation, particularly, and probably true around the world, is that economic spotlight has shifted to major research universities because, you know, we're in that sort of age of imagination, as I like to call it, and so where the economics are moving to where the brains are, where we're investing in people to teach them new things.

And so every town like us, I think, you know, you can look at Cambridge or you can look at Ann Arbor, Austin, or Palo Alto, or Boulder, the towns themselves are recognizing this is a great opportunity to keep our young people here. You know, we have as many people who have come from other cities to come here as we've had people who've come to school here and decided to stay. And so it is a great, Ann Arbor itself is a great attraction component. The University of Michigan is a big deal as well. And the other delightful thing about Ann Arbor, and hearkening back to that, take my longest drive to work story back in the old days, you can still be out in the country in a 15-minute drive in almost every compass direction. So, there's still a lot of open land here.

And I think that helps your psyche. You can get away from just the downtown pretty quickly.

[59:01] Paul: So, you started your recent book with a great Emerson quote, "A man is what he thinks about all day." I'd love to hear what's on your mind these days.

[59:14] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, you know, I think for me there's this profound sense of satisfaction now that I've been at this for 20 years, you know, and it's just— we're like between those 2 years of Interface and the 18 years at Menlo, I've seen this work for 20 years. So there's a sense now that I no longer need to prove that this can work. It has worked, even if it stopped working tomorrow for some odd reason, you know, if Congress passed a law against two people working shoulder to shoulder or something like that. You know, we now have a body of 20 years of evidence that this all worked. So now the question for me, the things I think about is how do we, how do we teach the world what we've learned? How do we keep sharing this in a way that is meaningful, that is actionable by others.

And we've had some grand impact on variety of organizations, large and small. But, you know, how do we expand that? When I talk to the team about our plans for the next 10 years and they wonder, you know, are we— do we just want to grow for growth's sake? I said, absolutely not. What we want to do is export the Menlo effect to the world. And so that's where I'm really focusing a lot of my attention.

These days. There's probably another book in me somewhere. I do enjoy the process of writing and getting books out there. That's been bucket list territory for me. But that's where I'm focusing my attention is this idea of how can we— and I want to be very careful here. I don't believe we have discovered the one true way of running an organization.

That's never gonna be our point. The fact that all these people come and visit, I tell them, you will find this being very passionate, but don't confuse passion with perfection. We are still very much a work in progress. We have lots of work to do. But we're not gonna tell anybody who comes visits here that this is the way you should work in your organization. What we do tell them is, here's a living, breathing example that you can come in and spend anywhere from 2 hours to 5 days.

We have people come spend 5 days here. Just digging in the earth of Menlo, asking questions, discovering why things work, helping us figure out why things work. Because I'm not sure I understand Menlo anymore. You know, this is a complex adaptive biological system out here behind me. And I'm, you know, I'm certain I'm going to keep learning every step of the way. What does it make for humans?

What does it take to get humans to collaborate with one another, to create great team effect? And that sort of thing. And so, you know, I'm on this journey with you, Paul. I'm on this journey with all the authors that have preceded me and those that are following and those who are current key thinkers in this space. I just had Mike Rother in here yesterday, a good friend who wrote the Toyota Kata book. And Mike and I just have delightful conversations about what does it mean to unlock human potential.

Mike's current focus is in the K-12 range. He wants to bring this kind of thinking back into our schools. And I'm right there with them. I think that's probably the most impactful thing we can do for humanity is in some ways redesigning the education of our children for this modern workplace.

[01:02:45] Paul: That's amazing. I'm excited to share this story with people. And I think one thing I've learned is just that there is a secret to successful organizations, and it's pretty much that they think that it's worth trying and you need to basically just keep experimenting. So I appreciate all the work you're doing. Is there anywhere you want to point people to learn more or find out about things you're working on?

[01:03:09] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, well, you can— anybody who's intrigued at learning more, obviously there's a couple of books out there they can read deeply about all the subjects we talked about, either Joy Inc. or Chief Joy Officer. It can be read in either order. They're pretty much standalone books. Our website gives you deeper insight into how Menlo thinks. There's a lot of articles there that we share.

We kind of have an abundance philosophy where we are not trying to keep anything we've learned here a trade secret. We share everything we've learned with the world in the hopes that it'll inspire them on a joyful journey of their own. So menloinnovations.com is the place to come learn. And obviously, because we host all these visitors, encourage your audience to come, come visit and sign up for a tour, come take a class, but come spend time in our space. We'd be delighted to have them.