The first time Rich Sheridan touched a computer was in 1971. The CEO and Co-founder of Menlo Innovations, who went on to write “Joy Inc.” and “Chief Joy Officer,” was then a freshman in high school who instantly fell in love with the idea of writing software.

For Rich, who refers to himself as a “pure Michigan kid,” software was an artistic medium. He started by typing the names and stats of Major League Baseball players into a computer so he and his friends could “play” baseball in the winter. That programming won a contest and essentially launched his career.

He got his first software programming job shortly thereafter and went on to earn degrees in computer science and engineering. But when he entered the workforce, the world of software development wasn’t what he thought it would be.

“It was chaos,” he says. “It was firefighting every single day, delivering poor quality all the time. There is nothing satisfying in that kind of career. I don’t care how much money you make; I don’t care how many stock options are thrown at you.” 

Eventually, Rich became a vice president of research and development for a public company, where he could make the kinds of changes he dreamed of. Unfortunately, he lost that job in 2001 when the dot-com bubble burst, but he took it as a sign to become an entrepreneur. 

Rich founded Menlo Innovations later that year with a mission to bring joy back into an industry that he always thought could, and should, be joyful.

Themes discussed in this episode:

●     The books that influenced Rich’s career

●     The two types of business culture

●     Why Rich hates the word failure

●     Taking action versus taking a meeting

●     Why spending time together is one of the most important ways to build trust

●     How to break out of the "numbers game"

●     Why entrepreneurship is really about self-discovery

Featured Guest: Rich Sheridan

📽️ What he does: Rich is the author of “Joy Inc.” and “Chief Joy Officer” as well as the CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations, which aims to bring joy back into software development with a stated mission to “end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.”

💡 On Gravitas: “When I hear that word, I hear gravity,” says Rich.”Which is [about] grounding. We entrepreneurs have our heads up in the clouds. But it’s our feet on the ground, taking one step each day, held down by that gravity, that’s important. It keeps us connected to reality.”

Episode Highlights

Timestamped inflection points from the show

[4:34] Origin story: Rich discusses his upbringing as a “pure Michigan kid,” how he got started in software and how he knew the industry needed a change.

[8:49] Becoming an entrepreneur: When Rich lost his job in 2001, he knew it was time to make the change he always wanted to see, so he started Menlo Innovations.

[12:20] When teacher becomes student: Rich’s advice to leaders: Read more books. He encourages us to “become students again.” He also touches on unlocking your dreams when you’re stuck in a rut.

[17:29] Clash of two cultures: The way Rich sees it, it’s important to distinguish between two types of business cultures — the “intentional” culture and the “default” one. He explains that, often, default cultures lead to “hero-based cultures,” in which the only way to scale the hero is by [working] overtime. 

[19:51] Run the experiment: It’s a given that experiments don’t always work, but that shouldn’t be a reason to stay within the company comfort zone. Rich shares an example of why running experiments is so important — and how he got his team on board to try something new.

[24:47] Nobody’s perfect: Rich doesn’t like the word fail. In fact, he encourages his team to “make mistakes faster.” Here, Rich explains why making early, small mistakes can help in the long run.

[29:23] Building trust: Rich says the only way to build serious relationships is through quality, in-person time. “You don’t get to build trust by just waving your hands, saying, ‘Okay, guys, let’s get past the trust thing. We all trust one another,’” he explains. “No, that’s not how trust works. We literally have to spend time together.”

[36:05] Avoid Groundhog Day: If you’ve ever felt like you’re Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” you’re not alone. Most of us have the same daily routines, but that monotony does not lend itself to new ideas. Rich talks about WeWork and the benefits of new “office” environments.

[46:04] Fear is just a four-letter word: Rich has a simple motto for transparency: “Fear doesn’t make bad news go away. Fear makes bad news go into hiding.” Here, he dives into the importance of frequent transparency and communication.

[57:56] A journey of self-discovery: Many careers, especially those that involve entrepreneurship, are a journey to self-discovery, Rich says: “The easiest place to identify where to start is the hardest place to begin, and that’s inside of you.” 

[1:03:26] On Gravitas: When asked what gravitas means to him, Rich talks about being grounded and taking one step at a time.

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[Transcript]

Can you imagine building a business culture that is so strong that you got a line of people lining up at the door waiting to come in? That the recruitment activity is nothing more than posting a simple notice perhaps on your website? Can you imagine that? It's possible. And the man who knows how to make that happen, who indeed made that happen at his company is Rich Sheridan. And today, you'll meet Rich. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Menlo innovations. Menlo has won the Alfred P. Sloan award for business excellence in workplace flexibility for six straight years, and five revenue awards from Inc Magazine. Rich is also the author of two best selling books, Joy Inc, and the chief Joy officer. And if you haven't read these books, I would strongly recommend that you put them on your reading list. I met rich a few months ago, we were both keynote speakers at the Detroit Economic Club young leaders event. And when I listened to his opening keynote, I just wanted to jump up and scream and shout and yell I was so excited because his story resonated totally and completely with mine. In this episode, we talk about his journey from the corporate world and how he broke the mold. And how he as he puts it, he believes in bringing joy to the workplace and doing it through a team culture and a process. We talk about advice on changing the workplace, about finding what you already know is true inside of you and being true to you. Yes, authentic leadership. We talk about culture being either intentional, or default. And a default, culture is that hero based culture. And I know you know what that's all about. Rich likes to say, run the experiment. And we'll talk about how to start to change your culture one step at a time. Another Menlo ism, is this make mistakes faster? And we'll get into that? How do you create a culture that allows that to happen that indeed nurtures and encourages that type of activity. We talked about taking action instead of taking a meeting, how many of us would love to do that every day? We'll talk about building trust, transparency and safety. And one of my favorite topics these days is workforce and workplace layout and the idea of the casual collision, the value of the casual collision and breaking up silos, as Rich says the vicious war of competing values and how he brings clients into his development process. You'll hear the word bullshit a couple of times in this podcast as we talk about calling bullshit on some of the practices in corporate America today. Rich, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jan. It's great to be here.

There's a story that you have to tell. And it is not unlike my story. Although you didn't actually grew up in a farm in Wales. I know that. But let's talk about you rich. Go right back to the very beginning. Tell us your story, please.

Well, Jan, I am what we call here in the state of Michigan. A Pure Michigan kid. I grew up north of Detroit touched a computer for the first time in 1971 50 years ago, literally. I was just a little kid then I was a freshman in high school and I fell in love with the idea of writing software. And little did I know this was a career that could create for a lifetime, I was just excited about the idea of programming computers. For me it was an artistic medium, I could kind of think something and type it into a computer, make the computer do what I wanted it to do, which included typing all the major league baseball players into the computer in 1973. So my friends, and I could play baseball with each other in the cold Michigan winter months, that actually won an international programming contest, which quite frankly, launched a career because that contest win was a big feather in the cap of the people who had set up this program to teach high school kids programming. And they offered me a job doing something I didn't, you know, I thought I just love to do as a hobby. And I'm like, Really, you're gonna pay me to do this. This is awesome. I stayed working there through high school graduation, eventually came to Michigan got a couple of degrees in computer science and engineering. And, and at that point, a career was launched, like an official real upward trajectory to the right career of promotions and stock options and greater titles and greater authority and everything the world measures to success, James I had. And there was this different line, and it was here in my heart. My heart was breaking for a profession that I thought would carry me for a lifetime. And I wanted out, I wanted to get as far away from this industry as I could. And I made a decision, you know, is either going to be a canoe camp in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, which is probably a lot closer to that farm you grew up on in Wales, then then corporate America. But my wife still laughs at me to this day at the whole idea of picking up and moving to the outback of, of the United States. But the other decision was the one I chose. And that was I was going to change things big time. I didn't know what I didn't know how I knew it wasn't a technology problem. I knew it was a human problem. How do we organize the humans more effectively? Now, a lot of people ask me rich, you were having all this success? What was the problem? And the problem was, I saw trouble everywhere. In my life in the lives of the people who worked for me and the lives of the people I worked for. It was chaos. It was it was firefighting every single day, it was delivering poor quality all the time. And there is nothing satisfying in that kind of career, I don't care how much money you make, I don't care how many stock options to throw at you. Everybody wants is Deming said so wonderfully. Everybody wants a chance to work with pride. And I did not have that. I was not proud of the results that I was producing personally, or the teams I was leading was producing. And I just was determined that there had to be a better way of doing things. Well, eventually I got to a perch inside of a public company. I was a VP of r&d. And I could make the changes that I thought were always possible. And I did and over the next two years transformed a tired old public company and something that looks like Menlo does today. And then in 2001, it was all taken away. The internet bubble burst, the California company that had purchased my company largely for the changes my team had made in those previous two years. They had to shutter every remote office they had because they lost all their stock value. And I was suddenly out of work. And I went home told my wife I had lost my job. And she looked at me with tears in her eyes. She said you're unemployed. And I said No, honey, I'm an entrepreneur now.

took her six months to figure out that entrepreneurship pays less than unemployment. But by then we were profitable. And a few years ago, she said I knew this would have worked out. But she actually works here. And she's a big part of our success. Now, but But in 2001, I lost everything except one thing. And that was what I had learned in those two years of transforming that public company. And that became the basis for what we created here in our company, Menlo innovations, and we adopted this crazy big mission, we're going to end human suffering in the world as a relates to technology. And we're going to do it by returning joy, to what we believe is one of the most unique endeavors mankind has ever undertaken. The invention of software, and our whole purpose, everything we do is to return joy to something we thought could always be joyful, but almost never is joyful inside of organizations everywhere. And we do it through hard work. We do it through a team. We do it through a culture, we do it through a process. And I'm guessing we'll dive into details. There are many unusual things we do here that have people turning their head saying really seriously. Oh, happy to happy to be with you and share deeper parts of that story as we go forward.

Yeah, well, it's it's great. What I love about what you've done is we you know, I talk a lot about breaking the mold of corporate leadership, right? You didn't just break the mold of corporate leadership You called bullshit on all the games that people play in the workforce. And as I read your book, you know, I, I can relate to all the stories that you talk about. And Rich. You know, in my career, I spent most of my career in automotive, little bit of it in the appliance industry. But I learned how to play the game. And I learned how to assimilate into this mold. And I became what people wanted me to be, because I knew that that's how I would climb the corporate ladder. And that's how we get success. So when I reached that moment in my life, where I said, you know, what, enough already, there's a better way to do this, there's a better way to lead, there's a better way to work. People can actually feel good about the way they lead in the way they they work. And I want to design my company to make that happen, right. And that's exactly what I did. And people thought I was absolutely out of my mind. And I chuckled when you said your wife realize that entrepreneurship actually pays less than unemployment. I feel Yeah. I feel that. But it takes it takes a certain personality, it takes strength, it takes guts to call out these behaviors, let alone change them. And what I see right now is an A show you would agree is there's this great opportunity to change the way we work, we're coming out of a pandemic, our values have been questioned. People are questioning their values, what's important to them? We've changed the way that we've been working with work from home and hybrid teams. But I still see people wanting to go back to the way that it was. And I don't want this window to close. What would you say rich to those leaders out there who know deep down inside just like we did, we knew that there was a better way. But having the guts to step out and do something different is hard. What advice would you give to those leaders or listeners out there today?

Yeah, they're a lot of my journey led me to authors and books. And it's one of the reasons I was delighted, eventually to be given that honorable position in society where I was asked to write books about what I did. The reason I found that so honorable is because how much authors and books had led me to different kinds of thinking that would get me to where I want to be in my life. Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Peter Sanghi, all these authors were teaching me something. And so I would say to those leaders out there, number one, become a student again, if you're not reading now, you better be reading all the time. And, you know, reach out to other leaders you admire, ask them what they're reading. See if those books speak to you and your heart. One of my favorites, was this book by Michael Ray, a Stanford University Business School professor, wrote a book called The highest goal. The forward is by Jim Collins, Jim Collins was one of the students just reading the foreword alone was enough to change my heart about things. But what Michael Ray writes about in that book is finding this part of you that you've probably You and me both did it. At a certain point in our career, we buried so deep in the backyard of our brain, our hopes and dreams for our careers, where we just said, You know what, no way. Put that aside. That's a dream. That's a fantasy. This is work. That's why they call it work, go to work, get a job, you know, get your paycheck, all that kind of stuff. But that dream never leaves. The book, the highest goal helps you rediscover that dream, in your, in your heart in your head. It's there, it's waiting to be rediscovered. And I will tell you, when you pop open that little box that's been buried, tucked away in a shelf in the attic of your mind for that long. You will be blown away by what you yourself already know is true about you. This isn't about the truth in the world that comes next. You got to discover your own personal truth. You know, I always say that, you know, so often in our work lives, we are a different person at work than we are at home. And we're actually living a lie in our work lives. And humans don't live lives really well. You know, this is where self medication comes in. And I'm not just talking about drugs and alcohol, but I'm talking about self medication of you know, escapism or you You know, a hobby or something like that, where it's like, no, all I want to do is forget about my work life. What if you could find the part of you, where you don't have to leave that part of you behind, as soon as you walk out the door at the end of the day, or as soon as you click off the zoom, like at the end of the day, what if you could stay in that place, because it's being true to who you are?

Yeah. And that's beautifully said. And that gets right to the heart of authentic leadership. And what I found, as I was growing my career, you know, all the things, all the stupid games that we play that I questioned, but went along with them anyway, you suppress that for so long. But then I started to realize that the way I was thinking and feeling was normal, that was actually the right thing to do. And I'll give you an example, in my last corporate job, at a senior level at a senior VP level, running supply chain, and we were judged, our performance was judged by how deep into the weeds we were on a broad range of issues. So if you could come to the meeting, and talk about these issues in this agonizing amount of detail, you know, and show everybody that you were on every call and talking to the supplier or whatever you needed to do. Right that that was a badge of honor that you wore, and I always thought, wait a minute, I have a whole team of people 250 people globally here, they, they need they need to be doing this, and I need to be supporting them in their role. If I'm the one on all the calls, and I'm the one calling all the shots, then didn't I just cut their legs from under them. And and I always thought, you know that that type of model of leadership never felt right to me. And I thought, wait a minute, and there was this VP of ops that would come into the meeting, and he would always pride himself in having more information than I did. Right. So it was about making himself look good and make me look like an idiot if he could write. And Rich. Where's the CEO? is the leader in all of this? Why didn't he call that behavior out? You know, I think that, as leaders, we tend to just let people let these behaviors play out. And it's the behaviors and how we interact as humans that determine our culture and our success.

Yeah, I often distinguish between two types of business culture. One is an intentional one, and the other is a default, one. Default is what most organizations operate in Who did we hire? What attitudes walked in the door today? What behaviors do we tolerate? Intentional is something that is can be described and can be lived and is obvious when you're when you're operating within that culture. And it's also obvious when you're not. And most default cultures that I've seen that I've experienced personally, or been part of, or what I call hero based cultures, which is what you're describing, right. And I was the number one hero very often. And that hero based culture is the only way you scale hero based cultures is to scale the hero, the only way to scale the heroes over time. And I will tell you, when my kids were young, I looked at them, and I thought I don't want to miss the best parts of being a dad. And the trouble was, I got to my position by being the hero. I'm sure I got to where I was in those old corporate days by drowning out other voices in the room, by making sure my ideas were heard before anybody else. And if anybody happened to overhear one of my ideas and bring some piece of it to a table, I needed to make sure they everybody knew it was my idea. You know, and it's it's a terrible way to run a culture. It's a terrible life for the person who's the hero, because eventually that what feels like a tower of knowledge you're in becomes a prison you cannot escape from.

Yeah, and I'm sure that, you know, there's a lot of people out there listening to this. And they're thinking, yeah, I totally relate to that, that resonates with me. But let's go back to you know, what, what can people do to break that, and I loved what I heard from you the first time I heard you speak, you said, run the experiment. Right? You start somewhere small, and you have to have courage. You have to feel that it is right at the very core of your being that it is the right thing to do. And then you have to walk away from fear of judgment, this need to be liked. And believe it to your core. When you first did that rich when you ran your first experiment in terms of culture. What did that feel like?

Yeah, I had brought my old team together. And I remember I was a VP of r&d at the time and it was suffering, you know, just like every other day big team on planet Earth suffers, you know, missing deadlines, blowing budgets delivering poor quality software, unhappy users, unhappy customers unhappy, you know, the executives above me and around me, you know, I was failing in every possible direction yet everybody was telling me I was doing a great job. And so I knew there had to be a better way, I wanted to try some radical new things. And I had stumbled across some ideas in 1999, that were intriguing. One of them was pull everybody out of their offices and cubes, put them in kind of a war room like environment, in closer proximity to one another, have them share a computer together to people one computer sharing a keyboard and mouse programmers, you can manage how radical a concept that was in 1999, let alone even in 2021. And have them share their work together so that there's no towers of knowledge anymore. And these were radical concepts. This was his opposite a way to run a software team is any I'd ever imagined. And so I brought my team together. And I asked him, I said, What do you think? This is where I'm thinking of going? The gym, they wouldn't make eye contact with me. All eyes dropped to the floor. Silence, like, if we don't look at him, he'll go away and drop these ideas. You know, I'm sure they were all hoping, oh, this is a flash in the pan idea. Next week, he'll be off to something else. But I said, Guys, I'm dead serious. I really want to know what you think. Finally, one of my guys raises his hand. Nice. I said, Gil, what do you think? And he says rich blood, may him murder. That's what I think. Don't pull me out of my office. Don't blame me put me out in a big open room. Don't make sure my computer with another human being. And please, please, please don't make me share my code. It's my code. Right. So that was the first response I got from the people who worked for me. And I'm like, okay, you know, and quite frankly, a and I'm sure you know, this because of your own personal history. If you believe in deeply in something, that kind of resistance is actually energizing, defeating. And, but I have fortunately had a couple of other guys on my team who weren't willing to speak up in the big group. They pulled me aside later. And we said, they said we want to try this, this crazy experiment we like, kind of like some elements, we want to experiment with it. So we authorized that experiment. And the thing I like about the word experiment chain, and how it can get you from where you are to where you want to go, is the very word itself let you off the hook. Because if somebody said, Well, you know, rich tried something, it didn't work, and they come back to me, I'm like, Guys, it was just an experiment. Right? Of course, experiments don't always work. But if we're not trying things all the time, we will never get anywhere else. So authorize the first experiment two guys working shoulder to shoulder to computer and Intriguingly, one of those guys who had told me months before he was planning on quitting, because he was as despondent as I was, I was the VP he was frontline programmer. And he was good friend, we'd worked together for a long time. He stopped me in the parking lot into this experiment. He said, rich, are you still gonna pay me to work here? I said, What? He goes, Yeah, this, this whole idea, this thing, we're doing this experiment were running. It's so much fun, and we're getting so much done. It doesn't feel like work anymore. So that was the first responses I got jam, blood mayhem, murder, I will work for you for free. These were not lukewarm responses. And soon as I got those two signals, I realized we're onto something here. This is important. This is big. Now, as you know, the rest of the book that I wrote talks about how I made the transition from that first experiment to something that looks like Menlo does today. And it's plenty of hard work. I was never afraid of hard work. It was I never believed that what I wanted to get to was going to be easy. What it was, I believed it was important. And it was important first to me.

Yeah, I think that, you know, if there's maybe three things that we could say to leaders out there, listen to this, it's, first of all, make sure that you have the courage and conviction and you believe in it wholeheartedly. Then don't fear. Just step out there and do it and run the experiment. And I fact I run an accountability lab in the mornings, and I call it a lab for that very reason. Because we try different ways of accountability. You know, it's not like there's one one right thing or one wrong thing. And then the third thing is just, you know, is is do it, just try it. And and if it needs to be tweaked, it needs to be tweaked. Right? Don't Don't fear the failure.

Well, in you know, I don't like the word failure in general, mainly because at least in the US school system, the word failure implies a permanent black mark on your record. And so I Like the word mistakes, we have a poster here mantises make mistakes faster. And it is a to two elements to that, number one, an acknowledgement of our humanity. If I look at a group of people and say, Guys, we're human, we're going to make mistakes you with me, they're like, of course, we're human, we're going to make mistakes. So then I tell them Look at that point, either from a leadership standpoint, or frontline action standpoint, we have a choice to make, we can either make really big, slow, expensive mistakes, and everybody's like, yeah, I don't want to do that, because that will lead to failure. Or we can make tiny mistakes that we correct quickly, while they're still small, while nobody's really noticing. And this whole idea of fast change of incremental change of trying little things and stepping forward a little bit, seeing how it feels. And then adjusting is so much more comfortable for us humans, right? Because there are very few people. And I'm not saying they don't exist, there are some big thinkers who can see a long arc and can take a whole group of people in a different way. Usually, they have lots of money in the bank at the same time, most of us don't have the luxury of that. And actually, I think not having the luxury and it's kind of a tangible benefit. Because, you know, most of us can only afford to make small stakes mistakes quickly. We can't afford to make the big slow, expensive mistakes.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's this idea of incremental steps of improvement. We talked about an egg in the accountability lab, right, it's just one little bit at a time. And if it isn't mistake, you just course correct and come back. And most of my experiences, you know, is in the automotive industry is much easier, and cost effective to make that change early on in the process. And it is after you've cut tools.

Yep. And one of the things I appreciate about what we've created here at Menlo is the spirit of the team that says, You know what, let's take action versus taking a meeting. Let's try stuff versus contemplate stuff. If the team says, Hey, I got this idea, the team like great, let's run the experiment, as opposed to well, let's form a committee to write a policy. I'm correct. Yeah, like, really? Because it will never happen if you do that.

Yeah. And how many times have you seen at the corporate world, right, where there's an idea to change something, and then there's a meeting, and then I've even seen the pre meeting for the meeting. That's called an alignment meeting. And then you have the meeting. And then it has to go through five or six different approvals. And then by that point, the person that had the burning passion to drive that idea forward is like, forget it, let it go. It's just easier to that point, path of least least least resistance right to just go back to the way it was?

Well, frankly, what usually occurs at that point in the person's eye, the person who had the idea, after a while they have that happen three or four times in there, their attitude is you know what, this is just a job. I'll go find my

disengage. Yep. That's exactly right. But it's great to talk about making mistakes faster, right. And there's a lot of leaders out there that would nod their head up and down to that and say, oh, yeah, I encourage creativity and innovation with my team. Yeah, we're all about innovation here at this company. I've seen it, it's on their vision statements, their value statements on their wall, which they maybe haven't looked at in a while. But then the behaviors that you see, are vastly different. So they'll talk about innovation in one breath, but then the actual behaviors will say, okay, but if you don't meet your metrics, and if you screw up three months in a row, you're out of here. That's kind of the culture. And what I what I love about this is a quote from your book. And this goes to the way that you organize your workplace. And it also goes to trust. And you said, when tone inflection and body language are missing from the conversation, there is little opportunity to build trust, and you have to have trust in place. Otherwise, people are not going to step out with their innovative idea, they're going to be afraid to make that mistake that we want so that we can get the path to innovation. So how do you build trust rich? Me, I know that, you know, the way that the office is laid out is one way to do that. But there are many other ways that you do that at Menlo. So tell us about that.

Jan, I think the only way we humans are wired to build trust is, is based on relationships that we build with each other. And the only way you actually build serious relationships. Unless you have some different formula than I've ever learned in my life. We have to spend time together. Right? It is impossible. We we have a part of our business. We work with startup companies. And so they will come to us to talk to us about the project. They want us to help them develop your software for their new idea and that sort of thing. Invariably, when they would come to our offices The peers, the people, co founders of this new company, were literally shaking hands with each other. Because the last time they'd been together was the last time they were in our office. And I'm thinking to myself, how on earth are they building a team out of this? If they're not spending time together? You know, the biggest challenge between co founders is a lack of trust between them. And you don't get to build trust by somebody just waving your hands saying, Okay, guys, let's get past the trust thing. We're all we all trust one another. No, that's not how trust works. We literally have to spend time together. So here at Menlo, of course, I mean, at least I will call it traditional Menlo and the first 18 and a half years before the pandemic, we were in the room together, my co founder and I sitting out in the open room with with everybody else, there was no corner office for us. 18 and a half years in, believe me, we have enough money, we could have built ourselves a corner office, we never have we we don't want that we want to be available. And that does that knock down all the barriers of fear between, you know, a worker in the sea? Of course not. I mean, I know my title carries a weight and an authority in the minds of everybody who works here, they will always be slightly afraid of me, not because I'm a scary person. But because I'm the CEO, I'm the co founder, I'm a co owner of the company, I have power that should I choose to wield it could cost them their jobs. Right, I get that. So I'll never be at that. You know, that peer to peer level, I'm not even sure that would be appropriate. But I can knock down the rungs of that. If I'm present. If they see me every day, if they understand the kind of humor I like, if they understand, you know, I mean, people on the team will be watching what we're doing right now. I'm in a glass box right now. They will see they will ask me later, hey, Rich, who will be on the car with? What was that all about? Who are you speaking with? That level of transparency is important to building trust? Again, there's no secret formula. I think it's just hard work like everything else. But it's hard work spending time together.

Yeah. And I think leaders now have to be more intentional about making that time in this hybrid environment. Because we don't have the water cooler conversation. You can't put people close together. It's difficult to do that in a COVID world. So they have to be intentional, whether it is a team building exercise, or whether it's something online. And you cannot talk about the metrics, you cannot talk about the numbers. It should just be human to human conversation.

You know, just this morning, we had one of our team members had been away for a while it seems pretty. He's pursuing another career direction. We asked if he could come back for a little bit. And he did and this was the first morning was back to delightful assume it's going to rejoin our team for a few months. And, you know, I was in the My first move. When I get into the office, I walked back to the kitchen, if the dishwashers need emptying I empty them. Okay, because, you know, we all need coffee cups, and I figure coffee is what runs my team anyway. So I'm going to make sure the cups are clean in there in there in the covers. And there is David with me. And he sees me doing this. And he says, Oh, let me help. And for the next 15 minutes, we had this delightful conversation about what what Menlo has been up to, since he left and what he's been up to since he left and what it feels like for him to be coming back and all that sort of thing. You don't get too many of those opportunities in a formal setting. Even if I had said, Hey, David, now that you're back, let's get together for lunch. You know, all the you know, some of the defense shields go up, right? Oh, I'm having lunch with the CEO. But when you're back there helping move coffee cups from the dishwasher rack to the cupboard together. You just feel more human. Right? more approachable can be more casual conversation. That's a way to build trust.

Yeah, I agree. And I know you're a huge supporter of this idea of a casual collision, where people are just crossing each other in the workplace, literally bumping into each other, and having conversation. And I had learned about that when I read Tony Shea, the Apple CEO, he's a huge supporter of the casual collision. And then I heard Lisa Drake talk about it at an event an automotive event when they're talking about the new Ford building. And that's going to be you know, based very much on that principle of the casual collision. But a lot of people can't see it. And when I was in my corporate role, I started to take my team to we work in Detroit. And I would have team meetings there because I love the space. The energy was just great being downtown. Wonderful place, right. And then my membership came with one day a month I think that I could go there. So I would go there one day a month and I would just just to re energize just to be in a different space and I would meet the most interesting people you know, I met a guy that was one Can blockchain for Ford, I met a couple of people from GM. You know, even though the GM building, you could actually see it from the WeWork. Office, right? And I remember my boss saying to me, Where where are you? I said, Well, we work today, where can we work today? And he's like, why you have a meeting there? No. Oh. And then there was this deathly silence, because he could not understand why I would want to be in that environment, away from the traditional office. Because of the casual collision idea, because it was energizing. It was inspiring, it was just a totally different vibe. And I wish that people would would see that and understand that more. How, how do we get people to see that rich?

You know, I actually worked with the University of Michigan on this very idea, they were doing a video on innovation. And the setup was, in actually, I used an automotive company, and in my imagine discussion of what the challenges are in innovation inside of large organizations. And I said, so imagine, you are a worker inside of one of these large automotive companies. And every morning, your day kind of starts like, like, Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray, right? alarm goes off, you jump out of bed, you brush your teeth, you take your shower, you get in the same car, you drive down the same road, you go to the same parking lot, you park in the same space, you take the same elevator, up to the same quarter, you walk down that quarter, you turn into the same office, you sit down at the same desk, and then your your but your bosses are all saying we need you to think up new ideas, we need to come up with new ideas, innovation, imagination, creativity, and like you've already set your mind in such a pattern, the opportunity to think a new idea is virtually gone. And they've actually done studies on this and humans in you and I probably have both experienced this. We're in the kitchen. We say I need that thing out in the garage, and we leave the kitchen, we go to the garage, we get there. We're like, Why was I here? Again? What was I looking for? I forgot, you know, and we track it up to old age, you know, especially if you get older, right? Then you go back into the kitchen, you're like, Oh, now I remember what it was. Well, what they've determined in that is that your brain actually frames reality in these physical rooms. So by going back to the physical room, you're putting your brain back in the frame that head you think whatever you want it out in the garage in first place. And now because you forgot it the first time, you're gonna hang on to it a little harder when you go out there. Keep it in your conscious mind. I want to flip that thinking around. Because again, if you're always going to the same space, guess what? You're going to think the same thoughts day in and day out. So you're going to we work in a new environment, probably not sitting at the same desk every time you there, because that's not how we work works. Not seeing the same people every time because that's not how we work works. You're injecting yourself into that a different frame of thinking, you're going to come up with new ideas that you've never thought before, you're going to have conversations with people about subjects you've never had before. And that's where creativity, imagination, invention and innovation come from, which is what I believe every company on planet Earth is yearning for right now. And you're not going to get it the same old way.

Yeah, but we're going to have to break up the silos rich Oh, no. Breaking up the silo mentality. And I have another quote that I love in your book. And it says, if you can get two sides of your business, such as your business and production teams, or developers and clients into regular and healthy conversations, where it feels like a partnership, you can avoid the vicious war of competing values. Ah, there it is, right there competing values. So many silos, functional silos are set up with competing values. And with my career in supply chain and purchasing, obviously, cost reduction was also it was always a big issue, right? Well, I can give you cost reduction. Alright, I can get cheap parts in for your plants, but I'll bring every manufacturing plant to its knees with quality issues. Right? Or I can bury you in inventory to get a better price. You we got to be so so careful when we design our organizations and our cultures, with the silos because we we get what we create here. And I when I'm training and doing my workshops, I tell people all the time, it is not about being right. And they say white. Of course it's about being right. No it isn't. It's not about being right or wrong. It's about getting to the right business outcome together. And I know that you To bring clients into that, and that at first had to be uncomfortable for everybody. So tell me about breaking down silos and bringing in clients?

Well, you know, what we do for a living is we design and develop custom software for business partners. Now, you know, I don't assume everybody in your podcast actually understands the world of creating software. But everybody uses software every day in their lives for something, right, whether it's their email client, or their calendaring, or some system they use for ERP and that sort of thing in their system. And the trouble was software is this, if you're building it like we do, it's all theoretical, until people can touch it. Till you can directly experience it, I can draw pictures on a whiteboard, I can tell you, Jan, here's the architecture of the software. But he's there, he gets really concerned about the architecture of the software. Well, most people if they want to see the architecture piece software want you to be able to draw pictures on a whiteboard. But people don't really understand the software looking at boxes and arrows on a whiteboard drawing, they don't understand the software till they can actually touch it like keyboard and mouse touch it, see. And so in again, this is in the spirit of make mistakes faster. You know, our clients would prefer we make zero mistakes, I would actually prefer that as well, this side of heaven, that ain't never going to happen. So we have to acknowledge we're going to make mistakes. So what can we do? Well, what we do in our world is we meet with our clients once a week and an event called a show and tell. And that might be virtual. Now it's almost has to be virtual, or it could be in person. But what we do is we put our customer on the keyboard. So project isn't done yet. Much like if you were building a custom house, I don't know anybody who ever built a custom home, who didn't go visit the building site at least once a day. Right? And are they carpenters, plumbers, electricians, block players? No, but they want to walk through their house as is being built. They want to imagine what the rooms and often they're like, wait a minute, I didn't want the window there, or I didn't want the window there. But now that I see what I'd be looking at, I wanted somewhere else. This is just a reality of developing something new. Right. And so by bringing our customers into the picture, putting their hands on the keyboard and mouse, while my team that worked on this project watches their reaction to what we build, you're now having this really, really honest conversation. We want the customer to express their enthusiasm for what they did, or their disappointment for what we did. We want to feel those raw emotions because it in in those emotional exchanges, where they're plotting and saying I love this, you guys have been something we'd never done before? Or is that what you thought I meant? That's not what I meant at all, I can't believe you got this wrong. I tend to feel those emotions. Those are the important things of how we're going to get from point A to point B. And because we do this once a week chair, there's not high stakes to this. There's high stakes enough just because hey, we worked and we're showing work to people who pay us for our work. So high stakes enough. But by doing it once a week, guess what? This is back to our earlier where we're building trusting relationships with our clients. Why? Because we're spending time with them. They're real humans, they find out we're real humans, isn't that a cool thing to find out? Right? They find out sometimes we make mistakes. They see the next week that we've corrected those mistakes, they start to understand their role in helping us discover the mistakes and their acceptance of when they're made that we can go back and correct them because we care about the outcomes. All of this helps us get to a better outcome than was customer and I will tell you my old life was nothing like this. We would typically slave away for months, sometimes years before the business been through it, see what we're doing? And they're like, well, that's not what we want, like we have what is what you asked for? Yeah, I know. It's what I asked for, but it's not what we need, like, Ah, right. And then everybody's compromising at that point. Because you've spent so much money on this thing. It's got to go to production. And everybody's unhappy. I

wonder why that is why the old model was built around this fear of bringing in the client into the into the process, maybe it's this fear of exposing yourself, you know, but yet, that vulnerability and transparency are so very important to building building trust and getting the business outcome that you so desire. And transparency comes through in many different ways. In our culture. One of the things that I really loved about your culture is the transparency that you have into the program management function and the tasks. And one thing that I've learned before I was in the VP role, I spent many years in program management. And so I was always trying to figure out who was doing What did they understand it? Did they have a skill set, glorified babysitter? Is it going to be done on time? And then, you know, this person didn't realize that they were supposed to do that they thought somebody else was doing it so much time wasted, and tensions. And if you could just be totally transparent about who's supposed to do what and when, how wonderful that would be. Well, I just discovered recently for my business Monday comm which I think is just the greatest thing ever, because it brings transparency to the task, and I have a client right now working on an ERP implementation. And they are they've just adopted Monday so that they can, they can see who's working on it. You don't have these glorified babysitter roles and all this miscommunication and misunderstanding. So tell us a little bit about the genesis of that what what prompted you into making it really transparent and in your face and on a wall?

Well, years after we started doing this revelation came to me that is expressed very simply in a phrase I use all the time, and is actually on a poster on a wall in the room. And it says simply this fear doesn't make bad news go away. Fear makes bad news go into hiding. And of course, we all know as leaders, if bad news goes in hiding, guess what? Can't do anything about it, because it's hiding? Well, I will tell you that my old life, my old, stupid corporate life was the typical one that every executive and a public company had, I was a VP of r&d. r&d in a tech firm is one of the biggest units of the tech firm. It's where the most money is being spent. It's where the most expectations are coming out of because like, you guys are going to innovate us to a new future and all this sort of thing. And so what would happen is I would make this quarterly presentation, because for some reason, corporations love quarterly presentations, right? Somehow that's magical, every 12 weeks, you're going to get together with your peers. And you're going to, you're going to talk about what you accomplished versus the plan, right for the last quarter, then you're going to talk about what you're going to do next quarter. Well, I will tell you, every stupid quarterly meeting I ever went to, I would say, well, here was our plan for last quarter. And here's what we got done. And those two bulleted points never aligned. In fact, typically, I never got anything done. That was on the list. Then I got 12 things done that weren't on the list at the beginning of the quarter. And then for the next two hours, I would get the crap beat out of me by all my peers, yelling at me pointing their fingers at me saying How could you do this? And then, you know, finally they'd settle down, and then I'd get the present what here's what I'm going to do next quarter, right, present next quarters lies. And, and then afterwards, everybody would applaud. And so yes, that's the right priorities. You're right on track rich, and they'd say, this time we expect you to stay to this plan. Right? Yeah, I know, you've experienced this directly, right. This is I've just described your life in a previous life. Because I've described, every executive out there is like, okay, yeah, I get it. That's my life. And chant. I couldn't get three steps out of that room before somebody tapped me on the shoulder saying Great job. Rich. Just one more thing.

What? Yeah, just one more thing. Why didn't we talk about that? Wow, I didn't want to disturb seem like you were on a roll. But just one more thing. And of course, just one more thing. Just one more thing. Just one more thing. Just one more thing. Hallway project management, as I call it now. And then the next quarter, guess what the 12 things I present that we get done in there are legitimate sound like they were making stuff up. That was unimportant. But it never got in the plan. So our view was, oh, no, no, we're gonna we're going to take control of this, it was it is going to be 100% transparent, and the team is going to adhere to this weekly planning event. And so here at Menlo, our team knows this. And this was true back at my old company as well. No work gets done here, unless it's handwritten down in an index card, estimated an hours plan in a planning game, and put up on what we call a work authorization board on the wall for all to see. And every week we're going to review those items in that weekly show and tell so this cadence gives us this wonderfully transparent thing. Now, nobody can come into our system, and I can guarantee you not even me, I can't come to this team and say, you know, just one more thing. Because you know what they'll do? They'll say, Oh, awesome. Yes. Okay. Let's get a story card and write it down. Well, I don't know if we have time for it. Oh, no, it's really easy. Just say what you want. I'll write it down. Okay, then you'll do it. Well, not quite. We got to estimate it first. That takes a few minutes. And then you got to go rich, make sure the project manager puts In the plan under our names, but you do realize rich, if you do that something that's on that list may fall off, or what? What do you mean fall off? Well, you know, I mean, there's only so much time in a week rich. So if we put something new in the plan, it puts something else at risk. Oh, well, I don't think I want to put anything else at risk. Okay, so then they hand me back the currency, then we're not going to work on this right now. And that adherence, a belief system that we all have here, that there is never enough time, budget, and people in money to do everything you want to do. That's just a simple truth in life, I don't care if it's at home or at work, that is a truth. We never have enough time, people and budget to do everything we want to do. And I always say a business defines itself as much by what it chooses to say no to as by what it chooses to say yes to? Because until you have oh, yes, until you have a mechanism for saying no, you'll never get anything done ever.

I like that. Would you say about having a mechanism for saying no, because as humans, we don't want to say no, we want to please everybody. And we like to say yes to everybody, even though we know that something's gonna suffer. Or it could be a personal life. Maybe we're putting ourselves in a situation where you got to work 18 hour days? I don't know. So I think giving people a mechanism to say no, if if people listening to this podcast, get nothing else out of this. That would be a beautiful thing. And the other thing I like about the way that you run your teams is you mentioned estimating, you don't have like a group of people sitting in a room coming up with these estimates, everybody is involved, and they have full buy in to that estimate, right?

They get it if you're being presented a work task, you and because we work in pairs, that's an unusual part of our culture here. You and your partner deciding if, if we are given this task, here's how much time we would need to work on it. That is their estimate. And we will give them that time. We never cajole them, we never force them. We never say, you know, because the trouble with fear is, you know, and I'm sure you work in automotives fear based management systems reigned supreme inside of large corporations, right? Well, you know, the trouble with fear is it takes away our humanity, it takes away our creativity, imagination, and invention and innovation, because we're in reptile brain mode when we're afraid. And that's not a healthy place to be. And so, you know, everything we do is to try and pump that fear out of the room that into the room.

But with the financial side of it, and the estimating, you've just taken away when I favorite games, which is called sandbagging. I took me a while to learn that one, but I became really good at it. Because all the CFOs I've ever worked with are going to hate me for listening to this podcast. But the idea that I would, you know, I would come up with a number knowing that you will couldn't come back at least twice and tell me it was good enough. And I would, I would sit down and plan three levels of numbers and storytelling that went along with it. What kind of bullshit is that?

Well, you know, it's certainly no way to run a company, right? I mean, if I'm pre quadrupling the estimates in anticipation of the, you know, the hack, hack, hack hack at the end, like now you don't have system anybody trust. And it is just bullshit. I mean, it is just, you know, people just saying stuff to say stuff. And you can't run a business that way. Right.

And so many people do what I know

they do, and they get crappy results. And they all have it in it. Here's the trouble. And this is what I was running into in that trough of disillusionment in my early career. I thought, number one, it's normal. Number two is just the way things have to be there's no other way around it. And number three, get used to it. It'll be your career. And I refused to take that as a given, I was determined that there was a better way of doing things. So it was customary. I was determined to find it. And I did. And I can tell you it. It's not easy. None of this is easy. And I know you don't talk to any of your guests who are describing Jan 123 steps, and next week, you'll be in a better place. No, this is hard work done well together. But if you care enough about the outcomes, if you've discovered that highest goal inside of you, and you want to get to the other side of the chaos and the bureaucracy that you're dealing with today, you will do it. I remember, early on when I did this experiment back at interface systems, my old employer, six months in when it was clear, it was working. One of my old time programmers, David came to me and he said, rich can't believe you pulled this off. He says How'd you do it? I said what do you mean? He says, Well, you put everything on the line, your job, your title, your authority. You said you had everything and you were still willing to take this risk. And I said David, you're confused. You see what you're looking at the worldly stuff, I said, what was at risk was my heart. I was in my mid 30s. At that point, I looked ahead and I said, I cannot do this for another 30 years, I just can't, I won't physically be able to I won't survive. I said, so what was the risk? wasn't all that stuff you were thinking about? What was it risk was me. Once I made that decision, David running towards this change was running towards safety net towards risk. Because what I was trying to keep safe and alive was me. I said at that point, once I crossed that bridge, in my mind, knew I was running towards safety, I could run faster and faster and faster. I'm not sure he really got it. Because he was still caught up in the old way of thinking. But, you know, for me, that was a clarifying moment as to why I was willing to try these crazy things I did, and probably why they all ultimately ended up working because I wasn't trying to prove anything to anybody. I was trying to save me.

Yeah, I can totally relate why I felt my life force draining out of me in that conference room, it was time to make a change. Going back to a comment you made earlier, when I asked you about advice to people to leaders out there who know that there's a better way and just stepping out and making that that first movement and running their first experiment, as you would say, you know, you said read educate yourself. And what I found is that once I started talking to other people, and and honestly, this didn't really happen full force until I left the corporate world, because I created the space that I needed to do it, right. But what I found was that people validated what I what I knew. And that helped build my confidence. When I discovered Simon Sinek, you know, I was like, Well, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. And then, you know, I'd read a book, and I read Extreme Ownership, which I never thought I would like, because I'm not into the, you know, aggressive military. And I thought, Oh, I'm not gonna like this. I read the book. And I thought, Oh, yes, that's right on. And then I read your book, and I go, Oh, yeah, that's it. So it's, it's educating yourself finding resources, people. And quite frankly, that's one of the reasons that I'm doing this podcast is so that people can hear other people practicing authentic leadership and changing the culture, so that they can then give themselves permission to do the same. It took me a little longer to figure it out. Rich, I was in my 50s, before I had the guts to leave the corporate world to do this. But what advice would you give to your 25 year old self today?

Wow, you know, it's, it's so hard to answer those kind of questions. Because, you know, I was pretty idealistic back in those days. And, you know, I would, I would probably tell myself, what I actually told myself, don't give up, don't give up on those dreams. You know, I think, a lot of entrepreneurship in particular, but I think it's true of all careers, is a journey of self discovery. You know, anybody who's thinking, you know, we're listening to you, or reading the books you've talked about, or my books, and you're like, Man, I wish I wish my boss would read this book. I wish those other I wish people on my team No, no, the the easiest place to identify where to start is the hardest place to begin. And that's inside of you. You have to decide, the change has to begin inside of yourself. Because I had to shed all those old corporate ways of thinking and quite frankly, the only thing I knew was how I was taught by my bosses. Well, guess what, they led me with fear and intimidation, and they, they dangled the stock option and pay carrots in front of me and I responded just like a normal human being would I had all the same inputs everybody did. And I responded the way everybody else did. But inside was this unquenchable desire, this flame burning inside of me that I was afraid was gonna go out. And that was probably my biggest fear is my flame was gonna go out. And I saw it go out and others that I cared for. And then they just went into like the zombie part of their career that often ended up being the last 10 or 20 years of their career, when they should be kind of at this height of something. And I always say that's like the weird part of people's career where they just start bouncing around from job to job. They're taking the job because it pays almost the equivalent of what they used to make somewhere else. But it becomes this transactional leadership model. And you really don't care about anything anymore, and everybody senses it. And they don't want to follow an inauthentic leader who doesn't really have a strong sense of where they're going or how they're going to get there. And so then they have to go find another job. somewhere else, and every two or three or four years are jumping around. And I thought, Oh my God, I don't want to end my career like that. And so, you know, this is I will say, simply, Jan, that the discussion we've had today that the, what you draw out of the people you interact with, to your listeners, I only want to say, listen up, this is really important to you. Because if, especially if you're a parent, your kids are watching you. And if you come home every day complaining about work, you know, complaining about a boss or complaining about a company, and I've watched people in their careers that way, where they're just bitter. They're just bitter. And it just it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way.

No, you're exactly right. It when I made the decision to leave my corporate job, I talked to my daughter, she was I think, 15 or 16 at the time, and I said, Look, all the trappings that mom used to have that went along with a corporate job, the European vacations, the shopping trips, the designer clothes, the country club, all of that, all of that is going away, it's gonna be gone. And I said, you know, we're going to, we're going to live in the same house, but the budget is going to be different, because I'm not going to have an income for a while. And she looked at me and she says, Mom, you need to do this. We'll eat ramen noodles if we have to. And I thought, wow, wow, there it is. Thank you. We're naughty, I am pleased to tell you, we're not yet to the ramen noodle stage. But you've got to, you're right, you know, there's this people coming up behind us, our kids Gen Z. And in fact, I have a few episodes on the podcast, dedicated to interviewing Gen Z to ask them what they want from leadership. So instead of us talking about what we think they want, I want it from the horse's mouth, I want him to tell us so that's, that's coming up, you know,

I'm gonna you can edit this out. If you watch, I'll just leave this one for you. I think you would enjoy interviewing my oldest daughter, Megan, who worked for us for three and a half years and then went off to a career in her own. And the idea she took home from her three and a half years of working for us. I would I would love to listen to that interview. So you might wanna that might be a fun one to try. I don't think she's ever done anything like this before. But, uh, you would get a chance to hear from, you know, somebody who had a front row seat to being a child of an entrepreneur and also then pursued some of her own dreams along with that. And it wasn't easy for her either.

Yeah, no, I will do it. I will do it. For sure. I think that's a great idea. Okay, we're gonna need to just do one more question to close out here. And that is rich. We talked a lot about authentic leadership today. And I've described described to rich, we've talked a lot about authentic leadership today. I use the word gravitas to describe the hallmark of authentic leadership, not gravitas, in its traditional sense. But if if gravitas is the hallmark of authentic leadership, what is gravitas to you?

You know, when I hear that word, I hear gravity. Right? Which to me is a grounding, right? That, you know, we can all all of us, entrepreneurs have our heads up in the clouds. But it's our feet on the ground, taking one step each day, held down by that gravity that's important, right? It keeps us grounded, keeps us connected reality. Because, you know, no matter how big our ideas are, James, every day, we got to come in and do something we actually have to execute. And that is the hard work of putting one foot in front of the other on that journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step. And I'll bet a lot of your audience is waiting. They're waiting for something magical. Imagine that seeing waiting is a bad thing either. I waited too. I didn't start Menlo till I was 43 years old. And conditions were right in quite frankly, it was a little bit of forced on me because of the internet bubble bursting in 2001. But, but eventually, you take that first step, and the important part of that gravity is it holds you down. It's humbling. Yes, yes. You know, to me, that's that's what it feels like when I hear that word.

Yeah, that's that's well said. I haven't heard anybody describe gravitas that way and it's so true. Well, let's close today. I would like to say Thank you Rich for your time today and I'm going to use your words to our audio Since a run the experiment what do you think Rich? Thank you. Thank you