Podcast appearances and mentions of rich sheridan

Today's guest is a big deal. He's the CEO of software company Menlo Innovations and the author of two highly recommended books—Joy Inc., and Chief Joy Officer, and he joins us today to share some of the incredible insights he has gained during his impressive career. From his definition of joy at work and how he has built a very unique professional environment and culture at Menlo to the unusual interview experience at Menlo, our conversation is expansive and detailed, giving you the tools you need to adopt some of the same principles in your own leadership journey. Richard shares how he has cultivated an environment where feedback is welcomed, why he has chosen a transparent remuneration structure at Menlo, how he has set this up, and much more. Don't miss this inspiring conversation with today's deeply intentional and revolutionary guest. Thanks for tuning in! Guest Bio:Rich Sheridan is on a mission to end human suffering in technology. As CEO and Co-Founder of Menlo Innovations, he built a workplace driven by collaboration, experimentation, and joy.Once a fear-driven leader who micromanaged every detail, he discovered that joy at work isn't a luxury—it's a necessity. With a background in software and engineering (U-M BS '80, MS '82), his true passion is process, teamwork, and organizational design.Through his books, Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer, Sheridan shares Menlo's story to help others create intentional cultures of joy. Because when joy leads, success follows.Key Points From This Episode: [00:00] Welcome and introduction to this episode and a catch up with your hosts.[06:40] Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations.[10:31] What Menlo Innovations does.[15:05] Richard's definition of bringing joy into work and how he measures it. [24:59] Why the work environment that he has built at Menlo would not be suited to everyone.[28:24] How Menlo approaches interviews differently.[34:47] The rewarding, promotion, and progress process at Menlo.[42:25] A story of how Richard realized that Menlo has excellent gender equity.[47:07] Navigating hesitation around salary transparency.[54:20] Why Richard is not transparent about his own compensation.[47:07] Managing the feedback process and making it easy for others to communicate how they feel.[01:03:58] How to book a tour at Menlo.  Quotes: “We launched Menlo in June of 2001 with a crazy mission: we wanted to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. We've been doing that now for almost 24 years. It worked!” — @menloprez [0:09:33] “I don't think unjoyful people can make joyful results.” — @menloprez [0:16:44] “We have an interview process where we're actually trying to weed you in, not weed you out.” — @menloprez [0:31:06] “Humans are incredibly adaptable when they are given clear expectations.” — @menloprez [0:33:21]RESOURCES: [01:03:58]Menlo Innovations Tours and Workshops FOLLOW: Follow Richard Sheridan:LinkedInXMenlo InnovationsJoy, Inc.Chief Joy Officer  FOLLOW:Follow Laura Eich:LinkedInFacebookInstagram Follow Mike McFall:WebsiteLinkedInFacebookXInstagram Follow BIGGBY® COFFEE & LifeLabTM:WebsiteFacebookXInstagramLinkedInAbout LifeLabTM ABOUT LOVE IN LEADERSHIP:At the Life You Love LaboratoryTM and BIGGBY® COFFEE, we're out to prove that financial success and healthy workplace culture aren't two separate goals. BIGGBY® COFFEE's own cultural transformation is proof that not only is it possible to have a successful company where people aren't miserable at work, but that the happier your people are, the more your business will grow. Each week, join host Laura Eich, Chief Purpose Officer at BIGGBY® COFFEE, and her co-host and BIGGBY® COFFEE co-CEO Mike McFall as they're joined by guests from around the world to learn how they are fostering a culture of love and growth in the world's most innovative and people-centric companies. Get inspired. Get real. Get ready to transform workplace culture in America with us. This is the Love in Leadership podcast.Learn more at: loveinleadershippodcast.com ABOUT THE HOSTS:Mike McFall began his journey with BIGGBY® COFFEE as a minimum-wage barista at the original store in East Lansing in 1996. Over the span of 23 years, alongside business partner Bob Fish, he has helped create one of the great specialty coffee brands in America. Today Mike is co-CEO with Bob, and BIGGBY® COFFEE has over 250 stores open throughout the Midwest that sell tens of thousands of cups of coffee each day. But more importantly to Mike and BIGGBY® COFFEE, the company is a profoundly people-first organization.Mike is also the author of Grind, a book which focuses on early-stage businesses and how to establish positive cash flow. Laura Eich is BIGGBY® COFFEE's Chief People Officer, having worked in a variety of roles at BIGGBY® COFFEE for the last 11+ years. She helped launch BOOST, the department at BIGGBY® COFFEE which ultimately became LifeLabTM — BIGGBY® COFFEE's in-house culture cultivation team designed to help people be the best versions of themselves and help companies support them along the way. In her role, Laura helps people build lives that they love through the process of building profitable businesses and robust, growth-filled careers.

Is the whole simply a sum of its parts? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss what happens when you divide a company into pieces and manage them separately - and what to do instead. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number one, the myth of segmented success. Jacob, take it away.   0:00:30.4 Jacob Stoller: Great to be here with you, Andrew. And yeah, before I dive into that myth, I'd like to just start with a quote by Albert Einstein. "There is no failure in learning, but there can be in refusing to unlearn." Now that's something that's gonna occur over and over when we talk about the different myths. And the fact is, as many people have observed, unlearning can be a lot tougher than learning. So I think we always have to keep that in mind. So I want to tell a little story which kind of illustrates just how deep this unlearning can go. And this was told to me by Rich Sheridan, who has a company called Menlo Innovations, they're a software development company. And very interestingly, the theme of his work has been about joy in work. Sounds familiar?   0:01:28.3 AS: I love it.   0:01:28.5 JS: Well, he didn't really discover Dr. Deming until he had already written two of his books. So it just shows to me that there's some very underlying truths behind what Dr. Deming was teaching. But anyway, the story Rich tells is that he had his family in for a wedding. And they had a new office they'd moved into, so everyone wanted to see it. So he brought his granddaughter in, an eight-year-old. And he said, well, where do you sit, pop-pop? And he said, right here. Here's my desk. Here's my computer. And the granddaughter looked at his desk and was puzzled. You know, she said, well, where's your name? You got to have your name somewhere. And so, I mean, Sheridan was amazed. He says, I thought, wow, she already has it in her head that as CEO, I should have a corner office with a placard that showed how important I am. And you know, I felt a little embarrassed. She was somehow implying that I can't be much of a CEO if I didn't have a placard with my name on it.   0:02:35.5 JS: And she's only eight. So no, here's a CEO that's just really, really, you know, ahead of a lot of people. You know, he understands a lot of the Deming principles. And he sees just how deeply people hold these myths. She believed that there's this pyramid structure and there's got to be a CEO at the top and there have to be all these departments and people reporting to various people, et cetera, et cetera. So this really, this belief she had is really, it's sort of the pyramid that Dr. Deming described. And Dr. Deming actually wrote, he said, in The New Economics, you know, his last book, he wrote, this book is for people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. And he talks about the pyramid. And I think that kind of encapsulates everything we're dealing with in terms of beliefs. And I'm just going to read it because he was so concise about saying it. "The pyramid only shows responsibilities for reporting who reports to whom. It shows the chain of command and accountability."   0:03:55.3 JS: "The pyramid does not describe the system of production. It does not tell anybody how his work fits into the work of other people in the company. If a pyramid conveys any message at all, it is that anybody should first and foremost, try to satisfy his boss and get a good rating. The customer is not in the pyramid. A pyramid as an organization chart, thus destroys the system, if ever one was intended." So I've never seen a more pointed description of the prevailing style of management. But think of this young girl at age eight, you know, I mean, and a lot of them, what happens is they go to school and they learn. And then maybe they eventually go to business school. And then sometime, maybe 30 years later or something, this person, this young woman is being told, we're not going to manage according to a pyramid anymore.   0:04:54.3 JS: We're gonna change the whole structure. We're gonna respect people and we're gonna respect their opinions. And we're not gonna assume that all these departments automatically fit together like building blocks. We're gonna work to define a system. All these things that Deming taught, you know, how do you think she's gonna react to that? You know, we're talking about things that this person has believed, not just from training in business school, but for years and years. So I think that kind of underlines the task we all have in terms of learning and unlearning. It's just an enormous thing we have to deal with, which is why I think it's important to look at the myths and various myths. And that's why I really worked to define those. So, when we...   0:05:46.5 AS: I would just highlight one thing about, if we go back to maybe, I don't know, constructing the pyramids, it was all about power and force, you know, get things done. It was about power and force. And I think what Dr. Deming was saying at a very, you know, many, many decades ago, he was saying that power and force are just, you know, a tiny factor in the world of business. The real motivating factor is intrinsic motivation, satisfying the customer, working together. Those types of things are the forces that will bring a much better outcome in your business, rather than just having an organizational chart that just shows the flow of power and force.   0:06:30.4 JS: Exactly. You know, and I think that if you look at the pyramid structure, it's actually a great system for consolidating power. So it works that, and, you know, but if you start to look at producing quality products and services for customers, it doesn't work at all. And, you know, so we need a new kind of logic, not this kind of logic. If we really do, like I say, we want to produce excellence. And if we want to have productivity as our competitive advantage, right?   0:07:06.4 AS: And one thing I just want to, for the listeners and viewers out there that may get confused, like what is a pyramid chart? We're talking about an organizational chart with a CEO, you know, and the like at the top, and then all the different department heads and the people below them. So Dr. Deming referred to that, and Jacob's also referring to that as a pyramid chart. Let's continue.   0:07:27.5 JS: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that. Okay. So that gets us to myth number one, because, and myth number one is the myth of segmented success. And the idea behind it is that the productive resources, this is a myth, this isn't true, but according to the myth, the productive resources of a company can be organized as a collection of independent components. The whole equals the sum of the parts. So this is essentially the glue that holds this org chart structure together. If that myth were true, then that org chart structure would be perfect for organizing a productive organization. But it is a myth. And what we see is that when you run a company according to that, with that assumption, you get into all kinds of trouble.   0:08:20.5 JS: And I'll just give you a very simple example. We have, let's say we have a company that does heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and they're selling stuff to industry, various machines, and they're installing them, and they're servicing them, all that kind of thing. Right? So let's say there's the end of the quarter and the sales rep has to make his or her numbers. Now salespeople are rewarded based on their sales numbers. Production people or the service people are rewarded based on their numbers, on how many service calls they satisfy or whatever. So installation people are rewarded for how much installing they do. So everybody's got quotas, and they're all sort of independent like components. So you get this sort of negative chain reaction where the sales rep does a big deal to make the numbers at the end of the quarter. He brings it in, the bell rings, you know, hooray, this person's made his numbers, he gets to go to Hawaii or whatever it is. Right?   0:09:27.6 JS: But let's supposing to get that deal, that's a big deal, it's high volume. So guess what? Low margin. And guess what? Maybe the sales rep had to make a few concessions to get that deal. Maybe the sales rep didn't reveal all the fine print to the customer, you know, in sort of the rush of getting the deal. So after the deal, the next quarter, well, the service department's got problems now dealing with this order. The installation department's got problems. So both of these departments have to hire extra people, have to pay overtime. So the end of that quarter, their numbers are going to look bad. Right? So that's a classic case. But it just happens over and over and over again, because you have all these different business entities compensated based on their own separate objectives as if they were separate companies. And yet that's glorified, that's seen as entrepreneurial. We'll run our department as a business, as a profit center. But they don't consider the whole overall system. So that's the kind of the tragedy, I guess, in modern business. And again, it's assuming that everything is kind of gonna work out if you manage them independently.   0:10:53.2 AS: And I was thinking that, you know, the head of the sales department is gonna be rewarding the salesperson for what they're doing. And if the head of the manufacturing or service department could anticipate that this deal that the salesperson's closing is gonna cause a lot of problems because of, you know, they're rushing it and they're trying to give great terms to get something under a deadline. There's just a very difficult for the head of the sales department to listen to that complaint to the head of, let's say the service department as an example, because they're being judged by the numbers they're delivering in their department by their boss. And so they got to kind of let it happen.   0:11:33.5 JS: Yeah. Yeah. And this is by the way, based on a real life story. And this is a company called Air Force, I think, Air Force One, it's called actually, and it's based in Ohio. It's a heating, ventilating air condition company. I could say HVAC, but they use the acronym. And they worked with Kelly Allen. And very soon after working with Kelly, they got rid of sales quotas and put everybody on salary. And the whole thing took off, you know, as the CEO told me. They're getting better deals, customers are happier, veteran sales reps are helping the younger ones close deals. Everyone's helping everybody. And the business is really, really expanded rapidly. You know, they've, I think, doubled or tripled their revenues in the last three or four years. So yeah, these things, when you get rid of these artificial barriers, businesses can really take off. And we got all kinds of case studies showing that.   0:12:45.3 AS: Yeah. And for the listeners and viewers out there, like, wait a minute, I can't do this. You know, my salespeople, they only are gonna work when they're incentivized individually as a department. I think the first thing that I would say is listen to what Jacob's telling you, listen to the stories that you're hearing and think about it. You don't have to move on it. I think that transformation in the way that you think about, you know, things takes time. And the natural reaction, when you hear something new, you know, you started with the idea of unlearning the natural reaction, when you hear something new is to say that can't work, but just keep that open mind as we continue through myth number one. So why don't you continue on, Jacob?   0:13:25.3 JS: Yeah, well, and as Kelly Alley, Kelly Allen you know, made some points on that. First of all, he said, you don't go in with your guns blazing and just take away the sales quotas. He said they worked very carefully so that CEO understood the whole system, how all the parts interact. And then once you understand the system, then you're in a position. Often people go in prematurely, remove all the sales quotas and you get chaos because people don't understand all the dependencies that are there. So it's really, really important, I think to manage the change in a responsible way. And again, as Kelly says, you've got to understand the system and how it works.   0:14:10.4 AS: Great. And I think you have more stories to tell.   0:14:14.2 JS: Oh yeah. Well, I actually a wonderful one. It's, and it's not just sales quotas, by the way, it's any kind of rating and ranking system. And one of the real classics is the, a company called Bama, Bama Foods, which is, uses Deming's principles. And the CEO, Paula Marshall, actually might've been this little girl, eight-year-old girl who was looking for the desk of the CEO 30 years later, because she started working with Deming just by accident, really, because she had taken over the company business at a young age and she, they were trying to deal with some quality problems. And she went to a Deming seminar and Dr. Deming asked who in the audience is the CEO? And she was the only one that raised her hand. And so he said, will you come and , be part of a study group? So that's how she got to work and got to become actually today's the only living CEO that's actually worked directly with Deming, or the only active CEO that's actually worked with Dr. Deming.   0:15:32.4 JS: But anyway, she started to talk with Dr. Deming about the problems they were having and he said, and she described a rating and ranking system that they had had, and they had spent, I think millions of dollars even back then with a very, very reputable consulting firm. And it was one of these things where they rank people on a scale of one to 10. And the idea was let's make all our people accountable. That's how we're going to get quality. We'll have accountability. Everybody has to be rated by their managers and we'll create some fear and we'll create some incentive for people to work harder and solve our problems. Well, the first thing Dr. Deming told her is get rid of that rating and ranking system. So it was very, very hard for her at first, you know, she'd spent a lot of money on it. And she said, you know, but eventually she said she realized that it wasn't helping the company. It wasn't doing anything, but it was still very, very hard to let go of that idea. But eventually she did. Eventually she got on a conference call.   0:16:40.3 JS: They got rid of it and the results were just incredible. She said by the, you know, everyone had hated the system and it just turned the conversation around. I mean, instead of saying, well, here's why I've ranked you, Andrew, on, I've only given you a seven instead of a nine. We would be having a sort of a constructive conversation about the problems you're facing in the workplace, how we can make things better, how can we work together, that sort of thing. So it was, it became much more constructive and much more cooperative. And they were able to evolve to a whole system where teams of people work together to solve problems. But without taking away that system, it would have been very, very difficult to do that 'cause, you know, well, that means that person will be ranked higher than me maybe, you know.   0:17:31.2 AS: And we know very well in the area of sports that, you know, great coaches are not sitting there ranking and rating and ranking their employees and beating them over the head with that. They're trying to identify the strengths and weaknesses. How do we, you know, build this team so that we can beat the other teams? And that really requires coordination. And if you do rating and ranking type of thing, you start to destroy coordination. And for those people that are thinking, of course, you know, I'm terrified to look at this and remove my rating and ranking. One thing you can do is take, you know, five or 10 people that you respect their opinion within the company and ask them how they feel about the rating and ranking system. And you'd be surprised what you hear.   0:18:15.3 JS: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Right. And, but yeah, about the sports team, I guess. Yeah. I mean, there's some documentaries on the Chicago Bulls, you know, and I think they had some very good stories about teamwork and stuff like that.   0:18:30.5 AS: Well, Phil Jackson was amazing in that the documentary on Netflix was great, The Last Dance. But what you can see and you can hear it from the players, I think Dennis Rodman was a great example where Phil Jackson understood how to deal with this kind of disruptive kind of situation and guy. How do you deal with that and get the most out of him on the court in a way that still follows the values of yourself and your team? And he just showed that very well in that. And so I think that that was a great example of how you coordinate your resources.   0:19:08.5 JS: Yeah, a great example, I think, for people to watch. Yeah, 'cause it really does. It does really show that.   0:19:15.3 AS: You know, you were talking to me about just before we turned on the recorder about Deming was a scientist and physics and all this, some things I never even thought about. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about your thoughts in that area.   0:19:28.4 JS: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that, first of all, the when you look at the traditional pyramid and all the traditional style of management, I mean, that's really based on reductionism, cause-and-effect. Essentially, it's Newton, you know, it's Newton's golden principles. So you have a business system that's built on 17th century logic, basically. And so what I think is wonderful about Dr. Deming, I mean, we think of him as this philosopher. But here he was, Dr. Deming in the 1920s, getting his PhD in mathematical physics. So at the time he's doing his PhD, I mean, there's Heisenberg developing his uncertainty theorems, all that kind of stuff was just exploding. And the whole view that people had of the physical world was just being turned upside down. So Dr. Deming was very, very cognizant of that.   0:20:35.2 JS: You know, when it started, you know, with statistics, but gosh, you know, science of psychology was changing too. And I think Deming, you know, when you read him, he was really thinking like a scientist. You know, this is the way the world works. And was very, very sensitive about all the components of that. You know, the science of the way people think and what motivates them. You know, he knew that people aren't motivated by sticks and carrots. And we'll talk about that later. He knew that there are limits to how much you can know if you're not right there in the workplace. You know, he understood all that because of variation. But I think when he was introducing those ideas, people really weren't thinking that way. I think they are a bit more today, but he was really a pioneer in that.   0:21:33.4 AS: Yeah. In fact, I was just looking at, he got his degree in mathematical physics from Yale university in 1928. So yeah, there was a lot going on in the world then.   0:21:46.3 JS: Sure was. Yeah. So yeah. And he, I guess he's very patient with us. You know, you think of someone having a degree like that talking, you know, over everybody's heads, but I think he really developed the style of communicating.   0:22:06.5 AS: So what else you got for us on this topic? I think you had some takeaways that you mentioned some four points or some other items.   0:22:14.3 JS: Sure. Yeah. I can, I did summarize at the end of the chapter just to sort of a bluffers guide, I guess, to, you know, this myth of segmented success. But, you know, first of all, you know, as we were just saying, conventional management practices are based on an outdated view of the world that emphasizes reductionism and predictability and ignores the influence of complexity and interdependencies. So you don't see how things actually affect each other in a company. Operating companies so that interdependencies are reflected in management practices and understood by all employees enables wide engagement in improving quality and productivity. To create a strong team environment, managers need to remove barriers such as siloed incentive plans and clearly communicate the aim of the organization. And finally, recent lessons from supply chain disruptions during the COVID epidemic show how segmentation extends beyond the walls of a company and how closer collaboration with supply chain partners can prevent such disruptions.   0:23:41.3 AS: So how would you, let me ask you, how would you wrap everything up in a very short statement? What do you want people to remember?   0:23:53.4 JS: I want people to remember that just because it says so in an org chart doesn't mean that that reflects the way things actually happen.   0:24:05.7 AS: Yeah, that's a great one. And I think we're trained, and this is where Dr. Deming used to say that, you know, what we're being taught in management schools, you know, is the wrong thing. And this is exact type of thing where we're talking about this concept of the, you know, the org chart and the way power flows and all of that stuff. So yeah, great points.   0:24:28.4 JS: Yeah. Not only in management school, but in grade school, you know, when we're rating and ranking kids before they even know how to learn and read, even before they know how to read and write.   0:24:41.2 AS: Yeah. And that brings us back to that first story where a kid walks in and what has she seen? She's seen the teacher and the principal with the name tag at the front, in front of the class.   0:24:53.4 JS: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if we can keep talking, but you know, Rich Sheridan also discovered a drawing, which is actually, it's a diagram in The New Economics, but it shows how people's creativity and joy in work and stuff are systematically destroyed throughout their lifetime. They're constantly put down by teachers, principals, and they go to college and university and there's competition. And then they go into the workplace and they're rated and ranked. And it just destroys the natural of joy in work that people have and the enthusiasm people could have in the workplace.   0:25:39.5 AS: And for those listeners out there who used to listen to The Wall by Pink Floyd, Roger Waters was talking about how the school system was just pounding out any creativity, any fun, any joy. And so it's not unusual. And it's the case in many educational systems around the world. And so I think, you know, this is a good reminder of, you know, joy in work. And also this idea of segmented success. I think you had a statement that you said to me just before we started, which I thought summed it up perfectly, which was the whole doesn't equal the sum of the parts.   0:26:18.3 JS: Yeah, that's exactly. And we can basically reduce it all to that.   0:26:28.4 AS: Yeah. So I'm going to wrap up there. So for ladies and gentlemen, I think that's a great description of myth number one in Jacob's book, but I think ending it with this, the whole doesn't equal the sum of the parts, helps us all to realize that, you know, just bringing competition between different people and different units within an organization does not bring the optimum output. Jacob, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined at jacobstoller.com. And this is your host Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. We've been talking about it today. "People are entitled to joy in work".

Rich Sheridan is the CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations, a software development company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He's the author of the books Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear. In chapter three of Chief Joy Officer, Rich says “If there is a core tenet upon which I would build my leadership life, and in doing so inspire those I led, it is this: love wins every time.” He then goes on to relate one of the most famous passages of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8, to the qualities of a loving leader. Whether or not you're a religious person – in fact, that verse is used often in even the most secular of wedding ceremonies – the relation of what the verse says to the qualities a leader should have is powerful. Rich talks about this chapter on this podcast. However, we encourage you to pick up his book and read for yourself. That chapter alone may affect the way you approach your responsibility for those entrusted to your care in your organization.

Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations (and author of Joy Inc. and Chief Joy Officer) joins us for a meandering chat. We talk about building a culture free from fear, the power of storytelling in the office, and the benefits of making two people share one computer.

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile F M radio for the agile community. [00:00:09] Joe Krebs: All right, thank you for tuning into another episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata series. Today I have two guests with me, actually three guests with me. I have Dan Roman and Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations. We have Dexter with us in the background. He might or might not. Contribute to this recording as he's a dog, Dan is a frontline worker at Menlo.He's a a lead, but he's also primarily a software developer. We're going to talk a little bit about Kata in development and obviously Richard Sheridan, author of the books, The Chief Joy Officer and Joy Inc. Is it fair to say you're the Chief Joy Officer of Menlo. [00:00:54] Rich Sheridan: A chief storyteller is the more typical title they give me here.[00:00:59] Joe Krebs: Awesome. All right. The chief storyteller, Richard and Dan, welcome to the podcast.[00:01:04] Dan Roman: Thank you for having [00:01:05] Rich Sheridan: us. Thanks Joe. Good to see you. [00:01:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Good to connect. And this episode we're going to focus a little bit on development. We want to talk about how do teams build agile teams? How do they build a product?Here in particular software development products. Now, Dan you are, as far as I know from a website, your keynoting together with Richard there is, you have a focus on software for manufacturers of medical instruments and software for space researchers. So this is. This is I would say complicated, complex stuff you're working on and as far as I can tell and we talked about that during our visit in in Ann Arbor, where you guys are located, that there is no formal process like Scrum or Kanban or like to the book extreme programming deployed at Menlo Innovation.Is that correct? [00:02:01] Dan Roman: 100%. We have plenty of people who come and visit and we'll see what we're doing and find that what we're doing matches with one of their models. So we didn't set out to be agile, but agilists who come in say, Oh, Menlo is agile, or we have lean practitioners come in and they say, Oh, Menlo is lean.But our processes, we never started from a place of. We want to be agile. Let's do it this way or we want to be lean. Let's do it that way. [00:02:27] Joe Krebs: As you're obviously working with different kinds of companies and clients. And obviously also with different kinds of products you guys are creating. Now, I would be interesting because.There is a term that's being used, I was told, on the floor at Menlo, this is run the experiment. That seems to be a frequent term. Can you just specify, either one of you, what that means, or maybe both, right? And how that comes into play, working in agile ways. [00:02:55] Rich Sheridan: I would say, Joe, that phrase is born out of a background philosophy at Menlo that says, let probably pump fear out of the room.We think that fear is a culture killer. Filler fear is a mind killer. I think there's a line in doom that says something like that. And so if someone has a new idea here, rather than. Hey, let's form a committee to write a policy on that. I do. Let's take a meeting. Our inclination is to take action with that simple phrase.If somebody has an idea, somebody else might see. Great. Let's run the experiment. See what happens. And that can typically the things we try are on fairly small scale. We don't upend the whole place every week to try some new, crazy new way of working. But usually it is some small incremental change to an existing process or an enhancement to the way we do things here.Because somebody believed that there was a problem to solve and this experiment may help us address that problem. Again, trying it and see how it works. And the experiments that succeed are the ones that last a long time and others might just thritter away because they didn't actually solve an actual problem.Probably more often than not an experiment. Morphs over time. We had the original idea, we tried it, it didn't work the way we hoped. We try something a little different. [00:04:23] Joe Krebs: So it could go into either direction. So when we talked about this a little bit about the experimental part and obviously I'm very public about my my work and my interest in Kata and scientific thinking through Michael Rother and Jeffrey Liker.We, we met in Ann Arbor. And obviously when you hear the word experiment in connection with Kata , then it becomes, obviously the question is, how does this whole setup look like in Menlo? How do you guys operate? How does this all work? Do you guys have a product owner within Menlo? Do you guys have scrum masters?Do you guys have project managers, agile coaches? What do people listening to us right now have to imagine when they just picture Menlo and cannot visit you guys in person? [00:05:10] Rich Sheridan: It's probably valuable to know, just for your listeners, a little bit of background on what Menlo does for a living, where we make our money.We are doing custom software development on behalf of our clients. So Dan has done a lot of projects for us over the years that he's been here. He will work in with manufacturing companies who are trying to enhance their ERP systems. He'll work with furniture retailers who are trying to improve how things happen on the sales floor.So all these companies are coming to us because as Joe, everybody in the world needs software to run their businesses these days. And so we are bringing in clients from every industry imaginable to come in and work with us. We have a fairly simple structure to our team. The teams that Dan is a part of that are working on those various projects will consist of a project manager who is typically paired with we'll call it a product owner on the customer side of the equation.And for us, the customers are the people who are paying us to do this work. They aren't necessarily be going to be the end users, almost never the end users. Software building. We have a set of people on our team that have a very fun and unusual title and a great role called high tech anthropologists, and their job is to understand the humans that will one day use the software, the end users in software.Then we have our software development team, which comprises the biggest part of our company. And then Formal quality assurance role that works alongside the software development team. So every project at Menlo has some component of each of those four pieces. And and we work on a weekly iterative basis here.essentially right sizing every project for exactly the workload, right sizing it with the types of people it needs. We're more in the discovery phase. There'll be more high tech anthropology. If we're more in the software development phase, there will be more people like Dan on the project. The project manager and the QA teams are shared amongst variety projects, and they are they are constant throughout the course of each of the projects.In any given moment in time, we're a team of about 50 people. We have, probably right now, I'm going to guess about 15 different projects. at various stages. Some of the projects are large. They'll have 8 to 10 people on them. Some of the projects are small. They only have a couple. And it's probably worth noting that we pair.That pairing is a big construct here. That was an early experiment that took hold in the 23 years ago when we founded Menlo. And it has never let up since. [00:07:44] Joe Krebs: So running the experiment seems to be something like a, for testing and verifying the process in place, like programming, right? Is this an interesting, is this you have read about it, you, the teams might try it and find Found it useful, like many teams found their programming useful, right?So it's an interesting thing. So you're using that kind of experimentation approach for the process you're using, but you're also using experimentation for building the products for your clients. And that's where I want to go a little closer here. So you have your how do you protect your end user, your users?Your clients or your customers that are the product owner or acting out that role. If you want to say it this way. But then how do these requests come in? There's a ton of teams that are there that are using user stories product backlogs, ordering activities, refinement activities planning, sprint planning activities, and so on.How does this all look like at Menlo? How do you guys incorporate that if you work in different ways? I would be curious to hear. [00:08:42] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, the biggest starting point and starting is always hard for every project is starts with our high tech anthropology team and really attempt to answer three questions and use a lot of experiments to get to the answers to these questions.What problem are we actually trying to solve different than perhaps the one even the customer presented to us? Who exactly are we trying to solve this problem for? What types of people? And we'll use personas and persona maps for that exercise. But a lot of that discovery work is done out in the field.And so a lot of the early experiments are to be able to find these typical end users of the products we're working on out in the world. And that is often where some of the key experiments start early on. I'll give you a fun example, way back in our earliest days, long before anybody had iPhones or any kind of GPS devices, we were working with a company that wanted to create lanyard type devices that people who were on cruise ships would use to navigate the cities they would arrive in as the cruise ships pulled into port.And so imagine they had around their necks, they had these GPS driven devices with moving map displays and that sort of thing. So we had to figure out simple questions like do people know how to read maps? Because, if you ask a group of people, do you know how to read maps? Everybody would say, absolutely, I know how to read a map.If you ask people to read maps, you find that hardly 50 percent of people know how to read maps. And so it would be very expensive to try and do this on a cruise ship. We did get one cruise ship ride throughout the course of this project. But before that, we went to a local theme park here, locally here, just to watch people try and use maps.So we would run into that. with them. We would walk up to them with a map in our hand and say, Hey, can you show me where the Edison exhibit is? And we obviously have the map in our hand and we would see if that people would grab the map and what they would do with it and how they would orient it. And 50 percent of the people said, Oh, I can never read these things.See that circle I over there, the information booth, you should go ask them. So we found out right away that about 50 percent of people self report they don't know how to read maps. But this was really early experimental data that we could collect very inexpensively around what kind of challenges would people get to if they don't know how to read maps and we're creating a device that's supposed to allow them to navigate a city.And we get very creative. We try and do things inexpensively. And then ultimately we experiment with the potential designs, often with paper based prototypes to see what will actually work for people. Once we get into the actual software development, once we've secured that we understand what design and work for them, then there's a lot of other experiments that Dan and his fellow developers here at Memo will use.Sometimes those experiments are technical ones, technological ones. Sometimes it's most of the time, I would say they're often human ones because we were often working with developers. And our client sites, we have to figure out how to work with them, given the way we work. [00:11:55] Joe Krebs: Dan I'm curious, like just to take it to the software development side and take advantage of you being here on on this podcast as well, right?So it's a great insight to see business and the leadership of the organization, but also to see the actual implementation of these products, right? So let's say we're doing these visioning techniques and obviously as a. As Richard pointed out, there's a lot of cost savings finding out early on that people can read a map, right?Could you imagine you were building something assuming they can read a map? That would be a very costly detour later on. But I want to go a little bit deeper because there's so many teams, agile teams out there that are preparing for sprint planning activities or iteration planning. And they're using user stories or and then they're basically have planned everything and laid it out and implemented.You guys have through that experimental process, a different thing in place. I think it's much more lightweight, if I'm not mistaken. Can you walk the listeners maybe through once these requests come in and you're actually in the software development part of how you're still using experiments for that?[00:13:00] Dan Roman: Sure. So to as Rich was telling us about those experiments, it reminded me a little bit that every development iteration at Menlo, I would argue, is itself an experiment. So the beginning of the iteration happens after a show and tell, where the software development team will actually have the client or customer demo back to the development team the work that was accomplished for the previous iteration.And then based on that demo we'll authorize the next week's worth of work which comes out to some 40 planned hours worth of work. And when I think about Kata, I think about declaring a desired future state. And that's ultimately what we're doing. When we set out a plan for the iteration, we're saying the plan is we will end up in a state where these cards have been completed and there'll be completed in this effort.And then the rest of the iteration is the steps that we as a development team take to try and realize that. Future state. And then by the time we get to the end we'll basically start the cycle over again, which will again reminds me a little bit of Kata where we'll compare. All right, we started with a plan to get to this future state.We've run the iteration for a week. Let's compare where we are compared to where we want to be. And ultimately, all of that happens through obviously the software developers doing the work, but that all happens through . The story cards, which are our fundamental unit of work and these are three by five index cards on which are written the work items that the developers will go and implement and our quality advocates will go and test.And typically our high tech anthropologists are part of writing in the first place. .[00:14:28] Joe Krebs: Is there still like, are you pulling from an organized formal product backlog as so many scrum teams? are doing, or is this process a little bit more ad hoc and fluid based on the work you did in previous iterations where you're getting instant feedback from your customers and how does that all look like?The show and tell, that's where this comes together, I would assume. [00:14:50] Dan Roman: Yep. That's a very good question. So it's a little bit of all of the above. So what Rich was alluding to at the beginning of our engagements, the high tech anthropologists will do a lot of the Upfront work of describing here's based on our research and our observational data, what we believe the application needs to do.And that sets as a starting off point for the engagement itself. But over the course of every engagement, we are also discovering new work. So over the course of a given iteration, as the developers are doing work, they might write. They may write other story cards or the quality advocates may write some story cards or even at show and tell the client might may say, Oh, we didn't think about the fact that the user might need to do this certain thing.One of the fundamental rules that Menlo is that everyone can write a story card. Now just because you've written a story card doesn't mean that it'll get authorized or that'll get put on a weekly iteration. But we are certainly collecting the scope that's being executed nonstop over the course of the engagement.[00:15:49] Joe Krebs: How does maybe I love this story cards, right? Obviously, there is a story to be told and collaborated on as a team. How detailed are you? As teams now within Menlo, how detailed are you with the planning activities? Are you planning very ad hoc? Is this like in subgroups or pairs or how let's say, this, these requests are coming in.You have these stories and you're experimenting, I would assume also on those. How detailed are those or all the questions? [00:16:22] Rich Sheridan: Yeah. The important element of our planning that I think probably differs from many development teams is how collaborative it is with our customers. Number one, we're putting together at a high level a story mapped version that might map out a year or two worth of key milestones for this client broken down into achievable goals that might run.Okay. A month, two, three, four months. And then we start laying out the story cards for that very first goal. And the customer is standing alongside of us choosing these story cards that should go into that plan. Obviously we're giving them some advice from a technical standpoint as to if there's a more appropriate sequence of things that makes more sense, but we really want the business feeling like they're driving this we often find it When we hear of other teams challenges in planning and estimating and that sort of thing, you often find that it's an adversarial relationship with the business sponsors, where somebody is I can't believe it's going to take that long, or you need to get this done in a shorter amount of time.Our approach isn't to try and argue against the importance of a date or features within that date, but to simply argue with the data of here's what fits, given your budget, given your burn rate, given the team size we have. And then it's a question of, can we make responsible trade off decisions with our client to get to that particular goal?And then, as Dan said, on a weekly iterative basis, we're going to review the progress against our original plan. Because, no plan actually holds up once it hits reality. So we're going to get, sometimes we get more done than we expected, sometimes we get less done. But that weekly visit into what exactly do we get done in the weekly opportunity to now look ahead in that longer plan and say, okay, what we've learned now, should we make adjustments to the plan?Have we discovered new things that need to be done? Should we write story cards and estimate those story cards? Should we take some things off that we originally thought should be part of the plan in favor of newer, more important things? Collaborative planning happens on a week by week basis on all of our projects.I think the most fun thing I see happen is that often we use paper based planning techniques, which is again, unusual for software teams to use paper. Typically in the earliest part of our planning, all of our story cards are on white paper. But as time goes on, and as customers start to get nervous that we don't seem to be making as much progress, we often switch to, say, hot pink paper for things that were newly discovered or that somebody raised their hand in a meeting and said, hey we didn't think of this when we talked to you about it originally.And so we'll write that story card up, we'll estimate it, but when we put it in the paper based planning process, we make it hot pink. And over time, what you can see is The actual physical real estate of our planning sheets being taken up by more and more hot pink work Which essentially says hey, there was a lot of stuff for some reason we didn't discover early on Yes wrong with that, but let's at least acknowledge With this, these colorful pieces of paper that we are now three months into this project and 25 percent of the things we're working on are things neither one of us thought of at the beginning of the project.That can be really helpful to maintaining executive sponsorship of a project because. Now we can have explicit discussions about new things that came in. It isn't some theoretical wave your hands in the air. There were a few new things that came along. No, it is clear what the new things are that came along because it's on this different color.[00:20:18] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Creating truly a partnership, right? With with the business the clients in this case do to showcase this, right? And obviously as a client, I would assume they're all very happy with us to see that. They are late changes are being incorporated some way or the other, and [00:20:34] Rich Sheridan: happiness is an interesting word in this.So it would be fun to believe that the people on the other side of the planning table at Menlo have all of the power and all of the authority to make these changes. But typically they're reporting up to an executive somewhere that has some other budgetary constraints. . We're not so much trying to make happy customers out of this process.We're trying to make informed customers so they can have intelligent conversations when they go back to their offices to say, Hey, I thought you were going to have all of this. What happened? And what you really want to do is give them the physical artifacts they need to be able to create a story. scale all the way up, perhaps to the CEO of the company to figure out why is this project where it's at right now.[00:21:27] Joe Krebs: . That's a good point. And thanks for clarifying. I think makes makes perfect sense. Dan Richard's mentioned the word a few times. I want to go a little bit deeper. That's the word estimates. Are you guys estimating there's a lot of different kind of estimation techniques out there.Agile teams are using, I'm just curious with this approach where you're going into more experimental activities, if estimation is actually still a thing here, or if it's an, if so, how lightweight it is. [00:21:58] Dan Roman: Sure. So to start right off the bat, yes, we do estimate it's part of that weekly iteration cycle.So every development team is sitting down and looking at the cards in play, as well as cards likely to be played in the future and estimating those story cards. That takes about an hour of time for regardless of the size of the dev team and we estimate in hours and in powers of two. So a given story card at Menlo would sit between two hours and 32 hours again on that power of two spectrum which can feel pretty radical for some organizations where things like velocity.I know that's a very popular way to, Fibonacci numbers as a means of calculating velocity or t shirt sizes, another sort of abstraction. I think that there are a couple of things that necessitate, or at least why we as Menlonians prefer that method. One is because estimating in hours is a universal language that when we get to that planning game after the show and tell with our stakeholders.There's no need to do any translation between 13 Fibonacci points or a medium t shirt size. We can say we've got 40 hours of effort for a given pair to plan for. And this card is 16, and that's 16 hours worth of work. And that's something that is instantly understandable by our stakeholders.I think part of the reason that we as a team are able to do that and Not in all cases, but in some cases, why other teams choose those kinds of abstractions at Menlo. We have a very healthy relationship between the technical folks who are doing the work and the project managers and stakeholders who are authorizing and planning the work.And that's manifest in this sort of contract. That's very explicit and part of, as I understand it, our project management training. There's a dual responsibility for maintaining our estimates. So any software developer pair that's doing work on a card. As soon as they know they're going to miss the estimate.So if Rich and I were pairing on a story card and we were on an eight hour card and we started to realize, Oh, wait, this is bigger. This is going to be at least double that. This is a 16 hour card. Now we have a obligation to go out to our project manager, for example, Lisa, she's one of our PMs and telling her, Hey, Lisa, we are working on this card.It was originally estimated as an 8, but because of these reasons, we see it as a 16. That's our half of the sort of contract. The other half of that is the one that lives on Lisa's side, or the PM's side, which is to say, Thank you for your estimate, and smile. And that sounds like a really simple little strategy, but it's That kind of strategy that sucks the fear out of the room that would otherwise inhibit Rich and I from volunteering that information or giving an honest, updated estimate on the card.And that's why a lot of other teams can run into those abstractions is because it's scary or painful when you let some set of stakeholders know, oh, this thing we originally estimated will take a day is now going to take more than that. Yeah, [00:24:59] Joe Krebs: well, there's definitely a lot of controversy out there about.Estimation and the techniques and in communicated and sometimes they're so like inflated to o just to be safe, depending on what organization and teams you work for. So that's, does not seem to be the approach at Menlo and obviously you guys. I've taken an expert estimate on the work at that time and see what, what comes out of it.Once you start working on it very interesting thing. Now you just mentioned that I want to follow up on that word too, because I think the listeners out there who are. Used to agile coaches scrum masters, et cetera, et cetera. They are probably not saying did he just say the word project manager?Did he just use that term? And because that sometimes that is a term that has been removed and replaced and you guys are using it actively, as far as I understand what's the role of a project manager at? Menlo, if you're working so in so agile ways and in experiments and et cetera what would be the role of a project manager other than nodding and saying, thanks for your estimate and smiling.[00:26:09] Rich Sheridan: So the primary role of a project manager at Menlo is to be the voice of the customer, people who pay us to do the work when the customer isn't in the room. And so their job is to answer questions from the development team about the general direction of the project, where it's going, how we're going to get there, what what the overall overarching goals for the project are if the cause, if the project manager doesn't know they will reach out to the client who isn't imminently available every time we want to reach out to them.That's why we need somebody who's advocating on their behalf when the client isn't around or not available by phone and that sort of thing. The the other role important role project manager does is to help the team remove obstacles. Dan and his pair partner will be rolling along and a card gets stuck.Have a question, need to reach out to somebody, you can just let Lisa know and say, Hey, Lisa, I just want to let you know we're stuck here. We wrote to the client. We're waiting for an answer. We're going to red dot that card, which means they're going to stop it. We're going to move on to the next card in the lane.And if there's anything you can do to help remove that obstacle, that would be awesome. Project managers also keeping close track. Our customers are spending a lot of money with us, so keeping close track on the budget relative to the total budget relative to the burndown for that budget, all those kinds of things.I guess there's a tremendous amount of, financial oversight that comes with every one of our projects, we're often working on projects that run into the millions of dollars. And so project managers are helping manage that part of the process with us. And you're also making a lot of decisions alongside people like Dan is to what should the composition of the team be this week.So it's a very collaborative role for the people doing the work I mentioned before we pair, we switch the pairs every five business days and. over time, systematically rotate people in and out of the projects to avoid burnout, to avoid towers of knowledge issues, all that kind of stuff. And the project managers will work very closely with the team to figure out what would be the best composition of people who should pair with whom who who would be good candidates for these story cards, that sort of thing.[00:28:27] Dan Roman: I think there's one element that's important too for Menlo, but I would also argue this is true of other organizations. But the roles and the titles that we have for the work that each of us as Menlonians do does describe a primary role. But that is not to say that the team is not responsible for also doing some of the other responsibilities of the other roles.For example, I am primarily a software developer at Menlo. But on a day to day basis, I am contributing to the conversations Rich is talking about where it's planning the resources for the project, making sure that the customer is appraised of any changes to the plan or keeping in mind the decisions that we're making today and what impact that has on the end user, the way that our high tech anthropologists might be considering.So I think it's one of those things where it's like we, we have those titles and those roles to an easy heuristic to generally describe what we do within Menlo, but at the end of the day, there's actually a lot of blending or blurring of the lines that exist between our individual roles.[00:29:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah. I think that's also it speaks to the self managing aspect of agility in general. Now I'm so thrilled to have you both on this podcast episode, because we had in this Kata series so far, we had different topics. We talked about transformational cultural things. I, this is a and I think that's a really great, wonderful episode.I believe it's a wonderful episode that really focused on Developing in agile ways, but in a non prescriptive or existing frameworks. That are out there and you can almost say like, when I listen to your conversation. It's almost it's almost sounds like cherry picking, right? Of how we're using this concept, or we are estimating, but a little bit different, or we have paper, but some of them are pink.And and so what I and working in pairs and we're shifting pairs and the way of how you operate with clients rather than the product owner being in house, the product owner is the actual client. So there's a lot of things. So there are some terminologies or project manager, just to name another one versus a scrum master.And what's really fascinating, I think, is for one of the goals of this episode is to show existing Agile teams if something's not working with an existing framework or with the process they have chosen, as you guys said, run the experiment, right? Try something new. Adjust your process. That's one element.And maybe you find ways of changing the way of how you currently work with breaking something. Obviously, that is recommended, but you're saying it's not working for us. That's not us. And that would be whatever you shared about. Menlo and the culture, but there's also the way of using this way of working to build the product itself, right?So there's two aspects to it, shape the process, how you want to work, but also the way of how you build a product for your clients. So I want to thank you guys for that. That is really nice. Thank you. [00:31:22] Rich Sheridan: You bet. Yeah. I think our general philosophy is all of these tools, methodologies, ways of thinking have value to offer and why would we constrain ourselves to simply one of them?Why don't we borrow pieces and parts? And put, I think for us, we do refer to our general system of work here as the Menlo way of working. . And but if you probed, you would see we borrowed all these pieces from this so we don't find ourselves resisting any of them. We find ourselves embracing them, looking at them deciding, oh, that might work here.And every project has its own unique, qualities to it as well. I [00:32:02] Dan Roman: think one of the pieces that reminds me of is the notion that when we're designing our process, we're setting out to solve a problem and our problem isn't that we're not doing agile. It's not that we're not doing scrum and we need to start doing scrum.We're trying to provide value to a customer on a frequent and consistent basis such that they can respond to feedback and make planning decisions. There are times when that desire or attempt to solve that problem will line up pretty closely with what Agile might seem like or Lean. But at the end of the day, it all starts from let's solve a problem and the absence of some predetermined process is not itself a problem.. [00:32:42] Joe Krebs: Yeah. This is, that's wonderful. And then maybe a good word to end the the podcast episode here together. And obviously there is. An opportunity to take a tour with Menlo and see that all in action. So I invite the listeners to go and reach out to you. There's a, there's tons of tours you guys are doing on a yearly basis.Ann Arbor is the place to visit in Michigan. And and then they can see all what we just talked about in action.[00:33:08] Rich Sheridan: And one of our experiments during the pandemic were virtual tours that we continue to this day, even though. The in person tours have resumed. , [00:33:17] Joe Krebs: even cooler. So this could be done just from your couch.Thank you so much. [00:33:22] Dan Roman: Thank you.​

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile.FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you again for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. This is the Agile Kata series. And today we're going to explore Kata from a leadership's perspective. And I have here with me Mark Rosenthal who is with Novayama that is his company. He's out of the West coast, United States, and we're going to explore a little bit together, leadership in conjunction with Kata, which is Series all about.We're gonna explore that angle a little bit. Welcome to the show, mark. [00:00:40] Mark Rosenthal: Thank you very much. It's looking forward to the opportunity. [00:00:43] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is awesome. I wanna go back in time with you and talk a little bit about an employment you had where you worked from home. [00:00:52] Mark Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. . [00:00:53] Joe Krebs: You didn't get a lot of phone calls until you got one.[00:00:56] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. [00:00:57] Joe Krebs: And that was the one you got terminated. [00:01:00] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. Bu Yeah. [00:01:01] Joe Krebs: But the interesting thing is you in your reflection, you had a, let's say a moment of realizing a lack of leadership skills. [00:01:14] Mark Rosenthal: Yes. And yeah, and really that was, and this is even better because this is really the kind of leadership that most conduct practitioners have to engage in, which is influence.You don't have formal authority you rather, you've got to, you have to find a way to influence the lead, the line leaders in the organization to be effective. And this is true for lots of cases. It's true whenever I'm bringing groups of people together that I can't tell what to do. And actually it's more true that you think even in the military, which is where I learned leadership.And it really was that. We tend to do, we practitioners tend to engage with the technical artifacts, and we put in the tools, we put in the mechanics, and we don't, and then we complain when the line leadership doesn't embrace the changes. And that is on us because if you look at a traditional Kaizen event approach, for example, in the world of, you know, of CI, but this would be equally true for somebody trying to get scrum in place or somebody trying to cause any change in the way the organization does business.I can describe the mechanics of the daily standup perfectly. I can describe, I can get all the scheduling. I can get the artifacts into place.If there isn't a engagement of the conversation about how we do it on a daily basis too, then it's going to fall apart as soon as that that, that goes away in the situation you're describing. I mean, it was even worse in a way, just because of the nature. It was an international organization and it didn't really matter where I worked, so I didn't work anywhere.Although I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. You know, going to Europe once a month, going all kinds of places. But what I was doing was making technical recommendations. And then, you know, they weren't getting picked up. And frankly, I wasn't earning my money. Yeah. And the key here for a change agent.Is it's not about the tools you're putting into place, the tools are there to create the kinds of conversations that need to happen in the organization between the leaders and between people, between groups of people. And once I understood that, then the paradigm changes completely because the experiments I run are testing whether or not I'm effective at moving the needle.About how these conversations are taking place. And that's kind of what I was talking about in the, you know, in the story that you're alluding to. [00:04:20] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So this is a life changing event for you, but also in your career, right? You had a lot of learnings coming out of this. [00:04:27] Mark Rosenthal: A lot of them, and they came later on.You know, I had, I was familiar with Toyota Kata at the time. But I was still in the position of trying to make people do it, and I can't do that. What I have to do is look at the dynamics in the organization and think in terms of it's not the mechanics of standing up a storyboard and getting them to go through the starter kata of grasping the current condition and all of that.It's about what actions what small experiment can I run? That I think that I hypothesize will nudge the conversation into, for example, talking about something a little more concrete than we had a good day or a bad day, which moves them toward measuring how they're doing, you know, in that example, that particular organization really had disdain for numbers because they made people look bad.So they didn't talk about them. I mean, they had them on displays, but nobody ever talked about them and the numbers they had on displays were lagging indicators. Yeah. It's interesting because you said like the words, if I remember correctly, like you said, like moving the needle, and I think that's also important from a leadership perspective, are we just in the operations mode of tools and features and keeping those alive or are we disrupting them?Yeah. Absolutely. Certain ways of working within the organization as a leader. Yeah, and you're going to be disrupting, you know, that's the whole point in a way. So when I want to begin to shift things I want to do is engage in the smallest change I can that's going to move things. And I'm going to try to do is to incorporate that change into something they're already doing.So in this example, there was already a daily production meeting. So rather than saying, we're going to have another meeting about improvement, rather than saying, you got to stop doing that way and start doing it this way, I can hook part of my agenda into the existing structure. So as a change agent, I want to look at what are they already doing?And can I grab any of that and just modify it in a way? That moves the conversation in the direction it needs to go. [00:06:58] Joe Krebs: Yeah, This is interesting, right? There's two things I would like to talk about, and I'm not sure which one should be first or not. I'll just take one and get started.Maybe it's the wrong order, but. We just went through a, or just two years ago, we somewhat ended the pandemic and we started going back to work. And your experience obviously from work from home was prior to to the pandemic. Now you had some learnings in terms of leadership and we see a lot of companies that are bringing the people back to work sometimes mandatory.And sometimes it's the leadership team that just feels like very strongly about that. So I want to just include that in terms of, it's very impressive right now. There's a lot of companies still work in that kind of dual mode or came back full time back on premises. What advice do you have based on your learning for leaders when you work this way?I don't know if you'd have any, but I'll just put you on the spot.[00:07:58] Mark Rosenthal: You know, that's a good one. You know, you're going to encounter resistance, but you know, this is a quote from Ron Heifetz out of Harvard, who Talks about this thing called adaptive leadership, which really is applying PDCA to leadership. And that's why I like it so much, because it follows the Kata pattern of grasp the current condition, make a, you know, make a judgment where you want to go next and run experiments to try to get there.And he said, and I love this, people don't resist change. People resist loss. Nobody gives back a winning lottery ticket. And so the people who are. are used to working with the cat on their lap and having be able to respond to their kids and all the awesome things that come from the ability to work from home are losing that connection that they have developed with their family.So that's what they're resisting. Typically, you know, I can't speak for everybody, but what's, you know, the flip side is what's the boss, what did the company lose when the people didn't come to the office? And that was the informal interaction that drives the actual conversation that gets stuff done.Yeah. And so that's what I didn't have, right? You know, we didn't have, I don't even think we didn't have video. We didn't, you know, I mean, this was a while ago. I think, you know, Skype was cutting edge stuff, right? [00:09:31] Joe Krebs: Hard to imagine, right? [00:09:32] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah yeah. You know, if I were to go back to the same situation, I would be having a lot more scheduled online sessions.With not just individuals, but with groups of people sharing their experiences with, in my case, with continuous improvement and what they're doing so that I didn't need to be there all the time, but I could work on keeping the conversation and the buzz going and get a better read for the organization.[00:10:09] Joe Krebs: Yeah. You mentioned that I've heard you say things like that leadership is a typical leadership. Yeah. What is authority. And then sometimes you do see that when you go back to, to work in, you know, in work environments where you're being asked and forced to come back to work versus adaptive leaderships, taking a different approach to something like that.But another quote you said, and maybe that's the other angle I wanted to ask you. . Is I heard you say a phrase that leadership is an activity, not a role. [00:10:40] Mark Rosenthal: And that's again, I want to make credit where credit is due. That's right out of, you know, Ron Heifetz work and a lot of it is taught at a place called the Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita.And so I want to make sure I'm giving credit where credit is due. . So in, there are, you know, there are cases where authority is a good thing. There are cases where you have to get something done fast. The building is on fire, evacuate immediately, not, hey, what do you think we should do?But even when there is formal authority, it's far more effective to use leadership as a role with the goal of developing other leaders. And, you know, this is if you know, are familiar with the work of David Marquet and his book, Turn the Ship Around on the submarine, you know, he, as the captain of the submarine had absolute authority.Yeah. And. And I read that book. I'm a former military officer. I was in the Army. Okay. We didn't get it. I did not go on a boat that was designed to sink. But you know, at the end of the story, he tells a story of, he. interprets a situation incorrectly, and he gives an order that was incorrect at the end of the story, and he is countermanded on the bridge with no captain, you're wrong, from the lowest ranking sailor on the bridge.Who countermanded an order from the captain of the ship. Yeah. And all it did was cause him to look back, reassess, and realize that this 22 year old kid was right. And that's what we want, right? Yeah. We want people to tell us if we're making a mistake. [00:12:29] Joe Krebs: Yeah, that's a key lesson. I remember this by listening, I listened to that particular book, which is also very eyeopening.Now, seeing a leadership like this, we see adaptive leadership. But it's obviously something you are embracing. There's a lot of books out there about leadership. That's a massive amount of books. And people could go wild, but you know, many of those are personal stories about what that person has embraced and you might find something very useful here now in certain areas of those books, but you might not 100 percent apply to your own.Yeah. That might leave the reader with, how would I approach this problem with all that wisdom that is out there and how do you combine and this is where I want to go with you here now in terms of leadership is how can the Agile Kata, the Kata, the improvement Kata, coaching Kata, how can the Kata ways of working scientific thinking.Help support leaders who are like, I want to create an environment like that. I want to have adaptive leadership. How can Kata help me with this? [00:13:37] Mark Rosenthal: Great point, because you know, all those books are those, as you pointed out, those people's personal stories. And it's interesting because all the, all of the stories about success have survivor bias.Built in and we don't, you know, they're in, in, in lean world, there's a commonly bandied about number that 85, 90 percent of all attempts to put it in the place fail. We read about the ones that are successful, but what we don't know is that the ones that failed probably followed the same formula.And it only works five or 10 percent of the time. That's really the story here. So what you, there isn't a cookbook and what you got to do is first understand the culture you're trying to build. Because if you don't have that in your mind deliberately, you're going to end up going wherever. But then.You've got to grasp your own situation in your own organization and then set that next target condition using Kata terms of, okay, I'm not going to try to get there all at once, but what's the one major thing I'm going to try to get in if I'm trying to change the change away and organization runs probably on a 90 day window.You know, if we're in industry or Kata, we set a target condition of a couple of weeks and no more than that. But, you know, these are bigger things. So where do I want to be at the end of the quarter? Where do I want to be, you know, in three months? And then that narrows my focus. And then I can just start working on that.And maybe it's just I'm going to, I'm going to get the staff meeting working. more effectively so that we're not trying to solve problems in the meeting. We're just talking about the status of problem solving. That's just a hypothetical example, but that was one place I try to take people for example.Yeah. And I was work on that. [00:15:45] Joe Krebs: So you work with leaders through. Coaching cycles. You coach them going through the four steps of the improvement Kata. And you help them to, as you say, move the needle. Towards more adaptive leadership. [00:16:04] Mark Rosenthal: And this is using adaptive leadership really to do it, right?So it's a meta thing in a way. And when I'm, you know, I'm really talking to the change agents out there, you know, the, and in, in the agile world, you know, the scrum master is a staff person who's the holder of the torch of what this is supposed to look like. So this is what. They can do us to work, you know, to say, okay, I know it's not perfect right now.What's the one thing I'm going to emphasize over the next 90 days to get it better? And maybe it's, you know, I'm just going to get the stand up to be less than 15 minutes. Okay. I just got to get people to just, you know, this is what they talk about. And then they pass the torch to the next person, for example, or the next pair in that case.[00:17:01] Joe Krebs: You are, I think by looking through your material a little bit and seeing where you're coming from, you're using a tremendous amount of powerful questions. Can you, again, I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but can you give possibly some like a, like an outline of how. What kind of questions you would be throwing so to make it a little bit more concrete.. We weren't listening to this like a leader or somebody who's receiving some form of coaching from you. And then what kind of questions it's powerful stuff. [00:17:38] Mark Rosenthal: . So the coaching Kata just to some background here and what Toyota Kata is just so that we got on topic is.What Mike Rother essentially did, and this isn't 100 percent accurate, but this is the effect, is he parsed a lot of the coaching conversations that were happening, you know, with leaders and learners at Toyota. And those conversations often are around A3, for example, which is just a piece of paper. And often it's just sounds like a conversation.But there were elements of the questioning that was, that were always present. And the way I describe it is he boiled all that down and was left at the bottom of the pot was the structure of questions that he published as the Improvement Kata. So I'm going to ask first, I'm going to go off the script first.What is your target condition? So I want to hear is where you're trying to go in the short term. And what will be in place when you get there? What is the actual condition now in between the two I'm really looking for is what's the gap you're trying to close between where things are now and where you're trying to go in that short term.Then we're going to reflect on the last step you took because you committed to take that step the last time we talked. So what did you plan as your last step? What did you expect? Because there was a hypothesis that if I do this, then I'll learn that, or this will happen. And what actually happened, And what did you learn?Then I'm going to ask, okay, what obstacles are now, do you think are now preventing you from reaching your target condition? And so really that's Mike chose the word obstacle because the word problem in the West is really loaded. Okay. Because a problem to a lot of people in industry is something I don't want the boss to find out.You know, another company I work for, I called them barriers, but it was before Kata was written. But if I go back and look at my stuff, this is basically the same structure. And that's just an enumeration of what person, the problem solver, the learner thinks are the problems. And as a coach, that's kind of telling me what they think right there, right?I'm beginning to see what they see because they're telling me, which one are we addressing now? It's important to address one problem at a time. And then based on that, and in being informed by the last step you took. What are you planning as your next step and what do you expect? So that's kind of the script going off script often just means asking calibrated follow on questions to get the information that I didn't get from the primary question.This is where, you know, if you're talking to Tilo Schwartz, he's got a lot of structure around that, which is really a contribution to the community. [00:20:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah, but your questions are not yes, no answers or status related, even the follow ups are investigative, kind of like bringing things to surface for the learner, not for you to receive a status.[00:21:07] Mark Rosenthal: What I'm looking for is, again, Toyota Kata jargon, their threshold of knowledge, the point at which, okay, the next step is probably learn about that. And there are times when, you know, even before we get to all the questions, if we encounter that threshold of knowledge, okay, great. We need to learn that.What's the next step in order to learn more about that? [00:21:32] Joe Krebs: Mark, this is this is really good. I was just like listening to Katie Anderson's book, and it was funny that you say problem in the Western world, not a very popular word and she makes tons of references in her book about. No problem. is a problem.[00:21:50] Mark Rosenthal: That's, yeah. That's the Toyota mantra. That's the Toyota mantra. [00:21:54] Joe Krebs: And yeah. So whatever you want to call it, you want to overcome it. If it's an obstacle, an impediment, or if it's a problem you want to overcome. [00:22:02] Mark Rosenthal: And that's a really good point about the culture. And I'm going to quote my friend, Rich Sheridan here, you know, fear does not make problems go away.Fear drives problems into hiding. Yeah. And we encounter that a lot where I go into a culture where everybody has to have the answers or everything needs to look good. And so asking them, what problems are you trying to solve here can be problematic. And so that's where the adaptive leadership part comes in, okay, I'm going to have to overcome the obstacle of that cultural hesitancy and find a way to help them get a shared sense of the truth. That they can talk to rather than talking to each other. And again, if I go into, you know, the, like the extreme programming world where I've got the cards on the wall, for example that is that shared sense of the truth. I can walk in and I can tell which pairs are working on which things and whether they're a hit or behind very quickly without having to ask anyone and there's nothing concealed is fully transparent.We go into industry, the purpose of the visual controls, the purpose of the status boards, the purpose of the Andon lights, the purpose of all of the lean tools, all of them is to put the truth of what's actually happening out there as compared to what should be happening so that we have an invitation to deal with it.[00:23:43] Joe Krebs: But they're tools. [00:23:45] Mark Rosenthal: But they're, but that's all the tools are, that's what they're for. Yeah. [00:23:50] Joe Krebs: That is great. Mark, I want to thank you for spending some time here talking from a leadership's perspective to the Agile FM audience and in particular in the Kata series to explore Kata and how Kata can influence.leadership and what you can do to embrace adaptive leadership while performing scientific thinking as a leader. And obviously your personal stories as well. So thank you, Mark. [00:24:14] Mark Rosenthal: Sure thing. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. ​

Heidi Helfand is the author of Dynamic Reteaming, which outlines practical strategies for orchestrating successful team and company org changes. Her work is informed by more than 20 years in the tech industry at notable companies like AppFolio, Procore, and Expertcity/GoToMeeting. Today, she dedicates her efforts to sharing her knowledge through workshops, comprehensive courses, and consultative services, helping organizations navigate and optimize their team structures. In this episode, we discuss:• The importance of reteaming and reorging• The benefits of embracing reteaming• The five patterns of reteaming: one by one, grow and split, merging, isolation, and switching• Examples of successful reteaming• Why stable teams are not always ideal• How change can lead to great career opportunities• The RIDE framework for decision-making• Advice on how to set up isolated teams for success• The anti-patterns of reteaming and the challenges that can arise• Tactical tips for becoming a better listener—Brought to you by:• Productroadmap.ai—AI to connect your roadmaps to revenue• Hex—Helping teams ask and answer data questions by working together• Ahrefs—Improve your website's SEO for free—Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today's transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.—Where to find Heidi Helfand:• X: https://twitter.com/heidihelfand• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidihelfand/• Website: https://www.heidihelfand.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Heidi's background(03:40) How Heidi got involved with reteaming and reorgs(07:37) Advice for people dealing with reorgs(11:56) The benefits of change and the RIDE framework(17:11) The five patterns of reteaming(20:00) The power of isolation(27:38) Advice on how to be successful by isolating small teams(33:27) Supporting and protecting internal startups(34:33) The one-by-one pattern(36:44) The grow and split pattern(39:20) The merging pattern(42:14) The switching pattern(50:18) Anti-patterns of reteaming(52:49) Embracing change and growth(58:48) How to become a better listener(01:01:28) Lightning round—Referenced:• Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams: https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Reteaming-Wisdom-Changing-Teams/dp/1492061298• O'Reilly: https://www.oreilly.com/• Procore Technologies: https://www.procore.com/• Kristian Lindwall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristianlindwall/• Chris Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissmithagile• Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes: https://www.amazon.com/Transitions-Making-Changes-Revised-Anniversary/dp/073820904X• Pat Wadors on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patwadors/• The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strategies/dp/1119690358• GoToMyPC: https://get.gotomypc.com/• Teamwork: https://www.amazon.com/Teamwork-Right-Wrong-Interpersonal-Communication/dp/0803932901• AppFolio: https://www.appfolio.com/• SecureDocs: https://www.securedocs.com/• Citrix: https://www.citrix.com/• The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups: https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Code-Secrets-Highly-Successful/dp/0804176981• Tuckman's stages of group development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development• Rich Sheridan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/ • Menlo Innovations: https://menloinnovations.com/• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Kata-Managing-Improvement-Adaptiveness/dp/0071635238• Paulo Freire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire• Jon Walker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwalker/• Managing Corporate Lifecycles: https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Corporate-Lifecycles-Ichak-Adizes/dp/9381860548• The Adizes Institute: https://www.adizes.com/• John Cutler on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/what-differentiates-the-highest-performing-product-teams-john-cutler-amplitude-the-beautiful-mes/• Co-Active Training Institute: https://coactive.com/• Co-Active Coaching: The proven framework for transformative conversations at work and in life: https://www.amazon.com/Co-Active-Coaching-Fourth-transformative-conversations/dp/1473674980• Creating Intelligent Teams: https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Intelligent-teams-Anne-R%C3%B8d/dp/186922583X• The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Surprising-Power-Liberating-Structures-Innovation/dp/0615975305• Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making: https://www.amazon.com/Facilitators-Participatory-Decision-Making-Jossey-bass-Management/dp/1118404955• The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

DETAILS | Chief Joy Officer Rich Sheridan reminds us of a somber reality: many lead lives of quiet desperation AT WORK and go to their graves with a song still in their hearts. But it doesn't have to be this way. We dive into Rich's powerful journey from despair to profound inspiration. Like many of us, he chased the wrong career success metrics; it wasn't working, and he knew he had to change himself. Rich has deep empathy and wisdom for professionals, asking the same powerful questions he asked: What do I want out of my career?  Why don't the traditional definitions of success and achievement make me happy? Given all that has happened, what needs to change to get to the next best version of me and my career? For over a decade, from the heart of Menlo to global stages, and through his bestsellers, "Joy, Inc." and "Chief Joy Officer," Rich has been illuminating a potent message: Everyone deserves to experience Joy at work, and we can build a workplace that people love! We explore joy as a tangible metric, how to define and measure Joy at work, the characteristics of a joyful leader, the power of running experiments, and how to lead with inspiration instead of fear. GUEST | Richard Sheridan—entrepreneur, business leader, and author—is best known as the co-founder, CEO, and “Chief Storyteller” of Menlo Innovations, a software and IT consulting firm that has earned numerous awards, acclaim, and press for its innovative and positive workplace culture. Rich's bestselling books Joy Inc: How We Built a Workplace People Love and Chief Joy Officer have inspired tens of thousands, and his message of joyful leadership has been featured in press outlets ranging from Inc, Forbes, and New York magazines to Bloomberg, U.S. News & World Report, NPR's On Point podcast, NPR's All Things Considered, and the Harvard Business Review. Rich was inducted into the Shingo Academy in 2022 for his work supporting the principles of organizational excellence. OVERVIEW | Are you ready to ADAPT and REINVENT YOURSELF for the most disrupted and digital workforce in history? What would it feel like to belong and not get stuck? It is estimated over 1 billion people will need reskilling by 2030, and more than 300 million jobs will be impacted by AI  — work, identity, and what it means to be human are rapidly changing. Join hosts Nate Thompson and Alex Schwartz and the TOP VOICES in the Future of Work to uncover how to meet this dynamic new reality driven by AI, hybrid work, societal shifts, and our increasingly digital world. Discover why a Future of Work Mindset is your key to prepare, navigate, and thrive! We are grateful you are here, and welcome to the TDW Tribe! www.thedisruptedworkforce.com

It's episode 95 and the highlight is Tracy & Elisabeth's interview with Rich Sheridan, the CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations. Rich's ingeniously Lean-incognito workplace sparks joy in all who enter. Menlo recovered from Covid with their best year to date, and Rich explains why. For Hot Apps, the AI exploration continues. This time it's some free help with project presentations. And for Q&A it's the Praise Paradox. We all want to be acknowledged, but we don't often see ourselves as the source of praise for others. Why is that, and what can we do about it?   0:00 - Intro 01:23 - What's on the Menu? 02:32 - Hot Apps SlidesAI.io (Chrome Extension) 10:09 - Q&A "How do you handle the Praise Paradox?" 19:58 - Featured Guest Rich Sheridan 46:46 - Upcoming Events New Workshop 10/24: "Value Stream Mapping Unleashed" October Webinar 10/19: "Causal Reasoning: Lean Special Sauce for Root Cause Analysis" New Bestselling Book, "Picture Yourself A Leader" New Lean Parody Video, "Baby Got Tools!"   Thanks for Listening!   Listen to more podcasts at JITCafe.com.   Link to the video version of this podcast: https://www.jitcafe.com/post/running-the-experiments-at-menlo-innovations-with-rich-sheridan   Find us on: - Apple Podcasts - Podbean - Spotify - RSS Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/JITCafe/feed.xml

Are you ready to elevate your business success by harnessing the power of collaboration? In this episode, we sat down with Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations to understand how he has driven Menlo Innovations to success through teamwork and innovation. Tune in to this episode to discover: Actionable strategies to transform your workplace into a hub of teamwork and innovation. Insight into Menlo Innovations' collaborative approach and how you can apply similar principles to boost efficiency, quality, and innovation within your workplace. Real-world examples of successful collaboration across various industries. Check out our blog for more ways to improve the impact of your experience strategy for your customer and company.  

Episode page with transcript, video, and more My guest for Episode #220 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Rich Sheridan, the co-founder, CEO, and “Chief Storyteller” of Menlo Innovations, a software and IT consulting firm that has earned numerous awards and press coverage for its innovative and positive workplace culture. He's the author of two books — first,  Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, and then his latest, published in 2019, Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear. I've interviewed Rich twice in my “Lean Blog Interviews” podcast, we've crossed paths at conferences, and I've been able to visit the Menlo Innovations office in Ann Arbor (2014). In this episode, Rich shares two favorite mistake stories from his time as a senior leader at a previous company. Why did one mistake change his life? How did the second mistake help him put himself in the CEO's shoes? Rich also kindly endorsed my new book: “At Menlo Innovations, one of our favorite phrases is ‘Make Mistakes Faster!' It's not that we like making mistakes, we just prefer making small mistakes quickly rather than BIG mistakes slowly. The difference comes from creating a culture where we are safe to share our mistakes. In The Mistakes That Make Us, author Mark Graban teaches all of us how to do this and shares story after real story of the benefits. It would be a BIG mistake to ignore this wisdom!” Questions and Topics: Why the title “chief storyteller?” How do you define “joy” in the workplace? What's your role as CEO in helping others find joy or be joyful? Joy vs. happiness? Deming connections: pride, fear Why is eliminating fear so important to you and Menlo? You say, “one of your favorite phrases at Menlo Innovations is ‘Make Mistakes Faster!” — tell us more about that…  “Fear makes bad news go into hiding…” “Let's run the experiment” — tell us more, “try stuff and see if it works” Being open to small mistakes as a way to avoid big ones? An experiment in working with you? “Without the stories, Menlo doesn't make sense” Paired work Please follow, rate, and review via Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or your favorite app — that helps others find this content, and you'll be sure to get future episodes as they are released weekly. You can also financially support the show through Spotify. You can now sign up to get new episodes via email, to make sure you don't miss an episode. This podcast is part of the Lean Communicators network. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

In this episode, Rich Sheridan and I discuss the impacts of implementing a culture of storytelling. What You'll Learn: 1. Why are you called the Chief Storyteller at Menlo? 2. Why is storytelling such an important part of your company's culture? 3. What kinds of stories are relevant to tell? 4. How do you curate stories? 5. How do you build a storytelling culture? About the Guest:  Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations, is a successful entrepreneur and author of two best-selling books—Joy Inc.: How We Built Workplace People Love and Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear. Rich's passion for inspiring organizations to create their own joy-filled cultures has led him to address audiences across the world—through four continents and 18 countries (and counting) as well as throughout the United States. Links: Click here to learn more about Rich Sheridan Click Here to learn more about Menlo Innovations Click here for more information on Rich Sheridan's books Click here for The Lean Solutions Summit  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leansolutions/support

Dave was joined by Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations, Speaker, and Author of "Chief Joy Officer" and "Joy, Inc." at the NEHRA 2022 Conference in this live edition of The Hennessy Report. Rich describes the truly unique culture at Menlo, with leaders traveling from around the world to tour their workspace and hear the team's stories. Whether it's working in teams of two on one computer, managing and conducting performance reviews with no "managers" but as a group, or pitting candidates towards each other rather than against - judged on how they support their rival - Rich paints a culture of true joy. You don't want to miss this unique episode of The Hennessy Report. Tune in now!

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM . Radio for the Agile community. www agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of agile FM today I have Katie Anderson with me. She has a web address not as easy ... Katie Anderson.com No! It's www.KBJAanderson.com. Just want to highlight that if you're starting googling her, she's an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant, professional speaker, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations to lead with intentions. She has written a book, learning to lead, leading to learn that was published in 2020. We want to talk about some of those topics today. In this episode, we're gonna talk about maybe Australia, Japan, UK, United States, topics like that. But first and foremost, welcome to the podcast, Katie.Katie Anderson 1:07 Thanks, Joe. I'm so really excited to be here and to have this conversation with you.Joe Krebs 1:11 That is awesome. There's, let's let's kick it off with a fun fact. Because I was doing a little research on your website, that is KBJAnderson.com. And I did some research and you started your business in July 23 of 2013. And exactly in that week, the first agile FM podcast came out.Katie Anderson 1:31 Oh, wow. Well, we're, we're fated to talk together with the great beginnings of a podcast andJoe Krebs 1:39 yeah, I would have thought almost 10 years congratulations to that. Oh, thankKatie Anderson 1:44 and who would have thought I had no intentions previously of starting my own business. But looking back, it's not a surprise when I sort of see how the things in my past actually connected it to lead to where I am today.Joe Krebs 1:59 Right. So very diverse background I noticed by two you started working, you know, if I please correct me if I'm wrong here. Planet Hollywood or something like that was? Oh, yeah, it's good. Yeah.Katie Anderson 2:12 I was well, that my I would consider that pre my professional career starting. But yes, in the year and a half after I graduated from university, I moved to London, and was Katie from California, as one of the servers at Planet Hollywood. Now this is back in the late 1990s, when Planet Hollywood was like, you know, the place to go. So it was it was a fun, fun experience and a great kind of bridge between finished graduating from Stanford University. And moving on to my the first part of my career in academia. So, yes, I never thought I was going to be an entrepreneur. So starting as an academic, but it all came together full circle,Joe Krebs 2:53 right. And that was before 2013 way before starting point that we can say, you know, England, London, check for his country already wide covered, you lived in a country and there were other countries on your journey as well, Australia, but Japan had a huge impact too.Unknown Speaker 3:11 So prior, so I've lived in I think I six countries outside of the US. So in high school, and in university, I did exchange student programs in the Dominican Republic and in Spain, then moved to London after university. And I was a winner of a Fulbright scholarship. And that's what took me down to Australia to do my master's degree in public health policy. And I stayed there for four years. And that's when I made one big career shift from academia actually into consulting, still in the healthcare space, and then returned to the US. And that's where I got my introduction to lean and continuous improvement and operations and all of the things that now I've shifted into my my later career and then moving to Japan as well. So...Joe Krebs 3:58 it's all of those things you just touched on speaks for your diversity and it's things we have experienced that obviously have an impact on one of the things you all bring together. Right. I think that's that's what this is why when you're pulling from different kind of areas and life and professional experiences, even better, Japan, I think, had a big impact on you.Katie Anderson 4:20 He has always had, yeah, a big impact but and Japan has had a tremendous impact on me from it was almost eight years ago at the time of this recording that my family moved to Tokyo for my husband's job he actually works in works in IT and we went out there for almost two years, and has just been an incredible part of my personal and professional life since then became the basis for my book "learning to lead, leading to learn" lessons from Toyota leader Isao Yoshino Tino and a lifetime of continuous learning. And the this Japan study tours that I run, leading tape leaders and practitioners from around the world to go learn in Japan on an immersive week long trip. Right? So I'm excited to be going back to Japan and 2023. So we're post pandemic are moving through the pandemic.Joe Krebs 5:14 of course, that obviously had an impact on that as well. Right. helped me build this this connection, obviously is Isao Yoshino if I pronounced that correctly. Well, thank you. Yeah. So he, his part indirectly part of the book, because these are stories, where do you have extracted and learning from, from him, but it's so fascinating about him that you decided I want to write a book about him or about him, but you know, in the context of him from a leadership perspective, learn and extract from him.Katie Anderson 5:48 Yeah, so that mean, he is the subject of my book, we became the what what I thought was a once in a lifetime opportunity to spend the day with a Toyota leader in Japan turned into one of the most profound and connected, you know, adult relationships in my life. And he played some really important behind the scenes roles at Toyota, in the 70s 80s, and 90s, as it was really transitioning to this real learning culture, that was more people centered as well. So leading, and being part of teams that were like almost you consider the internal consulting team, some huge leadership transformation, efforts, re-training, 1000 plus of Toyota senior managers on really what it means to be a leader to create learning in organizations and achieve goals, sort of the foundation of so much of what we know, that might be considered Kata, or a A3 thinking as well. And then part of the joint venture between Toyota and General Motors when Japan was sorry, when Toyota was expanding overseas known as numi, he was in charge of the leadership development program for the training program for the American workers to come out are the American managers to come to Japan to learn the Toyota way. So really prove that you can translate this thinking across cultures, that it's these principles like work, it's just how we embody them, and how we support the development of other people, so and so much more. But I as I dug into my learning from him, and realized how much history there hadn't been captured, and just his wisdom, his own personal journey, I realized this, this needed to be brought to the world. So it's been one of my life's great privileges.Joe Krebs 7:37 Yeah, so we had the opportunity to speak more, spend more time with you. Isao I would assume that not just one one day,Katie Anderson 7:45 oh, my gosh, yes, I so I, we, he I'm recording this in my office, it's also our guestroom he stayed at my house multiple times, we, I would, when I was living in Japan, we would spend, I would jump on the Shinkansen the bullet train, almost every month, every other month, spend the day with him started writing, I was writing a blog at the time, being a lean practitioner living in Japan was a really, you know, unique opportunity, and was writing about our conversations and people were really taken with it. When I moved back to the US. In 2016, we continued our partnership, and just this idea of writing a book came to be and as you know, the concept of a book, a great idea turns into something different and it became a much larger project to once we started with purposeful interviews, but it we've I this book is the culmination of 1000s of hours of conversation, which I'm so grateful to have learned from and having the one on one interaction, but also to be able to synthesize them and put them in a really, hopefully enjoyable read, but a really helpful and useful book for for practitioners lean, agile, you know, just enthusiast about learning and leadership around the world.Joe Krebs 8:59 Right. So I just wanted to make sure right, because you know, and that anybody walks away from this podcast has actually spent a day with no, no, no. Emerging with almost 400 pages.Katie Anderson 9:11 years. And we. So I had, you know, a lot of material from previous years of conversations and writing blog posts and working partnering together. But we when we said yes to like we said, Well, yeah, let's do this book idea together. And it actually wasn't intended to be using all of his stories, it was had a different form and shape. And I talked about that in the introduction how it morphed as you learn. But through the purposeful interviews over the course of a year, it became clear that so much needed to be so much more needed to be shared in a different way.Joe Krebs 9:47 Just curious, I mean, I would assume the conversation was in English.Katie Anderson 9:51 Yes. So Mr. Yoshino spent 14 years of his career in the United States. And actually, as you discover in the book, you know, his lifelong dream was to live in the US Since he studied English from an early age, and this is quite unusual, actually, you know, he was born at around the time of the end of the Second World War. And so, you know, the US and Japan relations were, you know, they're a little different than they are now. So his English is quite fluent, and which has been great that he to through the pandemic, even though we had planned to have all these in person events, he's now able to connect with different leadership teams and help them have conversations and talk about things as well.Joe Krebs 10:30 Do you think like, even though it's not necessarily the mother tongue that something? You know, was it harder to catch something that might have gotten lost in translation, just from like, Japanese culture at Toyota's perspective, translating into English was without any kind of difficulties, just like from a language perspective. I mean, there's always ways to, you know, I say it differently, but it's not the same, necessarily right?Katie Anderson 10:57 So I would say not as much between Mr. Yoshino and myself in terms of the book, as it relates to principles from Toyota. And what we know is lean or the Toyota way didn't, whatever you might want to call it. There have been some lost in translation moments. And particularly, and I highlight this at the end of the book about the internal document that Toyota put together in 2001, to really sort of summarize their culture and what the Toyota way really means. There were two elements that I really consider lost in translation that have really, I think, impacted how people think about what is emerged as lean or agile and a little bit more focused, why we've ended up being more focused on tools perhaps, than the real essence, which is around learning and people. The first is that the Japanese, the way the Japanese words are written, respect for people, we only have one word for respect. And one sort of the one way of looking at the people but the the way the kanji symbols are written in Japan, there's a there's a nuance in those words, and it's respect for humanity or respect for your humaneness, which, to me, has a much more enriched meaning than just respect for people, which you might be able to think of as, like, Oh, I'm respecting you just because of your title. And the second element, which I think is real, a real miss actually on Toyota is part because they were the ones who translated it this way, was that the the way they the pillar of the Toyota way that they translated just as continuous improvement, actually is made up of two Japanese words, one, which is Kaizen, which we know is where we are commonly know as continuous improvement or improvement. There's that was Kaizen and wisdom "chie". And we're totally missing the word wisdom from this concept, and to me, wisdom is like that generational knowledge. It's information that we're putting into place, and it's much richer and so are the missing the word wisdom, to me, really just make sort of continuous improvement. Okay, yeah, we want to make incremental changes and improve all the time. Wisdom has a sense of gravitas, and generations and connectedness that so that that part to me is lost in translation, as it relates to my conversations with Mr. Yoshino? I don't know. I don't think so.Joe Krebs 13:27 Well, so your so your book, what's what's really standing out is in a very short period of time since 2020, when the book came out tons of reviews, and not only reviews, five star reviews. I mean, it's just very, very remarkable have to say, usually, I don't pay so much attention to that I had people on the show here with a few stars, you know, and on an on an Amazon page. But that really stands out, I have to say and what I want to say those those guests were great guests, great topics. It's just like, you know what the public thinks about it. But it's, that's tremendous, in terms of what people would like to learn from you here, and it's let's focus a little bit on the book. Why because it's I think, what's what's in there is about "Learning to lead, Leading to learn". So it's a great wordplay. Well, I love it to add, but it's it's also something where he just mentioned about continuous learning. Right? Well, I would like to go as in terms of leading is some people, at least when I started my career, they were hired, you know, because they brought a certain knowledge to the job description when they were hired to say, like, we need exactly that knowledge to come in. Right? Especially on the leadership side, right? Like, I need that leadership to come in. I need somebody who has that knowledge. So you're basically brought in for what you knew at that time. Your book is all about going forward, right? You're coming in and continue your learning journey. I don't think that you know, that's obviously what we're talking about 20,30 years ago, he might have been different and maybe it was me isolated, but it just felt like that. That didn't beginning you were hired for something because of your knowledge at that time, I think that is a concept. So how do we, you know, how would you tell the listeners here to a listening to this episode here right now, the approach at Toyota, what you have learned and what you experienced over the years since since you wrote the book in the years before?Katie Anderson 15:17 Yeah, absolutely. And this is really what I see as the secret to Toyota and why they've been so successful, and why so many companies and leaders around the world are really trying to emulate what they've done either through applying lean or agile or kata, you know, all of these things that sort of had its genesis through these, through Toyota really be applied in different contexts. The one of the, the framework that I talked about leadership is this comes out of this comment that Mr. Yoshino made one of the first times I met him, and it really summarized to me the simplicity of what leaders need to do. And it's actually inherent in the kata framework as well, or A3 thinking, whatever all the tools you want to talk about from, from Toyota leaders set the direction. So where do we need to go? And you know, what's that challenge the target we need to achieve, then provide support. So that's the coaching the development, the cultivating other people's expertise, and figuring out how to get there. And then the third part is about developing yourself as a leader. And that third element is often missed when we think about leadership. Yeah, okay. Leaders need to set the strategy with the goals, where do we need to go? Okay, yes, they need to provide support to their people, what does that look like? But this realization that we also need to be always developing and improving ourselves, both from our knowledge perspective, but also from our behaviors, and our skills and abilities to be clear on strategy and direction? And then really, what does it mean to provide support? And you highlighted what I think is one of the biggest gaps that I've observed in leaders around the world. And was also, you know, when I, when I realized for myself as a, as a manager and leader within an organization, a challenge as well, is it we have cultivated deep expertise and knowledge, and we are hired often for that technical ability that we have developed. And that's great when we're in individual contributor role, or there's a problem that specifically or strategic initiative that needs to be solved, though, when we have people development responsibility, which usually comes with being a manager or a team leader, or however the structure is, you also need to be stepping away into how do you cultivate that expertise for other people and let them learn and develop those capabilities. And so we have to navigate this leadership continuum between being an expert and developing the expertise or coaching the expertise of others. And that can be a really hard shift for us to make and something that we're like invisible to sometimes. So we're jumping in with all the answers and trying to give people our all our ideas, which is great, because we feel helpful, but it actually is missing out on that secret sauce, which is cultivating learning across the organization.Joe Krebs 18:10 And it's not only the learning for team members or team or a group I work with, it's also my own learning. Right? So that's also, butKatie Anderson 18:20 absolutely, and so you're learning. And I call this this chain of learning, like we're learning through working on a needed gold or also learning through the interaction about how to be more effective and how to do that differently.Joe Krebs 18:35 Yeah, I always think like, if you hire somebody, you know exactly through like a checklist of skills and expertise you're looking for. And let's say you have that perfect match, check, check, check, check, right, and you got more than that person would be bored coming on the job, right? Because it's like that is, you know, what's the learning path here? So you got to provide that, for a person, at least that's how I'm triggered was like, what's, what's next? How can I evolve? What is the to learn and, and that platform, that environment has to be there for somebody to flourish? Right?Katie Anderson 19:03 Absolutely. We, I mean, we know this innately as human beings, right, we always need a little bit of challenge and a little bit of something new or making progress. I mean, that's very rewarding. And when we don't have that we do feel disengaged, or, you know, unsatisfied. And so that's part of the, you know, manager or leaders responsibility, too, is making sure people have enough challenge that's stretching them but enough support that they feel like, you know, they're not like doing it all alone. At that same time, and that's where that learning zone, that sweet spot of the learning zone comes in.Joe Krebs 19:40 I just saw recently like, I think it was a McKinsey statistic it was all about like leadership and the introduction of agile, the impact on leadership, and it was like a significant percentage of people freed up time to actually focus on strategy right in a in an organization because there was so caught up in a day to day activities working like on very tactical items. Because there was so blocked and an agility created a kind of space for them. So...Katie Anderson 20:13 yeah, absolutely. And one of the unintended consequences of us kind of jumping in to participate in problem solving or taking, telling people, all of our ideas is we end up actually taking on the burden of having the responsibility for doing those things. So we don't have time and space to do anything else. And so actually, to be more effective, it's how do we how do we know which are like, our problems to solve? And where is it really our teams and our people? And what does it mean to show up differently to provide that support and that help that's needed without taking over all the all the activity? So that's the great leadership challenge, right?Joe Krebs 20:52 Here we go. That's a good one. It's let's let's explore this a little bit, because obviously, Isao Yoshina is from Toyota. So how would you respond? I'm just curious, put you on the spot here. But how would you respond to somebody who would say like, oh, that's all great. You talked to him, and you wrote a book, and it's about Toyota, and it's maybe lean? But what if, you know, somebody says, I work in a financial institution? We're not building cars or something like that? How would the topic? I feel like I know the answer, but I just want to make from you, how would a topic like this apply to you know, something more generic out there was somebody in a totally different industry might not even for profit, it could be nonprofit? Anything like that? How would you know somebody benefit from this?Katie Anderson 21:40 Well, I first and foremost, I started off in healthcare and working in large hospital and healthcare systems using the same principles to guide improvement. And I now work with industry agnostic, really, you know, I work with IT functions I work with, large, you know, biotech, pharmaceutical companies, I work with knowledge workers, you know, all across the board, what I think is really important is we have focused far too long on sort of the visual artifacts or the process side. Now, it's really important to improve the process, of course of how work is done, and how value is created for any organization's customers. The principles of all of this thinking can be applied to whatever industry. So what is your purpose, your organization's purpose? What is the value that you deliver? Or create either a product or service for your customer? How are you do that doing that in the most effective and high quality way? How are you engaging people's thinking and problem solving at the right level each and every day? How do they know where they need to go set the direction? How are you in creating that active engaged workforce? And how are you improving yourself as well. So I think, if we focus too much on like, Oh, I'm in a different industry, they this can't work, we're actually missing the whole point. Because the the way it will manifest will be different, actually different across any organization, even if you're in the same industry. So this is why Toyota never cared about if people went in and saw their, you know, went to the manufacturing shop floor and observed things because they knew they're missing. The thing that's really the secret, which is underlying everything is that they're creating, learning, looking at how they're developing people, engaging people each and every day, they were just solving the problems they needed to solve. Your problems are going to be different. So that I mean, that's my really my response. And I heard that so much when we were getting started in healthcare to oh, we do we provide health care for people, you know, we're not You're not a manufacturing line? Well, actually, there's a lot of similarity, if you look across, like looking at value and how we create value.Joe Krebs 23:53 Yeah, but it's interesting, right? As you just said, like very transparent on the on the floor, right? Build how we build things and take a look at it. We're very transparent in this. But even with the secret sauce, it's not easy to build that, that that map, like, we can still do that, because now we have the tools, why we can say, we have a better understanding of what's behind it, right. But we're still, we're still struggling to identify opportunities within organizations to try something like this. I mean, I'm just myself, you know, as we talked about before, the Kata is what I'm very passionate about the same thing, as like, you know, is this one comes from Toyota, it's extracted from Toyota with that map or apply to something else, and I see the synergies, but even with the secret sauce, it's not easy.Katie Anderson 24:41 No, I mean, that that's the that's the challenge, right? Like, actually, these concepts are very simple. And they really make a lot of sense if you just take a step back, but it's not easy to put into place. And that challenges all of us to think in a different way. I mean, I think in my own business, as well, like, I'm well into all of these principles, but to apply them in my own work requires me to, like put real effort into that and to like, oh, how am I making the invisible visible? How I how do I have clarity on where we need to go? All of those things? Yes.Joe Krebs 25:16 Yeah. So maybe there's also the answer. I'm just, I'm just gonna ask you because the book itself has the little add on. It's this workbook.Katie Anderson 25:25 Hmm. Yes.Joe Krebs 25:26 It's not a coffee table book.Katie Anderson 25:28 No, it's reflect and learn. I mean, it's beautiful coffee table book. But no, it's for Applied Learning, applied learning.Joe Krebs 25:37 Exactly. So how would you like and obviously, that's why I said coffee table book. It's not a coffee table book. It's a workbook, right? Because we do want to use a copy and we want to work in it. So how would you like the learner work through some of those things you're describing in your book? What's the style with a book? How would you envision that? Is that a start to end read? Is that a chapter by chapter and then possibly exercises? Is that something you go along with as a professional? Is that something you prepare for something? How would you like to see the reader or the professional use that and consume the work?Katie Anderson 26:13 So the book is really, you can choose to use the book however you want? The the way I wrote the book is about Mr. Yoshino's, chronological learning journey. And so it is you could you could go into one of the case studies and just read that what I think is really helpful is it shows like a real human perspective of how like someone starting at the beginning of, you know, actually, there's some backstory of his own person, how he got to starting at Toyota, but as a new college graduate, and, and experiences he had at Toyota about learning what it actually means to lead in this way, what does it mean to be a manager, what it means to be a leader, and then starting to apply them across different assignments that he had at different parts in his career, some which were great successes, and the last, you know, actually, an innovative new, you know, product for Toyota was a huge failure that cost the company $13 million. And he was responsible for that. So, you know, I think it's the human human story. And the feedback I get from those almost 255 star reviews on Amazon, is people really love this. It's a real story. And it's really human anatomy course, you can jump in at any point. And I have reflection questions at the end of each section of the book, to help people think about it. So I wrote the book, the workbook as a companion to really take some more of the concepts that I help leaders and practitioners learn about what does it mean to have intention? Who do you want to be? What are the actions aligned with that? What impact do you really want to have? And then some more some of the questions plus more questions to reflect on some space about that some different exercises to go through to really bring to life some of the stories in the principles that are talked about in the book, but how does that relate to me? You are you rather than the reader, the the learner? And then have what are you what action? Are you going to take on that? So you can use that as an individual, I also bring this into the leadership development programs I do with companies around the world. And as a core part of the learning experience, and if done as part of different cohorts of one, like small group learning I've had as well.Joe Krebs 28:28 Yeah. Well, I used to be a super well connected with the Lean community, as we know, obviously from from your background, you have worked with Agile-lists around the world. What would be your advice for agile leaders, from your experience from your, you know, seeing in workshops, and I'm sure there were some agile leaders that came across your work or read your books or give your feedback? What would you like to tell them in terms of mapping your book to the Agile community and possibly a focus on leadership and learning?Katie Anderson 29:01 Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I've had different agile leaders and practitioners join me in Japan and have been part of my workshops and learning so people also in the IT space, and in many, many, many knowledge workers as well. And, you know, I gotta go back to what I we were just talking about that the these principles go beyond and actually, do you know, any, you know, I guess, categorization of approach that you've you would you want to call it agile, do you want to call it lean? Do you want to call it you know, continuous improvement, Kaizen, all of these things are built upon these foundational principles about what it means to achieve results, how we get there, how we resolve problems, how we develop people to solve problems and how we improve ourselves as well. And so when we can get back to those fundamentals, we can apply them in any aspect of our work. Regardless of you know what that's looking like and it can help us think differently about our processes. And of course, then we can bring in the different frameworks and approaches and apply this, the, our leadership behaviors to make those more effective. And so I would say, take this, take this step back to really think about what is your purpose in your as a human being first and foremost? And then how does it apply to your role or function and what you're trying to accomplish the impact you want to have? And then thinking about how are you best going to get there? And and how you can align your actions with having that impact that you want? And then how do you take the other frameworks and tools in within your sphere of work and make that happen? So that's, that would be my recommendation. And just sort of, and I'm not trying to take you away from saying, like, we all have different approaches have a great impact applied in the right context. But this is really fundamentally about how you're a real human story. And also, what does it really mean to be a leader and be a humble leader and a humble learner? And in a way, that's not what I appreciated so much about and I continue to appreciate that Mr. Yoshino, he's almost 79, by the way, and we're actually talking later today at the time of this recording, as it he was willing to share not just the success stories, but the challenges and his personal failures, too. And I think that that's really important for us to realize, and to, you know, it's easy to look back and only see the successes, but to hear about people's challenges also validates our own challenges and our own struggle, and that the journey to success is paved with setbacks. And this is, you know, learning is inherent about having, you know, not getting things right, but what are you learning, and I'm obsessed with these dolls called Daruma dolls, I have this huge collection. And I give them out everywhere. In fact, you know, Rich Sheridan has a derma doll for me, in our shared mutual friend, and they represent the Japanese proverb fall down seven times get up eight. So when you have a goal, you fill in the dolls left eye, and it's like a little paper, well, they can be giant too. But it's a paper mache doll that's waited at the bottom. So it's like a weeble wobble and always write itself back up. And to me, this is this great sort of encompassing conte, like visualization of a goal, the reminder of the persistence and patience, we have to have an end, just a reminder to have the inherent struggle, and the setbacks that happened towards achieving the goal. But if we can keep learning, keep getting up and keep moving forward. We'll eventually get there, even if the outcome of our goal looks different than we thought at the beginning.Joe Krebs 32:44 It's also tangible, right? Because you see, and it makes the goal tangible, right? Yeah. To these. Here we go.Katie Anderson 32:57 You can really knock it down, and we'll keep getting back up. So keep going.Joe Krebs 33:01 Yeah, our listeners cannot see this. But that was a Daruma at all. And we can we can put a link into that.Katie Anderson 33:09 Yes, either. Exactly. I'm usually I'm often holding a Dermatol. So you'll see many. And actually I gave Larry Culp, the CEO of General Electric, a larger during muddle when we were on stage together. In October of 2022. We were he loved my book recommended it to all GE employees across the company, which was, you know, amazing. And then I had the opportunity to have a fireside chat in front of 1000 people at the Association for manufacturing excellence. And when we talked about this concept of struggle, and learning and also, you know, the things we have to unlearn as leaders to get there. So I gave him a daruma doll, because I'm sure he has. I know he has some big goals out there. But he said the same thing. He had to unlearn everything that he was trained in business school about what it meant to be a leader. Not maybe everything but we have to get out of do what I call break the telling habit get out of this mindset that we are supposed to have all the answers. We have a lot of good answers. But are they the right answers? And so anyway, it was really, it was really wonderful. And, and awesome to hear directly from Larry and have the chance to talk with him. And really see, you know, I put him like with Rich Sheridan, these leaders who are really embodying these concepts that we're trying to develop in organizations, about what it means to really be an effective leader and an inspirational one toJoe Krebs 34:35 I don't even want to ask you a question. It was such a wonderful, wonderful end you just close it out so nicely, that I don't even want to go and ask you another question. But this is this was really awesome. I want to I want to thank you for your time. We can we can tell from your schedule that you're very busy. I'm happy you spent some time here with the listeners on agile FM that are out there and say that was very interesting. I might be They might pick up book, I might visit your website that is KBJAnderson.com. And there is ways to find you speak ways to engage, ways to find a path to your book or anything like that. And I'm super thrilled you had time to share your story here a little bit with us your story, right? I think that is great.Katie Anderson 35:20 Thank you, Joe. Thanks for inviting me here. And I'd love to hear from your listeners about what's one takeaway that they had from this conversation. And definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. If you're interested in how to break your telling habit, I also have a free downloadable guide on my websites that's KBJAnderson/telling-habit so you can go there. Alright, Thanks, Joe.Joe Krebs 35:48 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Join Barclay Damon Live: Cyber Sip™ host Kevin Szczepanski as he welcomes Rich Sheridan, senior vice president, chief claims officer for Berkley Cyber Risk Solutions. In this informative episode, “Avoid Cyberattacks: Don't Click That,” Kevin and Rich review the evolution of cyberspace, especially with regard to the most frequent types of claims insured clients make. Data breaches, malware and ransomware, and fraud frequently trigger claims. Less frequent, due to the rise of encryption, are claims for lost devices. Employee mistakes are still a major driver, asserts Rich, for example, clicking on a link they shouldn't open. Listen in as Kevin and Rich share more information about how companies and individuals can shore up their defenses against cyber issues.

Conference Keynote Speaker Rich Sheridan, CEO and chief storyteller at Menlo Innovations, speaks with IISE's Frank Reddy about the experience of attending the Lean Six Sigma & Data Science Conference 2022, Sept. 19-21 at the Hyatt Regency Perimeter in Atlanta. Follow #Lean6Data2022 on your favorite social media platforms to keep up with all the conference activity.

Episode page, video, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #448 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Rich Sheridan, co-founder, CEO and “Chief Storyteller” of Menlo Innovations, a software and IT consulting firm that has earned numerous awards and press coverage for its innovative and positive workplace culture. He's a returning guest from Episode 189 back in 2014 — the same year that I had a chance to visit the Menlo Innovations office. We talked then about his first book Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love. His latest book, published in 2019, is Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear. Rich is giving a keynote talk, “Lead With Joy and Watch Your Team Fly!”, at the Michigan Lean Consortium annual conference, being held August 10-11 in Traverse City. I'll be there and I hope you'll join us. Today, we discuss topics and questions including: For those who didn't hear the first episode, how would you summarize “The Menlo Way”? And how has “the Menlo Way” evolved over the past 8 years? Why is “eliminating fear” so important and what drains joy from the workplace? “Tired programmers make bad software” Sustainable work pace Paired work – Erika and Lisa Individual performance reviews? “We've eliminated bosses” — nobody to review you, the team gives feedback, develops growth plan “Let's run the experiment” Toyota talks about the need for humble leaders — why is humility such an important trait? Do you hire for humility or try to screen out those without much humility? No longer say “we hire for culture fit” “Not an interview, an audition” Leadership lessons from the pandemic– 4 blog posts In “Chief Joy Officer” you write about the proverbial “mask” that leaders feel pressured to wear… masking how we really feel. Were you able to be your authentic whole self at work, fears and all, during the early stages of the pandemic? “Scared and panicked” – was it OK to share that with the team? “They're all adapting” – as a result of everything we've been doing for 19 years The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more. This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network. 

Join me for our first live episode as I chat with Katelyn Magnuson, Rich Sheridan, and Bob Osmond about the skills and attributes necessary for leaders today! Support the show

"When the work of your heart, your hands, and your mind is done to serve others with delight, that is joy."  That is the mantra of Rich Sheridan, Co-Founder of Menlo Innovations, a software development company that is known the world over for its intentionally joyful culture.   In this episode, your host, Andy Goram talks to the international speaker and best-selling author of Joy Inc., and Chief Joy Officer about what it takes to create an intentionally joyful culture. But don't be fooled by the word joy.  This isn't a lesson in how to be more happy-clappy at work.  Far from it.  This is about working hard, as a team, with a clear sense of purpose and an empowering spirit of experimentation and trust. ----more---- Join The Conversation Find Andy Goram on LinkedIn here Follow the Podcast on Instagram here Follow the Podcast on Twitter here Check out the Bizjuicer website here Check out the Bizjuicer blog here Download the podcast here ----more---- Useful Links Follow Rich Sherdian on LinkedIn here Follow Menlo Innovations on LinkedIn here Follow Rich Sheridan on Twitter here Follow Menlo Innovations on Twitter here Follow Menlo Innovations on Instagram here Check out the Menlo Innovations website here Check out the Menlo Innovations blog here Find Rich's book Joy Inc. here Find Rich's book Chief Joy Officer here Find John Naisbitt's book Megatrands (1982) here Find Kent Beck's updated book Extreme Programming here ----more---- Full Episode Transcript Get the full transcript of the episode here

Rich Sheridan has published two books on the concept of bringing joy to the workplace. After an illustrious career, Rich has focused his personal activity on the development of culture and people. As a result, they've been able to hire 22 new employees during the pandemic while losing only 4. Listen in to glean insights on the ways Menlo Innovations obsessive compulsion with culture has allowed this marketplace leading position.

Today's episode features a compilation from two leaders in the B2B industry who decided to grow their company through focused CX efforts, while placing a strong importance on team and employee development. You'll hear from Andy Schulkind, the VP of CX at Domino North America, and Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations. Both leaders place a high value on developing a trained, supported, and efficient internal workforce which serves as a strong foundation for delivering great customer experience.

We welcome Rich Sheridan, Chief Storyteller for Menlo Innovations and author of "Chief Joy Officer" and "Joy, Inc.".  This is how transformation takes place.  When a leader learns from mistakes, gets out of the way, and empowers the amazing people that are part of their organization, that's when remarkable things happen.  Consider this a component of how to reinvent the workplace.Click HERE to find Rich's book "Chief Joy Officer"Click HERE to find Rich's book "Joy, Inc."Have a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own?  Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile.  We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable.  Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA.  It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself.  It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.Follow us on Twitter HERE and make sure to share with your network!Provide your feedback HERE, please!  We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com.  We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics.  Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience.  Sara is also certified in EQi and a member of the CAPA Pro membership network supported by The Table Group.  RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform.  RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state. 

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 

Rich SheridanRich doesn't just talk about joy in the workplace. He lives it every day at Menlo, the custom software and consulting company he co-founded in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rich's passion for inspiring organizations to create their own joy-filled cultures leads him to address audiences across the world as well as throughout the United States. Today, listen to Rich first hand on how to build a workplace people love. We also talk about other things such as pairing and understanding the ACTUAL problem. Tune in to find out more.Rich is CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations. He is a successful entrepreneur and author of two best-selling books—Joy Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love and Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear.About Being An EngineerThe Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us.  Links:Rich Sheridan on Linkedin

In today's episode, we discuss joy in the workplace with Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations. Listen in to learn why culture is such an important piece of attracting and retaining top talent. Rich and Bryan talk about the benefits of an intentionally joyful culture, and how it can help build relationships and grow businesses. Guest: Rich SheridanCEO and Chief StorytellerMenlo Innovationshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/Host: Bryan Powrozekhttps://claytonmckervey.com/employee/bryan-powrozek-cpa-cgma-mba/Denise Askerhttps://claytonmckervey.com/employee/denise-j-asker-iom-mm/

[DAY 1] Opening Keynote: Lead With Joy and Watch Your Team Fly! Change is hard. But you won't create a joyful workplace by leading the way you've always led. In this talk, Rich explores his own journey to joy, focusing on how he had to learn to lead in a completely different way and, by doing so, witnessed results that exceeded his wildest expectations. In 1903, the Wright Brothers achieved sustained, powered, and manned flight for the first time. Shortly after, Orville Wright was interviewed about the feat and he declared that man would never be able to build a plane capable of carrying more than two people. It would be physically impossible. Rich read that story in a book on a 747 from Detroit to London while flying at 35,000 feet, at 500mph, with 50,000 gallons of fuel on board, with 400 passengers and their luggage in perfect creature comfort. You, the leader, will need to make change, serious change. In this talk, Rich will use this example and by analogy, apply it to human teams we are leading. The message is simple: when we finally understand the relevant principles (in flight, or in teams), we can fly to heights and distances that were previously unimaginable. Rich will take you on a journey of change in this talk and bring you to the place he is now - that we stand at the vanguard of understanding what it takes to unleash the human potential of the people who work for us and around us. He will explain how the common, unchanging, disengagement statistics are a fundamental failure of leadership and what simple things we can do to get our teams off the ground and flying. You will come away energized and inspired. You will want to start your own journey to joy tomorrow! And he will convince you it is within your power to do so. All of these lessons are available to everyone no matter how big their company or how old their organization. Key Takeaways: Take concrete steps to elevate the human energy in your organization Change how you and your team see the role of a leader Create a culture that embraces change with excitement Move from endless discussion to taking action and "running the experiment" Speaker: Rich Sheridan CEO, Chief Storyteller Menlo Innovations Visit https://www.econclub.org/meeting/2021-young-leader-conference/ to learn more! #decylc

What exactly does joy have to do with software development? If you ask Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller of Menlo Innovations, the answer is pretty simple: Everything. According to Rich, joy is central to inspiring, sustaining, and steering the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based software company, which has been experimenting with new ways of working for more than two decades. In this episode, we speak with Rich about the personal struggles that first led him to future-of-work thinking; how some of Menlo's vital practices—like pairing two developers together daily and having them work on a shared computer—have evolved over the years; and why “Make mistakes faster” is a longtime Menlo mantra. Apply to work at The Ready: In the United States: http://theready.com/team In Europe: http://theready.com/team Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to podcast@theready.com Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

Rich Sheridan, world-renowned entrepreneur and bestselling author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer, is on a mission to inspire organizations to create joyful cultures. He is the CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations, recognized by Inc Magazine as the Most Joyful Company in America. People from all over the world have visited Menlo to see firsthand the unique culture and systems at the company. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Rich to this week’s Unlearn Podcast to talk about how leaders can inspire joy at work. Listen to Your Intuition Rich’s experience at “one of the highest-flying entrepreneurial tech firms” motivated him to listen to his instincts. He tells Barry that they were so far removed from what their customers wanted, that he knew instinctively they would not survive. His intuition proved correct. “They weren’t learning anything,” he remarks; “...they were only applying what they learned from years past.” He vowed to do things differently in his own company so that they didn’t make the same mistake. “All of us have that little place in our guts when something goes wrong… I just learned to pay attention to that signal,” he tells Barry. Look For the Opportunity When things aren’t going well, that’s where the opportunity is. Many systems exist because they helped you get to where you are, but “there are bits that calcify”, Barry says; leaders need to be true to themselves and see where changes need to be made. Rich points out that when things are going wrong, the leader must become a student again. He recommends going to books first: read the first 30-40 pages, and if it resonates with you, keep reading. You may discover a new idea or an opportunity that will help your company grow. Experiments Over Meetings “Let’s try it before we defeat it.” This simple change of approach has inspired dramatic change in many organizations, Rich says. Ideas need a chance to be proven before being discarded, because only then would you really know if they work. “I think that word ‘try’ is probably one of the most underutilized but most important behaviors for companies to do innovation,” Barry argues. “Take an approach that says take action versus take a meeting,” Rich agrees. He and Barry discuss the benefits of doing small experiments. When you create a culture of experimentation, your systems will always evolve. The leader’s job is to foster that culture by driving out fear: “My role as a leader [is] to pump fear out of the room,” Rich emphasizes. He shares how his daughter inspired him to unlearn leading through fear. It takes self-awareness and a good dose of humility to acknowledge where you’re going wrong and to course correct, Barry comments. He tells Rich that he has learned to be more intentional about who he chooses as role models because our own leadership behavior is conditioned by our models. Looking Ahead The biggest challenge of the pandemic is loneliness and isolation, Rich says. However, coming back together will likely be as difficult as the separation was, and it will take a while to get over the anxiety. He believes we will continue to embrace the new ways of working we learned during the pandemic. He and Barry agree that we see each other as whole persons now, because of this experience. As such, we will continue to be more empathetic and see each other’s humanity, building deeper relationships and a stronger culture. The past year has also reinvigorated his entrepreneurial spirit, Rich says. Full show notes can be found at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Rich Sheridan on LinkedIn | Twitter  Rich Sheridan books Menlo Innovations Chatter by Ethan Cross

Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan became disillusioned in the middle of his career in the chaotic technology industry. He had an all-consuming thought…things can be better. Much better. He had to find a way. Why couldn't a workplace be filled with camaraderie, human energy, creativity, and productivity? Ultimately, Rich co-founded Menlo Innovations in 2001 to end human suffering in the workplace. His unique approach to custom software creation is so surprisingly different, that 3,000 people a year travel from around the world just to see how they do it. His passion for creating joyful work environments led to his bestselling and widely celebrated book, Joy, Inc. - How We Built a Workplace People Love. His highly anticipated second book, Chief Joy Officer, came out on December 4, 2018, and will continue to prove that a positive and engaging leadership style is actually good for business. What you'll learn about in this episode: How Rich and his co-founder turned to their amazing team at Menlo for help during the pandemic What the two key questions are you need to constantly be asking yourself in a purpose-driven culture How the restrictions put in place during the pandemic engineered a deeper understanding of each other at Menlo What the five-step plan was at Menlo that allowed them to emerge stronger How digging in and being in the fight together changed the Menlo team members What was the turning point for Rich when he was able to see the incredible opportunity for his High-Tech Anthropologists to grow What it means to be human and the role storytelling plays Additional resources: menlo.cc/factorytour Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/menloinnovations/ Twitter: @menloprez LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/menloprez

Co-founder of LeadHERship Consortium, LLC Show notes: https://www.markgraban.com/mistake48 My guest for Episode #48 is Lori-Baker Schena, a professional speaker and leadership consultant based in Southern California. She has a PhD in organizational leadership and is a co-founder of the LeaderHERship Consortium. She is currently on her third career. She was a journalist and PR person, then a professor for 25 years, now she's a coach and speaker. In our episode today, Lori tells a story about her “favorite mistake,” related to staying too long in a role where she had two different bosses who not only didn't work together well — they didn't like each other! Lori regrets that it took too long for her to realize the situation was unworkable, but she learned from it. We talk about how people react to bad situations, how we can “ask for what we need” and why that can be difficult, especially for women. How can you be in a situation where you love what you're doing at work. I mention Rich Sheridan and Menlo Innovations, the movie “Office Space,” and the Apple TV+ Plus “Ted Lasso.” Also, how can we get past "the shame of failure" and "pivot to positivity"? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/favorite-mistake/support

Who do we serve and what does delight look like for them? By asking those two questions, Rich Sheridan created a company that has attracted people from around the world who want to replicate the culture of Menlo Innovations. In this episode, you’ll find out how the CEO of Menlo built a company on the business value of joy.One of the ways Menlo does this is by fostering an environment where people aren’t afraid to experiment. Rich will explain what can happen when leaders pump fear out of the room.We’ll also discus Menlo’s innovative hiring and business practices, which lean heavily on values such as comradery, collaboration, and compassion.

Being an effective leader and being a great comedian, believe it or not, take many of the same skills. One of those skills is the willingness to use mistakes as a learning opportunity. Rich Sheridan is the co-founder and Chief Storyteller of the software developer and IT consulting firm Menlo Innovations. Menlo is widely regarded for their outside-of-the-box, people-first culture where team members work in pairs in a giant open space where ideas are shared freely. This is the sort of workplace where communicable disease spreads easily, so when COVID-19 struck, Rich was out of his comfort zone. Before long, his team leaned into the "make mistakes fastr" mantra, and the virtual Menlo was up and running at full steam. In this bonus episode, we chat about: -The definition of joy and how it's different from fun and happiness / -Serving and delighting others being in our basic human nature / -The choice that comes with every negative life experience / -Experimentation and moments of discovery / -How Menlo responded to the pandemic and the two principles that have helped them thrive / -The willingness to share Menlo's culture with outsiders / -Building an intentionally joyful culture / -Improv and how it plays into Menlo's culture / -Adjusting to remote work / -Menlo's rat problem / -A message for leaders struggling to lead their teams through uncertainty / -And more! Follow Rich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/ Follow Rich on Twitter: @menloprez Book Rich to speak: https://richardsheridan.com/book-rich Check out Rich's books: Joy Inc.: https://richardsheridan.com/books/joy-inc Chief Joy Officer: https://richardsheridan.com/books/chief-joy-officer Find out more about Menlo Innovations: menloinnovations.com Follow David on IG and Twitter: @THEdavidhorning LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-horning-7b636176/ Follow "You Can't Laugh At That" on social media patreon.com/youcantlaughpod twitter.com/youcantlaughpod facebook.com/youcantlaughatthat Produced by Water Cooler Comedy - https://watercoolercomedy.org Music by Producedbyzip - https://producedbyzip.bandcamp.com

What if joy was made the explicit purpose of a company? What if people were excited to come to work everyday? What if fear and suffering were removed from the workplace? What would the impact be on the business, the bottom line, and the outcomes? Join Chris and Austin as they discuss the business value of joy with Rich Sheridan. Rich is the CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations, a speaker, and author of Chief Joy Officer and Joy, Inc. We not only discuss with Rich joy in the workplace but also running experiments and ending human suffering in the world as it relates to technology and teams.  Video and show notes: https://youtu.be/w0xEGN6rZ04  

Listen in as your hosts "Just Nate", Dennis K along with guest speaker Chris E talk to the CEO and Chief Story Teller of Menlo Innovations, Richard Sheridan. The Smalls team is a huge fan of Rich and everything that Menlo stands for. The team talks through all the ups and downs that Menlo Innovations have had in order to break the mold and how they created a joyful place to work. Menlo's mission is: "End human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.®" Rich tells stories throughout this nearly hour long podcast as he talks about how they were all focused on delighting others with the work of our hears, our hands and our minds. Rich states the key to success and how they have been so successful is they set out to make a culture where your more likely to take action than to take a meeting. A key to Rich's success is he had a different goal than most. His goal was to try to succeed, where others goal is to try not to fail. Don't let failure get in your way, run the experiment and if it don't work, try something else and learn from the mistake. It sounds simple, Create a Intentional Culture! We can't suggest Rich's books enough, you can find them at nearly any books store or online, see links to both books below from Amazon. Joy Inc. - https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/1591845874/ref=sxts_sxwds-bia-wc-rsf1_0?cv_ct_cx=joy+inc.&dchild=1&keywords=joy+inc.&pd_rd_i=1591845874&pd_rd_r=d686b69d-d465-4f2e-a0fb-6e8c751ccfed&pd_rd_w=pNf5t&pd_rd_wg=S9ISd&pf_rd_p=e0f994a8-a359-40a9-8917-dadca71c7184&pf_rd_r=QSASTN1ZB45FCMCXDMAK&psc=1&qid=1610928792&sr=1-1-526ea17f-3f73-4b50-8cd8-6acff948fa5a Chief Joy Officer - https://www.amazon.com/Chief-Joy-Officer-Leaders-Eliminate-ebook/dp/B07B2KHQCS/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=joy+inc.&qid=1610928832&sr=8-4 Listen in to the other podcast that Rich mentions the Bossless Office by Tom Ashbrook. - https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2013/06/20/bossless-office Read the article that Rich mentions from New York Magazine by Matthew Shaer, The Boss Stops Here - https://nymag.com/news/features/bossless-jobs-2013-6/ To find out more about Rich and his team at Menlo Innovations check them out on the web. https://menloinnovations.com/ To hire Rich to come speak at your event you can book him here: https://richardsheridan.com/ From the team here at "The SmallsCast Podcast", thank you Rich, it truly was an honor and pleasure having you on the show! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thesmalls/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thesmalls/support

Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations and best-selling author, shares stories about how and why the concept of Joy in the workplace is such a practical as well as an attainable goal. Rich is a gifted storyteller in particular when he tells stories about his leadership journey. www.menloinnovations.com

 Richard Sheridan, one of Menlo Innovation's founders and Chief Storytellers, which has given more than 1000 talks to audiences around the world and written the bestselling and widely celebrated book, https://richard-sheridan.com/books/joy-inc (Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love) and his second book, https://richard-sheridan.com/books/chief-joy-officer (Chief Joy Officer) joins us to discuss what he has learned about building a workplace of JOY.

An organization focused on relationships, trust, reasonable workload, vacation, work-life balance... sounds like a dream job.   A dream that is possible when a goal of the organization is long-term sustainability.   Beyond that, adding joy and recognition that employees have lives outside of work to the recipe has a powerful impact on employee attraction and retention and every measure of business success. My guest for this episode is Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations. His two best-selling books—Joy Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love and Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear outline the culture philosophy Rich and his cofounder lead by every day.   Listen in as Rich shares the story of his evolution of leadership and finding the formula for thriving in the organization. It is all about more lift and less drag. 

This episode features Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a varied effect on business and Menlo felt the impact of the highly contagious virus right away.   Having survived economic turmoil several times in 19+ years, the first 100 days of the pandemic lock-down were some of the scariest Rich had felt in years.  Despite great fear that Menlo wouldn't survive, the business many have called the most agile organization in the world found a way to survive, adapt, sustain with intent to emerge stronger and thrive again.  Listen in to hear how the intentional culture built many years ago supported the return of joy to Menlo amidst the storm of the pandemic.  

Rich Sheridan is a keynote speaker, the author of Joy Inc., Chief Joy Officer and is best known for helping create Menlo Innovations in Michigan. Check out the full show notes at TheAgileWire.com   YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y-DC8BE41Xw Twitter: @AgileWire

Episode 41 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Rich Sheridan (@menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. Rich describes some of the lessons he learned from the innovative entrepreneurs who run Zingermann's Deli as well as the book, The Great Game Of Business. Such learnings include open book finance, great customer service, how to take care of people and how to collaborate with others in every aspect of a business. Rich describes his company's mission, which is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. He compares the work of human systems to flying an airplane, including the “lift” of human energy, the “thrust” of a purpose-driven mission to pull people forward, limiting the “weight” of bureaucracy and the “drag” of fear. We discuss the difference between how the Wright Brothers learned to fly as compared to the failed experiments of the well-funded, celebrated scientist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Samuel Langley. Rich talks about how he created his company after first experiencing his “personal trough of disillusionment” during an earlier part of his career. We talk about how important safety is to human performance, how fragile safety can be and the importance of “pumping fear out of the room.” Rich describes why he calls himself a Chief Storyteller, the role of Joy in his company and the importance of being a purpose-driven organization.

Today's guest on “The Process” is Rich Sheridan.In the late 90's Rich was a high powered executive at a software company making lots of money.The only problem, despite his outward successes, is that he was absolutely miserable with a capital M.After the company he was working for was sold during the internet bubble, Rich and a couple of partners set out on a quest to create the software business they had always dreamed of working at.That company they created was Menlo Innovations, known worldwide today for their innovative culture that is build around one simple mission … creating more joy in the workplace..In our conversation you're going to learn Rich's exact systems and processes he and his team use to shape Menlo into the amazing company it is today.You'll also learn:- Actionables you can do in your own life to improve your relationship with your bosses.- The only way Rich has found to build more trust with your co-workers and teammates.- Why Menlo employees bring their babies to work with them and the (hilariously) unexpected benefits of that policy.- How to battle against the 6 sources of influence working against major behavioral changes (AKA - Why the failure rate of New Year Resolutions is 92%)And much, much more.Rich is a gem and a wealth of knowledge and I hope you come away from this interview ready to embrace your inner fears and run experiments in your own life that have the potential to change everything.To listen to this episode of "The Process with Brad Wilson" podcast, click that download or play button now.Join my email newsletter at: http://www.MentallyInvincible.com/TheProcessFollow @the_process_podcast on InstagramReach out to me directly at brad@mentallyinvincible.com

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina. Listen to our podcast show here: During this show, New Bern Now's Podsquad: Lisa Bisbee, Laura Johnson, Susan Moffat Thomas, Wendy Card, Rich Sheridan, with Special Guest, Meg Wethington, and I, highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in and around New Bern, NC. For more information visit NewBernNow.com Wendy Card

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina. During this show, New Bern Now's Podsquad: Lisa Bisbee-Lentz, Susan Moffat-Thomas Laura Johnson, with Special Guest Alana Gentry and I, highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in and around New Bern! Rich Sheridan will be back soon Have you heard someone say there's nothing to do in New Bern? If so, ask them to listen to our podcast and/or visit NewBernNow.com. Wendy Card

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina. During this show, New Bern Now's Podsquad: Laura Johnson, Rich Sheridan, Lisa Bisbee-Lentz, Special Guest - Thea Kincaid and I, highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in and around New Bern! Visit New Bern Now's Facebook page or sign up for daily updates by submitting your email address in the right margin on New Bern Now's website. Wendy Card

During this show, New Bern Now's Podsquad: Laura Johnson, Rich Sheridan, Lisa Bisbee-Lentz, Special Guest - Anna Bulszewicz and I, highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in and around New Bern! Susan Moffat-Thomas will be back in two weeks. Tell us what you think by commenting below or sending us an email. Visit New Bern Now's Facebook page or sign up for daily updates by submitting your email address in the right margin on New Bern Now's website. Wendy Card

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina. During this show, New Bern Now's Pod Squad: Lisa Bisbee Lentz, Rich Sheridan, Susan Moffat-Thomas, and I highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in New Bern all the way to the Crystal Coast. I caught up with Laura Johnson later today and we talked about upcoming events! Tell us what you think by commenting below or sending us an email. Visit New Bern Now's Facebook page or sign up for daily updates by submitting your email address in the right margin on New Bern Now's website. Wendy Card

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina.   During this show, New Bern Now's Pod Squad: Laura Johnson, Lisa Bisbee Lentz, Rich Sheridan, and Wendy Card highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in New Bern all the way to the Crystal Coast. For more information, visit NewBernNow.com.

Find out the latest information about our beautiful and happening town of New Bern and Beyond. Beyond, meaning our travels throughout Eastern North Carolina.   During this show, New Bern Now's Pod Squad: Laura Johnson, Lisa Bisbee Lentz, Rich Sheridan, and I highlighted numerous businesses and non-profits in New Bern all the way to the Crystal Coast. For more information, visit NewBernNow.com.

From kid programmer in 1971 to Forbes cover story in 2003, Joy, Inc. author Richard Sheridan (U-M grad BS Computer Science '80, MS Computer Engineering '82) has never shied from challenges, opportunities nor the limelight. While his focus has always been around technology, his passion is actually process, teamwork and organizational design, with one inordinately […]