How One CEO Creates Joy at Work

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, says it took him years to learn what really mattered at work and how to create that kind of workplace culture. As a company leader today, he works hard to make sure both his job — and the jobs of his employees — are joyful. That doesn't mean they are happy 100% of the time, he argues, but that they feel fulfilled by always putting the customer first. Sheridan is the author of "Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear."

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Say the name name Thomas Edison and you think of the light bulb, the phonograph and the big businesses he built around them, But do you think of workplace culture?
0:55.0	There's a biography titled Working at Inventing that describes Edison's famous laboratory
1:00.1	at Menlo Park. The work life there was quote punctuated by gambling practical
1:05.3	jokes and rowdy sing songs at the organ. The all-night experimental sessions
1:09.6	with their midnight feasts and hours of storytelling became as an important part of the Edison
1:15.0	myth as the inventions themselves.
1:17.8	One employee said, the strangest think to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday. For my labor does not seem like work, I enjoy it."
1:27.0	Those stories of Menlo Park inspired our guest today.
1:31.0	A software engineer for years years Richard Sheridan says his work
1:34.7	was as far from joy as he could get. So when he co-founded his own enterprise
1:39.8	software company he named it Menlo Innovations. He wanted his work and the work of his
1:45.0	employees to be joyful. He has a new book out about it and he's here to tell us what
1:50.3	he's doing. Rich, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Kurt. You've written two books about Joy, First Joy Inc and now Chief Joy Officer, but I want to take you back maybe to a non-joyful place and I want to ask about
2:16.2	maybe the worst job you had or maybe the worst day at that job that you had.
2:22.4	Yeah, I graduated from Michigan in 1982 with a master's degree in computer engineering and took a job here in Ann Arbor, a place that I had interned for a few years and started getting accolades from my new boss and the team I worked with and that sort of thing.
2:41.0	And my boss came in and brought me and says, rich, we're going to put you in charge of a new project.
2:44.4	And I looked at him and I said, awesome.
	...

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