Overcoming Hard Times

Episode 963: Overcoming Hard Times, with Richard Sheridan

Overcoming hard times is one of the traits of a good leader. Learn from Richard Sheridan in this episode about overcoming hard times.

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 to overcoming hard times. 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 December 4, 2018 and will continue to prove that a positive and engaging leadership style is actually good for business.

What you will learn from this episode about overcoming hard times:

• Richard shares the story of Menlo Innovations and its focus on overcoming hard times in the workplace by spreading joy
• What the 5000+ visitors to Menlo Innovations have seen that sets the company’s culture in a league of its own
• How the global pandemic has impacted Menlo Innovations, and how their powerful culture helped them make the transition to being a 100% virtual office
• How the team adapted to using remote work tools like Zoom and were able to maintain their unique culture even remotely
• How the team developed a sequence to overcoming hard times: survive, adapt, sustain, emerge stronger, and thrive again
• How the outbreak of the pandemic took Richard by surprise and was difficult to adapt to, and why it’s natural to struggle through difficulties
• Why Richard wrote Chief Joy Officer, the follow up to Joy, Inc., and what important topics he covers in the new book
• Why the intentionally joyful culture at Menlo is helping the organization maintain optimism through these difficult times, and why joy isn’t the same as happiness
• Why Richard feels the two strongest aspects of the culture at Menlo are that the team actually believes in it and that they want it to survive
• How Richard equates leading a business with flying an airplane, with forces of lift vs. weight and thrust vs. drag applying to businesses too

Resources:

• Chief Joy Officer by Richard Sheridan: https://amzn.to/2XSv1KW
• Email: [email protected]
• Schedule a tour of Menlo: email [email protected] or visit https://menloinnovations.com/tours-and-workshops/factory-tours
• Website: https://richardsheridan.com/
• Website: https://menloinnovations.com/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/menloprez/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/menlo-innovations/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/menloinnovations/
• Twitter: @menloprez
• Read a related blog about overcoming hard times from Menlo Innovations

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority book written by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library
• Connect with Stephen Woessner on LinkedIn
• Listen to more content about overcoming hard times in this podcast with Brett Gilliland

 

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success in overcoming hard times from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I am Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation. Where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built, and how they scaled their business. In fact, my team at predictive ROI, you know, I’ve been talking about this for the last several weeks. Actually, I think it’s been more the last several months about how we recently rebuilt and scaled our free resources section on PredictiveROI.com.

 

So it is now actually turned into a resources library. You can download everything from free and practical tactical guides for how to build your own authority sales machine, everything from how to create your ideal client avatar, how to create a value ladder, how to build out a sales funnel, and how to make sure your content strategy aligns with the ten truths to what makes someone an authority within their niche.

 

So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources. And as always, it’s all free and everything you request. We will send it right to your inbox. So okay onward Nation. My guess is you will recognize the name of our encore guest today, because this will be Rich Sheridan’s fourth visit to the podcast. And if you’ve indeed been listening to the podcast for a while now, you also know that I reserve the encore Spotlight for a very select few.

 

And even more rare is for someone to come back to the show a third time, and now a fourth time in the case of Rich. Okay, so why are we doing that? Well, because Rich has a passion for creating joyful work environments, and that led to his bestselling and widely celebrated book, Joy, Inc. How We Build a Workplace People Love.

 

And we’ve talked about this book and the outcomes of the book and the learning lessons. The big golden nuggets from Joy, Inc. in previous episodes. But Rich wasn’t done. His second book, which is entitled chief Joy officer, continues to prove that a positive and engaging leadership style is actually good for business. And that’s where we’re going to focus our time and attention today, because as we have all felt over the last several months, we as business owners or having a leadership skills test like never before, and our ability to remain positive, to remain engaging and to be the level of engaging leader that our teammates need us to be right now.

 

But candidly, it’s quite challenging. Yes, there is uncertainty in the market today. Yes, your employees are fearful. Fearful. So I invited Rich back to the podcast to help equip you, to help guide you through how to be in spite of everything we’re all facing right now, how to be the chief Joy officer that your team desperately needs you to be.

 

So without further ado, welcome back to Onward Nation, Rich. 

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Richard Sheridan’s Introduction

 

Thank you so much, Stephen. And I feel like I’ve entered the Onward Nation Hall of Fame here or something that we’ve been on for time. So it’s an honor and a privilege to speak with you and your audience again. Well, it’s an honor to have you here, my friend.

 

and and before we dive into some of the big golden nuggets out of chief Joy officer, as well as, some of the transitions and some of the really wonderful experiments that you and your team at Menlo have been, have been doing as a result of coronavirus and everything that’s going on right now. Before we do those two big things, actually, share some additional context, even though this is your fourth visit, to onward, lots of new listeners, too.

 

And so just just give a couple of minutes, you know, some behind the curtain context about your path and journey, and then we’ll dive in. Sure. Yeah. We have a company that we’ve been running here that I was co-founder of, we’ve been for 19 years now. Still feels like a startup. Just amazing to me. Still going strong after 19 years.

 

We founded a company in 2001 to, as we call it, end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology, our passion. Here at Menlo, my personal passion is as a builder. and the thing we build is software. What we want to do with the software is delight the people we intend to serve. We actually use the word joy in that context.

 

Joy for us is when somebody later touches the work of our hearts, our hands and our minds. You know, the custom software we’ve built on behalf of our customers. And they call us up and they say, we love this. It made our lives better. That is joy for us. So this idea of servant, leadership and service to others is where we derive our joy.

 

So the idea of who you serve and what delight look like for them is really baked into our culture here. the way we do it is so unusual that thousands of people a year come from all over the world just to see it. we were anticipating, pre-COVID, about 5000 visitors would come visit us this year alone from all over the world.

 

To spend anywhere from hours to days with us to learn about how we built Venmo and how it works, and why we are producing better results and others who are trying and struggling with technology. And of course, we fall into a category of companies that, there’s a community out there, agile software development teams that look to us for guidance as leaders and thought leaders and that sort of thing.

 

And boy, if there was ever a time where your agility was going to be tested on overcoming hard times, this is it. and so I’m sure we’ll get into some of those details. My personal history is, as a programmer, I grew up in technology. I touched a computer for the first time in 1971. Most of your younger listeners won’t even believe there were computers back in those days.

 

They were different than they are today, of course. But I fell in love with the idea of being a programmer. I thought creating software was going to be the coolest thing ever. But as my career advanced after I graduated from college, I fell into a deep personal trough of disillusionment because the results I thought I would be able to produce weren’t there.

 

And I was seeing budgets being blown and deadlines being missed and poor quality being delivered to unhappy users and unhappy customers. And there was a point in my career where I thought, I just don’t want to do this anymore. but I chose a different path. I chose to fix an entire industry, with a different mindset, and become an example for others to follow that you can actually build joy even into technology firms.

 

And that’s been my mission ever since. In a worthy mission, for sure. In fact, let’s just tease out this pivot, which is probably one of the most overused words during the Covid crisis, whether it’s actually a combination, the two an unprecedented pivot. Right. So everything seems to be unprecedented, right? Right. Yeah.

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Setting Up A Pro-Covid Environment

 

So when you guys were on track to have, you know, 5000 visitors to Menlo, that in and of itself, I think most business owners would give their front. It’s to have a workplace, to have a culture, to have a process. They have a system where 5000 people from around the world want to come see it.

 

But you guys have built your business on really intertwining principles and practices. And so now you’ve been able to turn that into a virtual tour. If I understood our pre-interview chat correctly and that’s and now that’s been really well-received and actually delivered with excellent. So can you, can you take us through that process because that was in all actuality a big pivot, right?

 

Oh, it was you know, I will tell you that. Yeah. When people come and visit, you know, we’ll talk about the 19 years of Menlo and then we’ll talk about the last six months. what they would see is a big open room, no room, no offices, no walls, no cubes, no doors. CEO out in the office with everybody else in the big open room, people working two little computers, sharing a keyboard and mouse talking in close proximity to one another. A daily stand up meeting where we’d all stand in a circle together and pass around the plastic two horn biking helmet as we reported out from our peers of people who’ve been working together, talking about what they worked on, what accomplishments, what problems, where do they need help? 

 

And so you can, I’m sure all of your listeners can easily imagine, wait a minute, a big open room. Everyone’s sitting shoulder to shoulder with two people working together, sharing a keyboard and mouse, passing around a plastic two horn baking helmet that everyone’s touching.

 

Contagion galore. Right? We may have set up the most pro Covid environment out there. And so of course, when all of this hit, things had to change and they had to change dramatically. They had to change quickly on a dime, really. And, and I will simply say, you know, in full disclosure, my sleep was disturbed for 100 days.

 

I couldn’t even imagine because, as you said, what I saw was a principal center. Practices were so intertwined, they felt like one. They felt like one in the same. And it took me 100 days in my own head just to separate them out and realize, just because the practices are changing and have to change for health and safety reasons, the principles can remain the same.

 

But principles of collaboration, relationship of trust, of teamwork, of camaraderie, of human energy, all of those things are still here and we rebuilt them quickly. I will tell you, the team was ahead of me. This I was the one who was struggling, keeping up with it all because I wanted it to be the same. I wanted to go back.

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Changes in Menlo Innovations

 

I saw, well, this is just temporary and, you know, and of course, we’re now five months into this and I think Menlo has gone through some as everyone has substantive changes and many of them I think will stick. And so I see a new Menlo going forward, and the tours were a big part of our business development process.

 

Certainly many of our customers would come out of people who would come to visit. And when those disappeared, we went from anticipating 5000 to, quite frankly, anticipating zero. And it wasn’t until June when one of our good friends asked, could they see Menlo in its current form, in this virtual form? And we did a virtual tour for that now I didn’t know how we’d work.

 

It clearly fell into the category of like, let’s run the experiment. That’s a tradition here at Menlo. It’s one of our principles. And so we tried it and it was so well-received, we put out a little blurb on LinkedIn about it, and we just said, hey, write to us if you’re interested in scheduling a virtual tour. And now we’re doing 8 to 10 virtual tours of a virtual memo per week.

 

Amazing. Very, very well received. The teams are enjoying it. We’re learning a lot just by sharing. And of course, you know, everybody’s trying to figure out how do we make this virtual thing work? How do we not record culture? If we had a good culture in the past, how do we keep it if we didn’t have a good culture in the past?

 

Is this making things worse? I think it often does. And you know, so now they look to Menlo again and say, hey, if you guys can make this work, the people who are all gathered in one room together and now you’re all spread out in your own pocket, there might be hope for us too, but that’s a fair question, right?

 

Like if you guys are the pinnacle of intertwining principles and practices and being a highly collaborative team environment that if you guys can figure out how to do this, then anybody can, right? I mean, that is a fair question, right? Yeah. No. And it’s a key one. I mean, everybody, let’s face it, everybody is trying to figure this out.

 

Schools are universities, businesses, sports teams. I mean everybody’s trying to figure out how to change. How do we keep human energy high? How do we keep the fear at bay? How do we keep people focused on our purpose? How do we keep bureaucracy lower, so we can, you know, starve off the human energy of our team of bureaucratic methods?

 

How do we keep trust high? How do we continue to build relationships, all that kind of stuff? That’s what people are now. All of us are focused on as leaders. So my guess is and I quickly want to transition to your book and some of the big golden nuggets about leadership in engaging leadership style, positive and so forth in just a second. 

 

But I can almost guarantee that some of our listeners are thinking, wait a minute before you move on to leadership. And I want to get there and get his mentorship. Stephen, you’ve got to ask him what roadblocks, what obstacles and so forth. It sounds like they’ve mastered this, but what were some of the messy pieces to the transition?

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Trusting Your Team to Adapt to Change

 

Because that might be a great nugget for our listeners. So what obstacles, Rich, if any, did you guys experience in making this transition? Well, it was you know, I will say the first obstacle was probably just my own mindset, where I didn’t even want to believe that a transition to a 100% virtual Menlo was even possible because I sort of, defined a company for 19 years and led a vision for a culture where close collaboration and a big open space was was key for us.

 

And, you know, I’m quite frankly, I mean, there’s been a headwind in the other direction for so long now that open offices are the worst idea ever. And, you know, so and of course, we made it work. And people wanted to know why it worked for us. And maybe it didn’t work anywhere else. And all of a sudden that was all taken away.

 

And I think there are a lot of people out there like, well, this has got to be the end of Menlo. And I think I thought that too. I thought, this is going to wreck us. This is going to destroy us. So I think for me, I think I saw our team adapt faster than I adapted.

 

So I trusted the mindset of the key leader, you know, and I can tell you my team was looking to me for vision, for optimism. And I could see it wasn’t there for three months. I actually uttered the word retirement to my co-founder for, you know, twice in one day. And I got him a little nervous. And he’s like, are you serious?

 

And, you know, I can tell you, even my kids say, well, dad, you’ll never retire. You’re having too much fun at Menlo. So I always appreciated that analysis on their part. They saw a guy who loved what he did so much that it didn’t feel like work, and this suddenly felt like work or like real work.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: Working Virtually During the Pandemic

 

So, like the kind of work you don’t want to do. And so, what I witnessed was a team that had been built to adapt and adapt. They did, and I started having to catch up with them. And so I think as I said, I wasn’t trying to stop it. It wasn’t like I threw up a roadblock, but I wasn’t the leader at that point.

 

I watched them adapt very quickly, and it was neat to watch them overcoming hard times. Of course. And, you know, there’s some practical things, just simple things like bandwidth, you know, did people have a strong enough connection at home? And I’m sure everybody’s run into that, figuring out all these darn collaboration tools like Zoom or WebEx or Google Meets and which ones of them work and which ones of them don’t, you know, and and all the stumbling and bumbling and fumbling you do when you’re trying to figure out a new way to communicate with people?

 

Yeah, I’ll give you a simple version. We have a daily stand meeting at BMO every day. Dart board on the wall goes off an alarm in the dart board. You know, the white dart board needs an alarm, but it has one that goes off at 10:00 and that was the call to stand up. So everybody in the room would hear the alarm.

 

They go stand in a circle. We pass around two horn plastic biking helmets around the circle of people, and we would have daily stand ups. And 13 minutes almost invariably took 13 minutes, 50, 60 people, 30 minutes. Yeah. I mean, everybody says that. Wow. How did you do that? It doesn’t sound like people are talking fast. You get a lot of content.

 

Sure, but you do it in 30 minutes and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that we could go into. But now all of a sudden, we’re all at home together and the circle can’t hear the dark. We’re going off. What are we going to do? And so we said, well, let’s try a zoom version of stand up.

 

And we did. You know, you get 50, 60 people on a zoom call. You got like 2 or 3 pages of faces on the screen, and people are still assigned to their peers. You can talk about their work, working in a remote environment, because that’s interesting too, because everybody’s at home. But it was clumsy. It was awkward.

 

Nobody knew who was next, nobody who knew who was paired with whom. And so quickly the team adapted, and they used the little chat window that’s available to all the zoom users. And just as they log in to zoom, they just write the word next and their peer part, their name next to it. And so what you looked at in the chat window was the sequence that the meeting would follow.

 

And so when you and I, you know, if we were the first ones to answer, we say, I’d say first with Stephen, and then when everybody was assembled, say, good morning, I’m Rich. You say I’m Stephen. Here’s what we’re doing on a podcast today. It’s Onward Nation. You know, talking about fourth time is good friend blah blah blah.

 

And then we’d say, and Helen and Kelly are next because we could see it in the chat window. And then how implicit. Good morning I’m Helen and Kiwi. This is what we’re working on. And then they’d say, oh Josh and Ian or next. And so all of a sudden it got reorganized again and it went back down to 13 minutes again.

 

And we got it to work. And we felt very proud of that. I mean, it’s a fairly simple construct, but we had to figure out how to do that. And so we still do our daily stand ups every day at 10:00 with the zoom meeting and that’s an important part of our culture. It’s where we gather together.

 

it’s where we share everything that’s going on. Any challenges? We have to ask for general help, big announcements, birthdays, And the delightful thing is, you know, about us. One of the things we’ve always had, a tradition that newborns could come to the office. They’d come in about three months old. They stayed all day, every day for 3 or 4 months, you know, from sort of three months old to about seven months old.

 

And of course, there’s no office newborns. I mean, while they still come to stand up. It’s awesome that all the kids come to stand. That, in fact is, you know, we’ve had dogs at minimum. We’ve always had 1 to 3 dogs in the office every day. Well, the dogs still come to stand up. oh. Little did we know, there are many cats of Menlo.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: Thriving and Doubling Down

 

Kids come to stand up and you know, and I will tell you, you know, I realize I’m going a long time. Just don’t stand up here. But it’s an important part of a realization I had. I’m getting a better view into the humanity of our team now. Senior. Oh, interesting. Senior families. I’m learning their pets names.

 

Oh, Sarah’s a cat person, and Giovanni’s a dog person, and, you know, and I think it added a layer of humanity that I quite frankly, didn’t expect. That’s fascinating. Yeah. And to me, those were the revelations. Those were the things that started knocking down the obstacles in my own mindset that I missed. Okay. So here’s here’s why I said that’s fascinating, because, you know, for the last several months, we’ve been talking, about how the silver linings are there, if we’re willing to look for them in the fact that that you guys made this unprecedented pivot and, and took virtual or, excuse me, took tours and made them virtual, you still do the stand up meetings. 

 

And in this additional layer of humanity, it’s like it’s like you found a way to actually take your culture deeper as opposed to, well, for Pete’s sake, our company is not going to exist any longer. And, and, and so amazing to that your team that by the way, that you had created and architected over, almost two decades in building that this team was out in front of you and it showed you the possibilities.

 

How amazing of a silver lining all of these things were. And let me tell you, just personally, it was so comforting and I literally lost sleep for 100 days because I felt like I was in a maze and it was one hall maze, just two walls, one at each end. And I kept running until I hit the wall, looked down, no cheese.

 

Came around, went back with the wall, no cheese. And I think it was about 100 days where the metaphor for me was. I looked up and I said, oh my gosh, I don’t have to stay here. There’s no ceiling. I can climb the wall and get out of the maze entirely. And we established at that point based on a great Patrick Quincy O’Neill, online conference that he called Emerge Stronger.

 

Right. And Lindsay only actually gave me some tidbits to establish a new pattern of thinking, he said, everybody is going through this, and you know, when’s the last time there was this much of a common experience across the nation, or the world for that matter? We’re all kind of going through the same thing at the same time.

 

We’re all trying to figure out how to hide our Covid haircuts, and we’re all going to work in shorts every day in slippers, because nobody can see below our belts. And he said companies that come out of this are either going to emerge stronger or weaker. and it’s all going to depend on how you, where do you double down your investments?

 

Yes. And I really grabbed on to that. And we established a sequence of we’re well long on now. And the sequence was survive, adapt, sustain, emerge stronger, thrive again. And right now we’re in the late stages of sustaining and being well to emerge stronger but not thriving in place yet. But I can see it coming and, you know, and that’s what’s been going on for us over the last five months.

 

And that thrive again has become a rallying cry. This is such a perfect gauntlet for you to throw down in front of real Onward Nation listeners. I absolutely love what you just said. Where will you or I guess in the case of Menlo, where will we double down on our investments? And you’ve been and you’ve been clear about some of those places where you guys have doubled down and what what an exceptional mindset of this isn’t the end of Menlo, but this is this is perhaps the beginning of a new Menlo in in your doubling down as opposed to shrinking and running it in you a few minutes ago, you described it

 

As is mindset. How that is so on point with everything you just shared with us. Yeah. And you know, I have to admit, I think I was wondering, do I have what it takes to adapt? Am I even energetic enough to adapt? You know, I’m 62 years old, so maybe I’m done. Maybe we need to turn over the reins and and, you know, the team was getting nervous and I was getting nervous, and I didn’t like that feeling.

 

And I, you know, and look, when you do anything for 19 years, whether, you know, it’s really good, like, I think we’ve adapted to. And I was very proud of what we created. Right. So, you know, there was a cadence and a sense of well-being in myself about where we were going and how we got there and all that kind of stuff.

 

And all of a sudden everything was taken away, and there was a little bit of start over, right? Like, well, I don’t want to start over. All these things. We were like, well, that’s not an option. Well then maybe I quit. Well, that’s not really an option either because it is so, you know, but again, it took me a while and I think, you know, I’m going to give your audience some encouragement here.

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Remain Optimistic Despite the Challenges

 

If you went through or are going through anything like I’m describing, it’s okay. We all got knocked down. We go down, knocked down hard. we weren’t ready for this. Nobody could have been ready. Nobody could have predicted this. I mean, okay, yeah, maybe people had predicted, like Bill gates were predicting pandemics, but none of us could have imagined.

 

What would it actually be like for our individual organizations, for us personally? And how will our businesses adapt? And what happens if most of our customers go away for a while and all that kind of stuff? So yeah, it’s a challenging time and that’s okay. And if people are struggling, I get it. And I’m hoping maybe in the words I’m sharing today and the story we’re telling in our conversation, you know, it can be inspiring for others.

 

Because I’m back to optimism. I’m back to personal energy. The team sees it. They’re glad for it. I am too, because I think, you know, we will come out of this will be different. This is not about how soon we get back to the way things were. And, you know, quite frankly, I mean, it’s weird to say it now, but I’m kind of excited about the changes we’re going through. Even though I’d like to read a few chapters ahead.

 

Right. Know just to see how long all this really lasts and see things. But it is a little bit of a glimpse into the reality of what? I don’t know if you want to call it the new normal, whatever normal is going to look like at some point. what used to be in its entirety is likely not coming back.

 

And you guys have done a great job of adapting and so forth. Will the pendulum swing back toward what normal used to be? Maybe. But there’s some things that are probably going to be permanently changed. Right. And I think you just gave Onward Nation business owners. I don’t want to call it a pep talk.

 

And the reason why I say that is because sometimes pep talks are filled with hyperbole, and none of what you just shared was. I think it was a very candid view of what can we be optimistic for the future? Yes. But does it require us to double down in key areas as you guys have? Yup. And so Onward Nation Rich just gave you the perfect blueprint for mindset and where to double down and how to look forward to the future with optimism and excitement.

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Working During a Vacation

 

So that was awesome. Rich. Yeah, I’ll give you one quick fun peek. You know, my life has changed just because I can. These little morsels might give people thoughts about things. My wife and I finally, after all this time, took a brief vacation. Okay? And, of course, got to be safe. So we rented an RV.

 

It’s like traveling hotels. When I’ve been in northern Michigan, where it’s quite beautiful. Well, my team probably didn’t believe I was actually taking a vacation, so one of my team members actually scheduled me to give a talk to a group in Berlin on the Tuesday of my vacation. And, I think I panicked a little bit.

 

Erica, who’s scheduled that, said, do you need me to? I mean, I really. I didn’t mean to schedule it. It’s fine. I’ll just do it from where we actually are. What do you mean? I said, I can do this from an RV, and, you know, along the lakeside, northern Michigan. I’ll put up my hotspot, I’ll flip it open. And I did it from inside the RV.

 

And I told the audience that’s where I was. And you know, what a delightful type of thing that I could still have on my vacation. I could still be who I needed to be for that group. And it was a great talk. It went just the way I wanted it to. It went just the way they wanted it to do.

 

But I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to break a vacation with my wife for it. And so those kinds of things, I realize the possibilities now are kind of wide open. You know, there’s still a lot of challenges. You know, we have team members, we have young kids at home, and they don’t like working at home with all the kids because they’re not feeling guilty.

 

You’re feeling the stress of, where do I draw the line between parenting my young kids and being a good employee? And I get all that. So there’s this isn’t you know, I’m not trying to be Pollyanna about this either, but I think there’s, there’s possibilities. Now, I would have never even considered it before. Absolutely. When I think about that group, that you dialed in and from, you know, they were in Berlin.

 

Read this blog from Menlo Innovations about overcoming hard times

 

Overcoming Hard Times: Showing Humanity During Virtual Meetings

 

You were in Michigan, as you described. And I’m thinking about going back to the additional layer of humanity and engaging with a team that your stand up meetings kind of unfolded because of the dynamic and in, you know, how you guys were doing that. And I’m thinking, okay, this group what a cool opportunity for them because they got to experience you in a different way and maybe in a slightly less formal way.

 

And so they got to really get to know you probably at a deeper level than they would have in a different type of situation. Is that fair? I think it is absolutely fair. And that same group did another thing with me where there was a panel of a set of CEOs. One of them in Dusseldorf, and right in the middle of the zoom video call with these CEOs all lined up for the panel. This CEO’s four year old son comes up and starts whispering something to dad, and he just picks them up and sets them on his lap and continues on like nothing was going on and none of us thought it was unusual.

 

And again, I think that element of oh wow, look at him. He’s got a four year old son who’s really cute and, you know, and what a great dad he is. He didn’t try and push the kid away or call his wife and say, could you get him out of here? I’m on a zoom call, for goodness sakes.

 

And so I think that embracing of our whole lives is more present now than maybe it’s ever had a chance to be before. I love this. So when you and I were talking in our pre-interview chat and actually going back and forth, what were you thinking about doing this fourth interview? You know, we’re thinking about some leadership lessons and so forth that could come out of chief Joy officer, because you and I have talked about leadership skills. Our, you know, skills for being positive and engaging and being sort of that stoic leader, all of that is being tested right now like it never has been before.

 

So why first tick, tick, tick it. Before you take us into the book, take us into the why behind the book. Like why? Why did you decide? Because Joy, Inc. is an awesome book. And so, why did you feel like your work wasn’t done and you needed to write this next book? Chief Joy? Officer, you know, I think that the probably the simplest way to describe it is Joy Inc was about the very visible parts of the things you could see, touch, experience by looking at it.

 

Chief Joy officers, the invisible stuff that actually makes it tick, kind of the soul of the machine in some ways. You know, there’s this aspect of Menlo that was described in brief enjoyment, that one of the chapters in joining was titled Growing Leaders, Not Bosses. And this idea of leadership as a component of creating a company structure versus a strong hierarchical authority system that is typical in most organizations is fascinating the world. 

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: What Makes a Joyful Leader

 

We’re probably in one of the far ends of the spectrum on this, where we have no we have no bosses here. And everybody looks this way. I am chaos. Yeah. That’s true. If we had no leaders here, what’s the difference between a leader and a boss? And like. Well, leaders actually have to influence people to an outcome.

 

Bosses can just tell you what to do, and people will follow that because they agree. And they might follow in name only. but if you lean too hard on the hierarchical authority of leadership, then you are, you’re running a risk. You’re running a risk that you will get people following just because you were told to do it, not giving their whole hearts, their whole Spirit’s leadership is a much more difficult thing to pull off when you don’t have that, you have to do it because they told you so.

 

Option card on the table and that was what the book was about, is how do you create that kind of leadership model? And, you know, then doubling down on the joy, peace. How do you create a joyful leadership model? What are the components of that? What are the elements that make a person a joyful leader? And I, as you know, I differentiated between joy and happiness in both books.

 

And so we can talk about that if you want to. I think that would be a great place to start, if you wouldn’t mind. Sure. You know, I remember when I was writing for Joy Inc, my editor, we struggled with the subtitle, which ended up being How We Built the Workplace. People love. Her first suggestion was to take a peek inside the world’s happiest Workplace.

 

I smiled and I said, oh no, don’t you dare. She said, what do you mean? I said, joy and happiness are two very different things, which is what do you mean? So? Well, I said, joy is a much longer work. I said, there’s no way. I don’t care what your company does. Work is too hard to do.

 

Something meaningful takes too long, and it’s to differ. Called to be happy every minute of every day. I said that would require medication. I said, joy is that longer arc of combining the work of your hearts, your hands, your minds to serve others, to delight people. Your intent is there’s no way to be happy every minute getting to that kind of outcome.

 

And so I gave her some strong examples. You know, any of us who have raised children, I use the example of watching my daughter marry the man of her dreams. And in that moment, you know, the I do, there were tears and there was joy. But as good as my girls have been throughout their whole lives, the arc of parenting is not an arc of happiness from one end of the spectrum to the other.

 

But is there joy? Absolutely. And I think anybody who’s raised children knows that feeling of joy, of generating, even though there are many, many difficult moments along the way, that that is a great way to describe it. And I love them, like when you said metaphor, Or what? Excuse me? When you said Joy, I thought about that sort of metaphorically, and I can visualize that arc. 

 

And you’re right. That is such a great way to describe it. So when we’re thinking about or if you were to think of a couple of golden nuggets out of chief Joy officer that you would want to accentuate because of where we’re at right now and because of what the last five months have been like, what might be a couple of the the golden nuggets that you would want to impress upon business owners, listeners who are, receiving your mentorship right now as a result of this on core, what are a couple of those lessons that you think are timely that you’d want to share?

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: Optimism is a Choice for Leaders

 

Oh, goodness, you’re putting me on the spot. You know, I think that there’s no question that optimism is an essential ingredient for joyful leadership. And I’m not talking about Pollyanna. I’m not talking about ignoring the real these. You know, I love this quote from Viktor Frankl, that I use as the epitaph for the chapter on optimism.

 

This is between stimulus and response. There is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. Amen. Of course, if you know that book and you know what the conditions were that Viktor Frankl was living in, and that’s someone who went through what he went through, could write.

 

That is just astounding to me. but we are all living in that gap right now between stimulus and response. And I will, like, admit it, before my first 100 days’ response weren’t all that great. But one of the things that I realized was that, you know, every leader has these moments in their life. And the question is, how will we respond to them?

 

Will we, you know, and it’s so easy right now, isn’t it to just line up the dominoes in our mind and say we’re heading towards catastrophe in oblivion? Right. That’s easy to do, interestingly enough. And this was kind of a revelation. Even when I was writing the book. Optimism is actually the harder choice to choose. Optimism is to walk into the wind, because the winds that blow against us every single day.

 

Bad news, pessimism of, woe is me. We all experience those personally. We all experience them corporately. But I would say that optimism is just a fundamental choice for leaders. And it’s not about choosing sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. but it’s literally, about believing you have created a system that will produce a good outcome.

 

And if it doesn’t, you’ve built a team behind you that will figure it out. And quite frankly, I mean, I will say my biggest lesson in this personal lesson for me was, oh, man, am I ever glad that we built this strong, intentionally joyful culture. Because if there was ever a time, you know, if you use a metaphor of a hurricane because that’s what this feels like.

 

Category five worldwide hurricane storm of the century. You want a building built on a really, really strong foundation to withstand the storm. And culture is the foundation. And I would just advocate that a joyful culture is a stronger foundation as you’ve been built. This is awesome. See if you’ll be a litmus test here. See if I’m tracking with you what you just shared there around optimism.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: A Team Who Can Take Care of Themselves

 

I think, in my opinion, here comes the litmus test. Like that is a perfect tie into chapter 14, which you entitled, bigger than ourselves. And you started off that chapter with this really wonderful quote from Walter Lippmann. And, Walter said, the final test of a leader is that he or she leaves behind in others that conviction in the will to carry on.

 

So like if you get that culture piece right, which is bigger than ourselves, like you’ll have a team that can take care of themselves, right? Yeah. Well, I’ve often said that two strongest pieces of the culture we’ve built here at Menlo are number one, the team actually believes, deeply believes. And what we created. So they’re not walking in the door every day.

 

And I have to remind myself, you know, that’s why we’re here again. These people believe in what we’ve created here and storytelling is a big part of that. It’s stories we tell each other. And believe me, we’re getting stories galore right now about what we’re doing, give you a fun one in a second here, but, and then the second piece is because they believe so strongly in it, they want it to survive.

 

But to have your entire team showing up every day saying, we are not going to let this thing die is such a powerful force. And because, you know, it’s not this force of personal energy on my part like plate spinning. And keep going, guys, you can do it. I mean, there’s a part of me that has to be that kind of leader for the team.

 

They want to see that. Me. That’s why they’re happy, optimistic, energized, which is back again. But they didn’t, they didn’t just collapse when I wasn’t the leader. They needed me to be in those first 100 days. This is so, so amazing. Great conversation. Did you say you had a fun story you wanted to share with us?

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: The High-Tech Anthropology Piece

 

Well, there was you know, we have this. Not only is our culture challenged, but the way we do our work is challenged. And sure, we can for our business challenge. So, I’m used to, you know, closing a new piece of business, you know, getting on an airplane, flying to see a customer, or going out for a meal.

 

They build the relationship before we start doing the work. And of course, nobody’s doing that anymore. And so you have to start to figure out how to do this. Well, at a certain point, we engage a part of our team for every project we work on that we call high tech anthropology. And it’s a curious name. Right. But it’s all about if we’re going to delight people with the work here, we’re going to build a piece of software we darn well better understand deeply who is one day going to use this one.

 

And so the understanding of the people, which is what anthropology is all about. So we’re understanding the people who are going to use the high tech work we’re doing. So we have these people on our team. Their title is high tech anthropologists and their job is to go out into the world and study the people we intend to serve as their native and we see their workflow, their habits, their goals as human beings.

 

Get to know them. Lindo vocabulary because we don’t want to torture them. That’s what we’re doing. Remember, we want to end human suffering in the world’s technology. World’s best way to do that is to understand the people you intend to serve. So we send a high-tech anthropologist to understand what we can’t do. And one of our senior high tech anthropologists, Molly, is getting to where we need to start this new project.

 

And realizing our high tech anthropology piece is similarly thwarted. And we can’t go out in the world, so we’re going to have to do it remotely with video or something. And she leans and she goes, this will be so exciting to figure out how to do this. Wow. And I have to tell you, I told this story so many times, such a great comfort to me to hear one of my senior team members say that, right?

 

Because it would have been so easy for her or anybody else. Tim. Oh, this will never work. We can’t do that. You know you are. We require you know, she’s like, no, no, what a great new challenge. And I’m like, thank you Molly. I appreciate hearing that from you. Wow. Well okay. That is a great story.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: The Value in Building a Culture

 

That is a fun story. But all joking aside, that had to really make you smile as a leader because it is, you know, and just putting a real, bright spotlight on it. That does not happen by accident. It takes 19 years of culture building to make that moment happen. Yeah. And like I said, it’s, you know, some people say, well, we haven’t built that strong culture.

 

Yes. Okay. I’ll admit, the best time to have planted a tree is 20 years ago. Yeah. The second best time to plant a tree is today. Yep. And so, if your audience is thinking, is there really value in building a culture? Absolutely. Should it be a joyful one? You bet. Why not? Is there business value in that?

 

Absolutely right. And by the way you’ll work. You’ll actually not have to. Work is hard. You’ll sleep better. Hopefully you are sleeping better now, my friend. I’m too much now. I didn’t pick you up. I know that our time is, quickly, flowing through the hourglass here, and I, I really appreciate you taking time out of your compressed schedule to come back for a fourth, conversation before we close out, before we say goodbye.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: Lifting Human Energy

 

I know we covered a lot, but anything you think we might have missed? Anything. Any final advice, Rich, that you’d like to share? And then please tell Onward Nation listeners, how best to connect with you. Yeah, thank you for that. You know, as I was preparing and I gave a lot of talks around the world, at least they did.

 

Now I do them virtually, which is kind of cool because they do it from my basement. I’m convinced, by the way, the first time I do the next actual keynote on an actual stage at a hotel conference center in front of a live audience, I’m going to step out onto that stage with my zoom shirt on my shorts and my slippers.

 

Because that’s where I’ve been giving all of my talks in the last six months. It’s and I think the audience will get it immediately. But, one of the gifts that I was given in preparing for this series of keynotes that would come out of chief Joy officer was a drawing. I was trying to explain to a team member who’s helping me craft the slides, and she’s like, what message do we really want to give?

 

And I drew a picture of an airplane, a little airplane, because I’m a pilot. And I said, look, I’m going to compare and contrast the forces at work on an airplane to the forces at work. And as a human organization, because all of us are leaders, what we want to do is get our corporate aircraft off the ground and fly every single day.

 

And I said, if you think of the four forces at work on an airplane, that even if you don’t have a pilot’s license or an aeronautical engineering degree, everybody has the basic understanding of lift versus weight and thrust versus drag, right? The lift of human energy has to overcome the weight of bureaucracy, the thrust of purpose. Extreme focus has to overcome the drag of fear.

 

And I will tell you that picture and I, we have little postcards of it. Now, we could send your, you know, you could send them to your audience if they write to us. It has been transformational, in terms of the impact of the talks I’ve been giving. I know I’m on to something when I’m in an audience, and I put up a picture like that and you see all the phones come up and click, click, click, click, click.

 

Yeah, it’s such a simple model because now I can talk about, well, how do we lift human energy? How do we reduce the meeting load of bureaucracy, how do we make sure people understand their purpose? And how do we reduce that drag of a sphere inside of organizations? Because an airplane will always have drag and will always have weight, it wouldn’t have utility if it didn’t have those things.

 

Right. But what do we need? We need more lift than weight. We need more thrust, right? Or that airplane never gets off the ground. And so I would just want to leave that picture in people’s minds of the simple model for thinking, what is our job if we’re the pilot of that airplane, for the design or the systems that create things, how do we make sure that our systems have more lift in weight and more thrust?

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: Sharing a Great Lesson

 

Right. Okay. Great story, great illustration. And actually let me just not call it a story yet. Let me call it a lesson because that was a great lesson. Then in addition to giving a great lesson, Rich, you actually just shared another lesson about how to tell a great story, how to share a great lesson, and how to tell it in the framework of a story.

 

So that was doubly impactful. That was awesome. Yeah. And like I said, it was one of those fun moments where I was just talking to a team member who was helping me craft the slides, and I started drawing this picture and I started drawing it again and again. And I think the greatest moment for me was when I was meeting with some friends over lunch at a local restaurant here when you could do that.

 

And, I started describing this. I just grabbed a napkin and I said, let me draw some napkins, drew the airplane that drew the four forces and that sort of thing. And I got done, and they kind of looked at me funny, and I said, what? They said, would you mind signing and stating the napkin? I like okay, this is going so, so and that hasn’t been the first time, that sort of thing or the last time that that sort of thing has happened.

 

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Overcoming Hard Times: How to Connect with Richard

 

So anyways, you know, I think it is incumbent upon us as leaders to come up with simple examples, you know, just because then you can carry them around in your hearts without having to remember 29 steps, that sort of thing. So yeah, that was awesome. But the best way to connect with you, Rich. Yeah. You know, feel free.

 

I’m on LinkedIn, you know, the best way to connect with me on LinkedIn is connected to something. So if you say, hey, that was a great interview with Stephen on Onward Nation, I’d love to connect with you. You know, then I say yes, if it’s random, I sometimes question whether I should or I should. So just to have people reference our shared and my last name at MenloInnovations.com is my email address, and people are welcome to write me directly if anyone would be interested in a virtual tour, which we do plenty of now, you can either write us that experience at MenloInnovations.com, or we’d be happy, Stephen, to supply you a link, that you could post, on your website alongside the talk. 

 

And either one works for us. It would be awesome if somebody or your team could send that to me. We will definitely include it in the show notes. for today’s episode, that would be fantastic. Thank you.

 

So Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Rich’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. But the key is, you have to take these blueprints for joy in mindset and the unprecedented pivot. As we’ve talked about in candidly. Take those and apply them into your business right away because they can be transformational, as we’ve talked about here in this conversation.

 

And Rich, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, my friend. I am so very grateful that you said yes for a fourth time to come back to the show, to be our mentor yet again, to help us move our businesses onward to that next level and to guide us towards overcoming hard times. Thank you so much, Rich. Well, thank you for giving me this platform to share ideas with the world.

 

I really appreciate it. This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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