Ending the Human Suffering in a Tech-Driven World of Work with Richard Sheridan

One of the most squandered energy forces on the planet is the force of human energy. Everybody knows what human energy feels like, sounds like, acts like you can sense it. It's palpable. When you come into Menlo, you can feel that energy. Why? The central word here is joy, and we define it very tangibly. We want to delight the people we intend to serve.

Foreign. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode, we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives, and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Today I'm honored to host Rich Sheridan, CEO, storyteller of Menlo Innovations and author of Joy Inc. Joyce, a man who's built a software development company so joyful, 3,000 people visit each year just to see how it runs. In this episode, Rich shares why pairing people at one keyboard all day creates fewer emergencies and better results, how clarity and laughter can outperform complex systems, and why joy isn't just emotional, it's measurable and massively productive. Menlo's mission to end human suffering in tech. And they're doing it one joyful project at a time. Stick around to hear the one interview technique that shows whether someone's truly a team player. It might just change how you hire and how you lead. Let's get started. Hi Rich, it is so lovely to have you with us on the Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for spending time with us and the time you spent with me walking me a real time tour of menlo Innovations the last time I was in Michigan.

Awesome. Well, it's great to see you again, Ashish.

So, Rich, I want to ask you, you know, to tell us a little bit about Menlo Innovations and what inspired you to start it. And friends, for those who are listening, I truly feel Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan is truly one of those flourishing lighthouses. It's a workplace that is designed so differently. It's a workplace designed not to accentuate human suffering or cause human suffering as a side effect in the pursuit of profits, but it's a place that literally is about being successful through ensuring the people who work there are flourishing. So I'll give you a little bit of intro from which to kind of really listen and actually encourage you to actually go for a visit yourself. But we'll try and capture as much of the magic of MENLO innovations here on this podcast. So, sorry, Rich, back to you. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to start it and give us a little bit of details about what you do.

Absolutely. So my personal history is as a programmer. So I started working with computers when I was a kid, like a lot of kids these days do, but I'm older. It started way back in 1971 for me. I was a freshman in high school. I started coding because they offered a computer science class, which was crazy. First time that it ever happened in the school system I was a part of. And I just fell in love. I thought, this is cool. This is my opportunity to be an artist. Wasn't that good with a paintbrush or a pencil or something? But coding, it is an artistic activity. It absolutely is. It's creative, it's imaginative. There are many ways to do the same thing. And I just fell in love with the idea that you could do this for a living. And I got the opportunity to do that, and I eventually went and got a formal education from the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, where I live. And it was, pinch me. I'm in the profession that I love. I'm now well schooled in it. I'm ready to. Let's get going. And very quickly, I started to discover the dark side of our industry. And for those who know the software industry, this will be familiar. For those who don't, you might be surprised that the software industry, even to this day, is often a lots of overtime kind of culture. Delivering lousy stuff on a regular basis that is low in quality doesn't delight the users at all. In fact, they get frustrated.

They're.

They're like, why does it work like this? And the people who do the work, I will tell you, the people who do the kind of work that we do here at Memo and I did when I was a programmer, we're really good people. We have big hearts. We want to serve others. That's what. That's what engineers do. They build things for other people. And when those people get frustrated, it actually steals a piece of our heart every single time. And eventually it becomes a job and a paycheck. And I was never wired like that. So there was a period of my career that was literally unhappy trough of disillusionment days thinking about escape plans to camps in the boundary waters of Minnesota or something like that. But this is what was feeding my family. This was what was keeping a roof over our heads. This was my chosen profession and career that I thought would carry me for a lifetime. And by my mid-30s, I wanted out. And my inner optimist kicked in. Because when I looked around, I found out it wasn't just me, it wasn't just the company I was working for. It was endemic to the whole industry. And so I thought, when there's endemic problems, there are great opportunities. And so I started reading a lot of books, but not books on technology. I started reading books on how do we organize humans more effectively, how do we get the most out of them without killing them in the process. And so I was drawn to a lot of culture and management and leadership books. And eventually I had a moment where I was a VP of R& D. Click moment where suddenly everything snapped together. All my pain and suffering informed a journey. All my book reading laid the foundation for kind of that moment when you know it, when you see it. And over two years between 1999 and 2001, I reinvented the technical team of a fairly high flying public company to something that looks a lot like Menlo does to this day. And I got to a place in those two years where I was the VP of R& D that I would now term joyful. I didn't use that word back then, but it absolutely was. And then in a sudden instant, it was all taken away when the Internet bubble burst and now I'm out of work. All my stock options went to zero. I lost everything except for one thing. They could not take away what I had learned in those two years. And that became the basis for Memlo Innovations. We are a custom software design and development firm. We build software on behalf of other business customers. Every business these days needs software. And so we build that for other businesses. That's what we do. But we have a crazy mission, as you know, Ashish, it is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology by returning joy to what we believe is one of the more unique endeavors that mankind has ever undertaken, the invention of software. And so the central word here is joy, and we define it very tangibly. We want to delight the people we intend to serve, the end users of the software. We want to delight them with high quality software. We want to delight them with software that actually is usable by regular human beings, not just the engineers who built it. And in order to accomplish different results, you have to take a different approach. And I'm guessing you and I will dive into many elements of our different approach as we go along here.

Yeah, I want you to restate your purpose again for our listeners because there are so many purpose statements that are out there. Right. They, you know, I've heard a bunch of words, artistic, claireful, but I think for me, what I felt, I felt your purpose alive when I walked through. So restate that for us, please.

Yeah. The way we describe our mission is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. And we talk about three stakeholder groups. We're very specific about this. We want to end suffering for the people who do the work. We want to end suffering for the people who pay for the work. And ultimately our highest goal is to end the suffering of the people who ultimately use the work. The people who their work lives, their daily lives might be impacted by work we do in this room because they use some piece of software we've created to accomplish some goal that's important to their business, their career, their work, their profession. And if they're frustrated every single day, we have failed. So we are going to do everything we can to make sure they are not suffering. And then we turn the suffering around and say, what's the goal? And the goal is joy. The goal is to return joy to this wonderful profession of designing and developing software for other humans.

I love that. Friends, if you want to know more about this unbelievable place, I finished reading after experiencing it, this beautiful book that Rich wrote. It's called Joy Inc. I'm holding it up How We Built the Workplace People Love. It's just a beautiful, beautiful read that takes you into the story right all the way from the beginning to some of the key lessons that you can integrate into your lives. Friends. Because look, you know, Rich, you tuned into this so early, 20 plus years ago, but. And you did it because your heart showed you the way.

Yes.

And you said I want, you're, you know, I want to do things differently. In the last 20 years, dear friends, especially in the last two, three years, all the research has caught up to the work around flourishing companies with flourishing cultures, high work well being, high happiness, are outperform competitors. They have higher profitability, they have higher productivity, they have more creativity. Two to three and a half percent higher shareholder returns is what's at stake here year over year versus competitors that you can unlock if your employees are more satisfied. That was the work from Alex Edmonds, the recent work from Jan Emanuel from Oxford. If you invested in a portfolio of top hundred work wellbeing companies that are publicly traded, that index outperformed every other public index in the three years from 21 to 24. So there is real science here. And I really want you to listen to this next part of our conversation, because the things, the way you design your workplace, those flourishing practices are not just good for people. Don't do it just to end suffering for your teams. You should. But my point is, don't do it just for that. But what I'm telling you is if as leaders, you're not doing it, if as board members you're not demanding it, you are not living into a core fiduciary responsibility that you have as executives is to maximize shareholder and stakeholder value for all. So tune in and listen to some of the real practices. This is not theory. This is what we are about to get into next. So, Rich, there is a very distinct way, you know, at Menlo, you call it our way. It's your codified approach in how you work. Talk to us a little bit about three or four core elements that are really at the heart of that unique way.

Yeah, yeah. We fundamentally are systems thinkers here, Ashish. Simple, repeatable, visible, measurable, simple systems will outperform complex bureaucracies every single time. It's literally, you know, running around the track and lapping your competitors because you just have a better system in place. So all of us in our workplaces should be thinking about the systems and that we use and trading away our bureaucracy in favor of those systems. So you've been here. You know what it feels like when you walk in the door. And I will tell you that almost universally, people visit here the first time, and the first word out of their mouths when they walk in the door is wow. So you get that here? I get it every single day. I've had that wow feeling when I walk in the door of Menlo every single day for almost 24 years now. Imagine how much that thrills me as a founder to be able to say wow when I walk into the place that I helped create. And what do they. What. What is the wow? What is the palpability? Well, I. I will tell you at a. At a basic level, one of the most squandered energy forces on the planet, which I love that the science finds us and says, you're doing this. And they're like, tell us more. One of the most squandered energy forces on the planet is the force of human energy. And everybody knows what human energy feels like. Sounds like. Acts like you can sense it. It's palpable. When you come into Menlo, you can feel that energy. Why? Well, number one. And you just see A little bit of it behind me here. It's a big open room, it's colorful. There's stuff on the walls, important stuff. Not just fun motivational posters or anything like that, but actually work related things on the wall. So we're very visual. We believe in tactile artifacts. You peer into the room and you see it. Everybody's in a conversation here. It's a noisy place. People are confounded by that. Like, isn't software supposed to be done in library? Quiet. No, not here. Why? Because everybody here is working in pairs. Two people, one computer all day long. That is not unique to Menlo. There are other companies that do pairing, so it's rare, but it is not unique to us. Yep, we do it every single minute of every day. We pair all day long. If Ashish, you and I were working together, we'd literally be sharing a keyboard and a mouse and we would be in conversation all day long trying to solve problems. A problem together and that construct alone, just the simple construct of putting two people together, human energy begins to thrive. Why? Because you get stuck, you stay stuck, I get stuck, I stay stuck. If we get stuck together, we help each other out of it.

Yep.

And I will tell you, my wife and I do the connections game in the New York Times every day right after I do wordle, we do connections together. And it's amazing how much better we are at doing connections. Because together. Right? Because she'll be like, oh, what about this? I'm like, yeah, that's it. And then we move along and we figure it out together. Right. I would encourage your listeners, if they've never done that, to just try it. Right. And see how much faster it goes, how much better you do at that game. Well, that's what's happening here. Software has never been a typing speed contest. It's always been a problem solving contest. And two people are better at solving problems when working together. And I don't mean just solving them, I mean solving them. Well, solving them completely. Solving them in a simpler fashion than they would have had they done it on their own. So those pairs working shoulder to shoulder, side by side in the room, the noise level is up because they're in conversation all day long about the work they're doing. Then every fifth day at least, sometimes more frequently, we switch the pairs. So if you and I are working together next week you're working with Ted and I'm working with Angelina. And then the next week you're working with Angelina and I'm working with Ted. So we keep Revolving the pairs around the room. What does that do? Because people look at that, and they're like, oh, that must slow things down. Absolutely, it does. It slows us down, and we go faster at the same time. Why? Because the stuff you and I thought was perfect. Ted comes in, starts pairing with you, and he says, hey, Ashish, are you sure that's gonna work? And you're like, well, yeah, Rich and I did it. And then I'm actually leaning in because I'm sitting right near you. I'm like, what did you find, Ted? And within a second, Ted's found something really important, because that new perspective brings new, fresh thinking. Maybe we got a little cocky. Maybe we got a little tired. Maybe we've done something like this before and we got it right. And then Ted comes along. He's like, mm, I'm not sure. And just in that little instant, quality begins to soar. You know what quality does for teamwork?

It's like, absolutely.

It's like rocket fuel.

Yeah. It's like Oxygen man. Like, it's. You know. Yeah.

If you go home at the end of the day and feel like Deming said so famously, that you and I had a chance to work with pride, Deming said it best. He says that's all anybody asked for, just a chance to work with pride. If we walk out the door and think we did good work today, that makes you want to come in the next day. And quite frankly, I think the most important thing that does is you go home and have a good dinner with your family. Your kids see that you're excited about your work life. Most kids don't see that from their parents.

Yep.

Most kids are sitting around the table hanging on every word as mom and dad are complaining about work. And then, you know, we wonder, why do kids not want to work anymore? It's like, well, maybe because they watch their parents complain about work.

For struggle, suffer, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

And so that simple construct alone.

Paired work.

Yep. Paired work. Switching the pairs at least every five days. Some people who do pairing switch more often. We've just chosen that cycle. But it's. It's more the pairing and the switching of the pairs that matters. And. And then the other part that we believe fills a team and doesn't diminish their human energy is clarity over ambiguity. We are very clear here. When you walk in on a Monday morning, you know exactly which project you're on. You know exactly who you're paired with, and you actually know exactly what's expected of you. We actually call that we have a funny name for that system of work. We call it freedom through tyranny. And people are like, wait, you're joyful Place? And like, yeah, it's joyful. Because by giving you that level of clarity, you are now free to do the work that you love, almost unfettered by any management system. That's. How's it going? What you working on? Are you almost done? Could you stop working on this? Can you stop working on that? We are abundantly clear how we plan and how we execute the work. And that is so refreshing for people to not come in on a Monday morning juggling 15 priorities because they were assigned percentages to projects and all that kind of stuff. And they're like, I know I got a lot to do, but I have no idea which one I should start on today. We are abundantly clear. There is no question when people walk in, exactly what they're going to be working on and who they're going to be doing it with. And we're also pretty clear on, you know, in the coding world at least, and certainly in our design world, and we'll talk about that in a minute. On the methodology we use. So there's a lot of stuff taken off the table from. In terms of, like, how should we approach this? You know, in our world, we're going to write automated unit tests before we write the code. When we write the code, we don't put comments in the code, which is crazy. That's not what I learned in school. We use humanly readable words in the code itself. We work, write small methods. So there's. There's not a lot of standards like this. There's just enough that people say, I know how we're going to work together when we do this. And so we don't have to spend all day arguing about these, you know, minutiae facts about the best way to do something. We have a basic structure that says, this is the way we do things. And again, then the freedom kicks in, because once you know what that structure is, now the sky's the limit. We can solve a problem any way we want to, as long as we're fitting within these pretty light guardrails of our system of work.

We hope you're enjoying this episode and would love your help in spreading awareness and furthering our mission to help a billion people rewire for happiness. Please consider leaving us a review and sharing this podcast with others in your personal and professional life who you feel could benefit from some of these very insights. It's really simple way to extend and spread positivity. Also check out Rewire, our proprietary offering to move you from knowing to doing. On the Happiness Squad website, www.happinesssquad.com Rewire uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to help you build happier habits in five minutes or less daily. Now back to the episode. Yeah, and I have a couple of questions, but I'm going to hold off on that. And I'm literally smiling because, you know, at Happiness Squad we created a framework around organizational flourishing called perl, which we have found to be really, really powerful to unleash human flourishing and truly through that drive higher performance by addressing all the losses. Right. And you've literally rattled off in our conversation, right. You talked about purpose. Right. Purpose is lived. I felt it. It's about alleviating, removing suffering. Right moment suffering. People are aligned around that for all. Not just for the team or for the customer, but for the end consumer. E stands for energy. Are we creating positive spirals of energy through how we engage and how do we leave the day more excited than what we came with, more filled with energy? And you talked about that in the design of the place as well as the collaboration. Right. That you create A is all about awareness. Awareness is as much about using our strengths and growing, but it's also about role clarity. What am I working on? Right. To make sure that we don't have too much kind of reporting. I'm, I'm being the most, most productive. It's awareness. We talk a lot about R as relationships. You know, do you feel psychologically safe? Do you feel trusted? Do you belong? And through your paired continuously changing, you're fundamentally breaking down silos. You get a chance to work with everyone. So you are implicitly through work deepening relationships. You don't have to do, let's go do once a quarter and outside dinner and drinks, people are building relationships, learning from each other all day long. That's what you've engineered. The last is what I want to ask you about and I know you do it, so I'm just going to ask you which is the last? L is lifeforce, which is how do we make sure we are working in neuro friendly ways? How do we make sure we are not working all day long in meetings with no breaks, which literally creates brain fog, accumulate stress. So talk to me a little bit about how people work so that they are cognitively at their best.

Sure. Yeah. So, boy, there's a lot to talk about here. I will say here's a simple one. That I don't want to miss. So I'm just going to say it first, even though it may not be the most important or it might be. I'll let you decide. I always love people who've studied this stuff. Come and see us. They're like, oh, you're doing this stuff. Like, tell me more. Because I learn as much from your view of things because you've really thought about this, and we have, too. But sometimes I hear other people saying, like, oh, yeah, we've never thought about it that way. Way. So we learn when people come and visit, which is. I would highly recommend tours, you know, and actually, tours is part of our energy.

Yes.

We get. We typically get about 3,000 people a year, travel from all over the world to see what's going on in the room behind me. Well, imagine how that feels to the people who work here.

Absolutely right.

They're like, right. You know, it's. We're interesting enough that all these people want to come see us. They want to talk to us, they want to learn from us. They want to interact. They want to ask questions about how we do and why we do it this way, why we think it's better. And that just energizes our team for sure. The other one is. Another one is what I call laughs per hour.

Tell me more. Maybe I should change life force to laughs per hour. Huh? Rich, Tell me about laughs per hour.

People often ask me, like, what's the KPIs for joy?

Right.

And which I just find a hilarious question. But I'll tell him. I said laughs for all. Like, what do you mean? I said, we had a guy here, Dan, who retired from Menlo a number of years ago. So he ended his career here. The last 10 years of his career, like 55 and 65, he worked here at Menlo in the space you saw. He made a comment one time that just really stuck with me. He said, I have never worked for a place that has as much laughter as we do here at Menlo. And, you know, he's talking about a long career, right? In his last 10 years. We're in a place filled with laughter. Think about laughter. What better expression of psychological safety, psychological ergonomics. We don't laugh when we're afraid. We don't laugh when we feel like we're being chased down and hunted. We laugh when we're comfortable, when we're in good relationship with others, when we can banter with one another not at each other's expense, but in the sense of lifting each other up. So that's a big deal for us. And it's not like we teach people a laugh. I just hear it all the time and I sit out in the room with everybody else. So the open and collaborative work environment, I believe, is another big part of that life force, because you can feel it, a fun one that you didn't get a chance to experience because it wasn't in the office that day. But we invite newborns into the office all day, every day. Typically they come in at about three months old. They stay till they're about six or seven months old. They're with the parent. This is not a daycare. They're literally in a front pack and a pack and play and a swing in a car seat. Whatever the parent wants, they bring them in. And every parent, moms and dads alike, have that opportunity. Most take advantage of it. We literally. I just got out of a baby shower for Matt and his wife Emily, and they're going to have a baby in May and Matt knows, if he chooses to, he can bring that baby into work with him, no questions asked. If you want to add life to a space life force, bring in a baby.

Yep.

And the babies love it. Why do they love it? Because they hear all this energy. You know, if you've ever taken a baby to a noisy restaurant, you know they're calm. When you take them to a quiet restaurant, you're about to panic every time because they're going to destroy the ambiance of the whole space here. The babies, they join in the banter. I remember one of the first babies we had here, she started making what you can affectionately refer to as dolphin sounds. The typical fun five or six month old thing. Just that. And the whole team laughed as loud as they could. And she didn't take long before she connected to, oh, if I make that sound, I get laughter. And so those kind of things are a remarkable part of our culture that aren't, you know, and people have asked me, like, what does that do to productivity of the parent, though, I think said, compared to what? Like getting the phone call from the daycare that your kid just threw up and you got to come right now, you know, and they're always worried, how is my child doing? Especially at that very young age. So it's been a delightful part of our culture. The other thing, I think, and this is really to the heart of the matter, and I'm sure we'll talk about our interview process as well because it's very unusual, but during the interview we pair people together with another candidate, and we give them the weirdest instructions they'll ever hear in an interview. And this is literally teaching our culture from the moment of first contact. Your job is to help the person sitting next to you get a second interview. Make your peer partner look good. Help that stranger, this perfect stranger who, by the way, is competing for the same job you are. Help them succeed. We will judge you in this first interview based on how we see you support and help another human being.

Amazing. Wow.

So those. There's probably a lot more we do here, but those are the things that I can think of that just really contribute.

I'm just thinking about that, right? We ask people, tell me a time you have helped somebody, and somebody's going to come up with a story whether they did it or not. But I think what you're creating is a real time. Like, do this. And it's really hard to fake it, especially if you don't know it.

Somebody asked once, they said, you know, well, what if the candidates come in? They can fake collaboration. And my co founder, Quipti, says, if they can fake collaboration 40 hours a week, I'm good with that.

Yep. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, I love that. I love that. Rich. So question for you, right? I want to go to this pair. The pair conversation. I'm sure you might have many who say, I get it, that when you pair, you get higher quality, right? You go. You said you go slower to go faster. But really, Rich, isn't two people coding for 40 hours versus 40 hours of output because the two are just doing one thing. Do you really feel you can make up 40 hours of the gap on hands, on keys, but by this approach, what do you say to them?

Yeah. So, yeah, you can imagine, like, this.

Is not the first time you would ask this question.

Well, everybody asks it, right? It makes sense. It's a. It's the most logical question ever. Because they're like, okay, Rich, you. You feel like you've discovered, like, cold fusion of teamwork, right? You know, so tell us more about this. And, and, and I do believe that I, I will tell you this. Construct just that one of pairing and switching the pairs. I would. That would be the last thing on earth I'd give up. It'd be like, you'd have to tear it out of my cold, dead hands. Right? And so they're, like, intrigued. They're like, why do you think you're the CEO, you're the guy who's, you know, managing the company, make sure they're making a profit and you, you seem to have been willing for some odd reason to cut your productivity in half to achieve some ethereal result, right? So what's the proof? And it's funny how often I can touch on it pretty quickly with them. Most people get that when you're doing creative, imaginative, hard R and D kind of work like we do, people get stuck a lot. You know, when people ask about, you know, how's your personal Pro2? Oh, I'm great. If I'm in a quiet room with my headset on, I just, I'm in flow and all that kind of stuff. But if you actually like to a time lapse photography of them over the course of the day you look and like they're stuck like half the day and even the day that doesn't look like they're stuck, you know the part of the day that doesn't look like they're stuck. The question you should be asking is are they doing good work right now? Are they actually solving the problem they're trying to solve or are they going off in a wrong direction? Well, let me tell you, you got another human there who you, who you have to think out loud and they're listening and they're looking for, you know, is he is rich going the right way when he's typing on the keyboard that stopping and talking and making sure we're right quality goes through the roof. So proof in the pudding. Because I can say this now after 24 years, I would have never imagined that what I'm going to say to you right now, I would have never imagined at the beginning of mellow that 24 years in I could say what I'm going to say to you right now in 24 years of doing hard important custom software development of our business clients. Some projects go years cost millions of dollars and often hold the lives of people in that software's hands. So just give you an example. We rebuilt the organ transplant information system at the University of Michigan health system. So when I say it holds the lives of people in its hands, I'm.

It literally holds the lives of people.

And so in 24 years, Ashish, I probably hold a record that no other software company could ever speak to. We have had two software emergencies in 24 years.

Wow.

You can't imagine every one of your letters purpose, energy, you know, life force. Imagine you can say that about your work. We are basically emergency free. What does that mean for the people in there? Again, what it means is you did good work on behalf of our clients. You kept people alive. You Helped scientists try and discover cures for HIV and various blood borne. I mean, we just, we work in all kinds of arenas. And the fact that they know that there's people who've worked here for their whole careers and they've never experienced directly a software emergency, that's unheard of. I did this at a software. I said that at a software conference a few years back. And there were people coming up to me. Either they were basically saying, you're lying or you have a bad definition for emergency. I said, no, I don't think so. And I told them what the emergencies were, and they're like, okay, you know, it's unheard of. So I remember being challenged about this by a gentleman I was giving a talk to at their company. And I, I challenged him back. You know, he said, I think this is all bs, you know, let me tell you how we work here. And he told me, I said, well, I said, bill, pretend I took everything you just described at your company. Me and I brought it back to mine and we switched to your way of working, the way you just described. I said, what do you think would happen? To his credit, he thought about it and it was. I literally was watching him think through the answer to this somewhat Socratic question. And it was like I was watching every cell in his body change from head to toe as he contemplated the answer. And then he said this. He said, I'll tell you what you'd have, Rich, at memoir. He says you'd start lying about being done with things. You'd start kicking quality problems down the road for somebody else to fix. Your customers would begin to notice those quality problems, and then you'd start to lose market share. You'd go from number one in your market to number two or three because your customers can see your problems. He says, you'd have exactly at your company what we have here.

Yeah.

And I was astounded at the change of mindset right then in that one single question. And I kind of kept in touch with that company. And people told me that guy was never the same since that day. He changed because he realized he was at the center of the problem. It was his own spirit and attitude that was causing all these problems because of the way they ran their company and their team. So again, there's lots of ways I can measure, but here's a simple one. Everybody can relate to this. Somebody walked through here once in a tour like you did, and they said, hey, Rich, kind of curious. I noticed nobody's on their devices when they're Working, you know, on their phones, playing with Instagram or something. I said, yeah. He goes, how'd you do that? And I said, what do you mean? He says, how'd you get people stop doing that? I said, well, let's go talk to them. And we went up to a pair of people and one of our senior team members, you know, they asked, you know, why aren't, you know, you don't get on your devices? And her, her answer was so precious. She said, no, I'd be letting my pair partner down. She felt a personal responsibility to the person sitting next to her. Yeah. That said, if I'm screwing around at work, it's costing not only me time.

Absolutely.

But somebody else. And the guy who asked me the question goes, well, that's it right there. You've just saved 50% of the labor just in that construct alone.

Yeah, well, you know, I think I. Since I walked that tour, right. You know, I'm an ops guy. You know, I grew, I grew up as a, I, by the way, grew up as a software engineer. I did my, I worked for IBM, was my first job. And then I worked at keen doing y2k renovations. Then I was at KPMG right before. And then I did 12 years of workshop.

You had as much human suffering as I did then.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Talked about human suffering.

You could write a whole book with me about yourself.

Oh my God. And then I said, 12 years of operations work right before I really started focusing on flourishing. And that operations taught me all about how we build programs that drive scalable, sustainable transformations across thousands of people. Distributed workforces, many of them in blue collar workers who. People are like, wait. I'm like, yes, we can train people to become, you know, and by the way, those factories that are highly productive, producing high quality, there's also an energy about that place because people are proud to show up. And those things that you think result in them feeling that is the other way around.

Absolutely.

How you make people feel. And so, you know, I've thought a lot about it. I think about, I talk about this very differently than a lot of researchers and people who do this work. You know, I talk about human assets and losses, availability, performance and quality. People are like, oh, wow, you think about losses. I'm like, yes. And you know what comes to me is I thought about, on one hand, you can think about a 40 hour loss versus two people working, right. But friends. And I'm going to share some of these with you coming from that background, right. Walk through this pathways with me. Okay. First, let's think about absenteeism and attrition. Or call it availability loss.

Yep.

Software is a high attrition, high absenteeism environment. Because people burn out.

Yep.

With stress and anxiety, people leave. Right. Every time somebody leaves, all that knowledge walks away. Then you bring somebody else who's new and now you are needing to train them up. Forget about the fact that all of a sudden if somebody left in the middle of the project, maybe they documented everything, maybe they don't. That knowledge resides with them. I think you've solved that problem in three ways, one by pairs. There's always two people who know what you're working on. So the knowledge, even if somebody leaves, is not all lost, it's actually distributed in the system.

Yep.

It's not in the code, it's in the people's heads and they're all around. Right. So unless everybody quits you, that's not a problem. The second is because of the environment you've created. Your numbers of attrition and absenteeism are almost zero. Right.

You know, we have normal attrition. This is a college town. People are married, their spouse gets a job somewhere else, they leave. But because of what you just said. And remember this too, Ashish, it's not just that two people know the work because we continually switch the two.

Yeah, all of them do.

Right. They all know it. And so, you know, so we don't actually. It's not that we want people to leave, but we don't fear them leaving because we have no powers of knowledge.

Absolutely. And compare that to like 10, 15%. That's why I say almost nothing. Right. Like you'll have some natural attrition. People are going to retire, people are going to marry. Right?

Yep.

So that's a big one. I mean, usually people lose 10, 20% in this bucket alone.

Yep.

Right. Then let's think about performance losses. Which means when people are working, are they producing the output? Now most people will say it's very hard to measure it. In software it is. But here's the levers that I picked up. Why you are creating higher performance in the time that people are working. The first is what you just said. You know, even when people work alone, when you run into an obstacle, you give up. That's when you go to your device or you're just going to be stuck or going down long ways. So fundamentally, by two people working together, you've eliminated that loss of stuckness.

Yep.

Which happens all the time. Second, software is a fundamental creativity, problem solving Task. There are seven ways in which you can solve a problem. Some might be more or less efficient, more or less bug oriented. So by having two people think about it and then have a third person the next time you switch, you are really finding the most efficient way forward, or at least giving yourself the opportunity to find a more efficient. Because there are more heads thinking about it. Right.

Yeah. What happens when we switch the pairs is if you and I are continuing work that say, Ted and I did the week before, there's two things that happen in the first day we're together. I'm teaching you what we did and you are asking me questions so that you can bring yourself up to speed. Well, in that conversation, quality improves.

Absolutely. So hold off on that quality, because that's the quality loss, which is the third bucket, which I was going to get to. Right, but that's exactly right. You get higher quality because of that conversation.

Yeah.

The other thing that affects software all the time, I've sundars, I've served banks, I've served large CPGs. You can't be listening right now. If you run a team and say every person in your team is as proficient, what are you doing here? You're completely training on the job. Those who are less apprenticed are learning from others. Those who are less apprenticed are questioning and bringing new creative ways than what somebody might have always done.

Yep.

You're also creating fundamentally shareable codes and ways of working across. You know, knowledge transfer is a really big thing that holds people back. So another performance loss that you're fundamentally addressing, because that's the reality. Right. Multitasking people are not on devices and all these other pieces, you know, they're working on one thing. You're very clear, this is what you're doing. You're not trying to do 15 projects.

Yep.

And by the way, if a user calls you, you switch and you go solve that bug. And now you have to get up to speed. So in the system itself, you've designed things that literally, I bet there's 40, 50% of loss that just shows up when individuals are working that you've eliminated.

Right.

You've eliminated. And then of course, the quality loss is. Oh, my God. You know, the fact that you said, I've had two emergencies. I'll tell you, this is a real story. This is real. I was running a leadership session with the CIO of a team of a large bank, talk about human suffering. This person said to me, I get panic attacks when I wake up in the morning and go into the Shower? Who? Why? Because I'm not next to my phone.

Ooh.

If something breaks, I can't respond to it. And because. Because things are breaking all the time.

Yeah. The 15 minute shower is a torturously long time because there would have been two or three emergencies that popped up in those 15 minutes.

Right. Like, think about it. Right. Like I don't feel I can have a shower. Right. That's the state though of so many people, you know, people who are on call because they make the software is buggy. Right. I'm sure you've been on teams where you are expected to stay all night.

Yep.

Quote unquote, you're on call because something is going to break down. I get it. You're on call if you're a doctor or a surgeon. But on call for software is avoidable if you design it. Right. The first time.

You know, funny story about that. We just finished a big project with a client. It was multi year. They were transitioning from a mainframe to a, to a cloud based environment. They had to retire the mainframe because all their programmers were retired. And so our team worked diligently with their team for probably five years.

Yeah.

And then just recently, last few months now it's rolling out now they're opening it up, they're, they're getting all the warehouses online. All their customers are switching over the system and everything. So they came to us and said, hey guys, you know, we don't really know how this is going to go, so we need your team to be on call through the night, just, you know, have their phone on and ready and ready to jump up and have their computers at home. And we're like, okay, you know, customers asking for that. And it was first time it ever happened in our career. And that lasted about two months of on call. You know, our team ready if they're needed to jump up, throw on their robe and go to their computer and wipe the sweet sleep out of their eyes and get working. They never called. And you know, I mean it was, I mean the team, you know, recognized, oh, they're paying us for these hours and we're sleeping and but they got to sleep and so they just never called the whole time. And you know, and it's like, I don't know, I mean, you know, every one of your listeners should be asking a question. Tell me the price you would put on that.

Yep.

Because what is the insidious effect of all of those emergencies your banking friend is getting right? It's diminishing their impression of their business in the minds of their users. And if it's a bank, I mean, banks are a little hard to switch. You know, it's a kind of a pain in the butt to change your banking relationship. But everybody knows there's lots more banks I could go to, right? And there's always. There's a switching cost. But eventually, if you cause your users enough pain, they will switch. And so, you know, all of those things are important. Here's a couple that you should think about, too, in terms of. Because I can see what you're doing, Ashish. You're building your little list. You've been doing that for a long time, which is awesome. It's exactly what we should all be doing. When we think about our human teams and getting in the flourish. When somebody here goes on vacation, we do something no other tech team would do. We literally forbid them to check in electronically. With Kokomo, we don't turn off their email accounts, but we will catch them checking their email while they're away, and we'll come back when they come back. We will gently and humorously chastise them. And so Lisa has. Her husband is from Hong Kong originally, and all of his family still lives there. So when they go on vacation, they're gone for six or seven weeks because that's a big trip. And they have two kids. And so he doesn't work for us, but she does. And they're there with family, maybe on a beach, you know, somewhere, because they do other traveling around. And he keeps looking over at her. He's like, why aren't you on your laptop? Shouldn't you be checking him out? She does smile. She says, no, I work at Menlo. They actually chase me down if they catch me checking email. Imagine the effect that has.

Yep.

What's the difference in life between her and him? They're on the beach. He's on a. He's on his laptop while the kids are out playing in the water. And she's just making sandcastles with the kids, which is exactly what she should be doing. She's recharging. She's living life. She's enjoying her family. Again, you want to talk about flourishing, that? Recharging. It's why we have vacation days, right?

Yeah.

You know, and then the other thing is. So imagine you're the expert in something. You know, you're the Oracle. 9.1.1.2 Service Back 3 Expert. Right. That's. It's like a real thing in our industry as we get that narrowly defined. And that's all you do every day for years. And then one day you're like, you know what? I'm getting a little tired of this. I want to do some new AI stuff or I want to learn a new language or I want to work on a different project. And the company says, oh, no, I'm.

Sorry, you're the only one who can do this.

You're the value right here. And you're like, yeah, but I don't want to do it anymore. And you know what you can't do to get away from this? You can't quit either.

It's literally because anybody else will want you to do that.

It's like the three laws of thermodynamics. You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game. And so here though, even if you are that tower, and we have people who know that kind of stuff deeply, but because they're paired, they're sharing their information with another.

Absolutely.

And after a while, you got five or six people on the team who know what they know. And then they can either switch projects, go to a new technology, do something new they've never done before. And the beautiful thing is in our world, because they're all in the same room together with no walls or offices.

People can always walk up and ask them if they needed it.

You don't even have to do that. You just say, hey, Ashish, can you come over when you're ready? You don't even have to move. Right. We call that high speed voice technology, by the way.

No, I think this is so brilliant and what you're highlighting. And I always go down this pathway because people hear this and they get it here, they get it here. They don't get it here. Because the reality is, as you said, this way of working. Right. Rich, you said we're not unique, but we are rare. Why? Because people fundamentally don't believe it.

Right.

I had this. They don't believe it fully. They might wish it in their heart, but they're stuck out of fear and their minds. Keep you going the old way. I said to somebody what you all just said, what we discussed, it's all common sense, right?

Yes.

It is not common practice.

Absolutely. And you know what? And here's the thing. Everything I've described to you right now is dirt simple. It is unbelievably simple to do these things. Now, simple doesn't mean easy, and simple doesn't necessarily mean fast. Because we're talking about changing human beings behavior, which is one of the hardest things to change on the planet. But you just got. You just gave your listeners a tremendously good tour of Memo without them having been here right now. You come visit and you're confronted with a reality that you can't unsee.

Yeah. Well, my friend, as we are building Happiness Squad, you've given me so many ideas, I'm almost transported back to what I left when I visited you with. And I just want to say thank you. We'll probably have you back again. I would love. You know, we can go on for three hours. Rich, there is so much gold to mine here. There is so much that you're doing. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your bravery, for your courage, for your heart in what you've really created. And you know, I'm going to do my part in getting more of my clients to come see you because they can hear this. They can read about it in Joy Inc. But once they walk through the premises, they will realize that despite the fact that AI has now an AI product, an agentic AI that can do 90 to 100% of the coding that programmers can do, it will never be able to come close to what you are doing with humans at menlo. So thank you for what you're doing. It's so great to have you here. I appreciate you.

Thank you, Ashish, Great to be with you today.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to anyone, enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.