GA 213 | How to Lead with Joy with Richard Sheridan

At that moment, my humble self just melts because I realize here's a guy who's only been here six months and he's demonstrating more loving, caring leadership than I did. Leader of the company, the chief storyteller, the CEO after 17 years. And I learned an important lesson that day about how to be a better leader. And I learned it from one of our youngest team members.

Over the years, I've been fortunate to meet so many amazing people within and.

Around the continuous improvement world.

I've also been able to visit some companies who are what I can only describe as game changers. And by game changers, I mean these companies leave an indelible mark on your soul. And without a doubt, my guest today leads one of these organizations. His name is Richard Sheridan, and his company is called Menlo Innovations. Now, on today's show, Richard and I explore a wide variety of topics, including why he believes fostering an environment of joy just may be the secret to long term success. And as you'll hear later in the show, Richard and I both open up and share some stories that we're not exactly proud of. In other words, we share some stories of times where we weren't the best of leaders. But in typical Richard fashion, these moments of temporary failure only served as another opportunity for growth, love, and professional development. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 1, 3. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show.

All right, Richard, welcome back to the show. How's it going, my friend?

It's going great, Ron. Good to be with you. I always enjoy our conversations.

Yeah, I always try to do my homework before each episode. For folks that have been on the show before, just seeing what episodes it was, I don't know if you remember, but you were on episode number three way back, and then episode 70, and now this is episode 213. So we've done a few, Richard, and it's great to have you back on.

Well, I enjoy the regular conversations with you. Yeah.

All right, well, hey, I want to definitely encourage people to go back and listen to episode three. We spent a lot of time talking about Joy Inc. And then in episode 70, we just dove deeper into the whole Menlo Innovations business and how you guys do your work. So I don't want to necessarily repeat all that, but I do think it's appropriate for folks who may not have listened to those episodes to understand a little bit more about Richard. So I've got a. I know you're a storyteller, so I'm gonna throw a different twist on you here. I want you to imagine that one of your high tech anthropologist who's worked for Menlo Innovations for many, many years and you know, it's all fired up for Menlo, is sitting in one of those Ann Arbor bars, you know, that you guys have over there with one of their friends and they're saying, say, what do you do for a living at this Menlo? And who's this Richard Sheridan character? I want you to tell me what is that employee of Menlo going to respond? How are they going to say what are they going to say about Richard and Menlo?

Wow, you literally want me to talk about myself in the third person.

Yes, yes.

Well, I think the conversation is probably. I'm going to channel Michelle, who's one of our longtime high tech anthropologists and maybe a little bit of Molly too, who hasn't been here as long but is just steeped in the traditional, you know, this conversation is, you probably well know, Ron, even if you know the person and they say, so what do you do? And they say they're high tech anthropologists at Menlo Innovations. That by itself will lead to a one hour conversation because the title is unusual, as you can imagine. Yeah. And the role is critical. And so I'll tell you just a little bit about that and then get into that guy who thought of all of this. So the role of high tech anthropologist at Menlo to your community is going to sound a lot like go to the Gemba. The reason we call it anthropologists and the reason we invented that role is because we fundamentally believe that the way to create great software, software that delights the people it's intended to serve, is to understand the people, understand the people we're going to serve. And the only way we believe we know how to do that is to go out into the world and study them in their native environment, observe their workflow, their habits, learn their goals as human beings, learn their story, and then fold all of that learning back into the user experience and still assume even after all of that, that we'll be wrong. And that by going back out to people like them, the people we intend to serve, and iteratively approaching the design of the software we're creating and interacting with them in a way that elicits concrete feedback about the approach we're taking. Not Fluffy feedback like, do you like this? And they say, oh, I love it. When will it be available? Which is totally useless information. Rather, ask them some goals. How would you use this screen to do this thing that you do every day? And by eliciting that input, that interactive exchange with the people we intend to serve, we will ultimately get to a design that works for the people we want to serve in a way that doesn't require user manuals, help, text training classes, frustration, which is the way most of us experience software. And so all of this is based on learning from the people we intend to serve, rather than applying what a lot of people think is the actual trick to creating great software. And that is we need to have brilliant designers. What we need to have are people who empathize with, compassionately empathize with the people we intend to serve by honoring them in their place of work, by honoring what they know, by honoring them as human beings. And so that is the role of high tech anthropologists. And if your bar room conversation that you're imagining goes on to, like, how on earth did you think of this? That must be where we start to talk about Rich Sheridan and James Goble and this company they created called Menlo Innovations.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. All right. So you have one of the most unique, I don't know, executive job titles that I've ever heard, and I believe it's something along the lines of Chief Storyteller.

It's on my business card, Ron.

So what's that all about, Richard?

Well, I guess somewhere in my career development, as I got frustrated with the industry that I was in and wondered whether I could keep doing this technology career, it dawned on me that the biggest challenge wasn't technology. It was how do we organize the humans into more effective teams. You know, the human process of organizing teams, organizing the systems that those teams will operate within. And, you know, a very popular word these days is how do you build a culture that's sustainable over a long period of time? Over time, it dawned on me, through experience, actually, that this idea of telling stories and repeating those stories over and over again, the most important stories that we tell over and over again here at Menlo are the ones that actually evoke the consistent values that we want to pursue as a team. And as I began to actually think about this role, the team actually gave me the title of Chief Storyteller, somewhat playfully, a number of years ago. And it dawned on me that this may be the most important leadership thing that any of us can do, is be the Guardian of our stories. And as I thought back over the course of human civilization development, you think of totems and campfire songs and anthems. This is really what we have done somewhat throughout all of human evolution and societal evolution and building of communities and states and nations is this idea of grabbing hold of our most important stories and telling them over and over again so that everyone has a chance to feel in their hearts what it is you're trying to accomplish. And so I think it dawned on me that this chief storyteller playful title may be the most important role I play as CEO of the company. So it got on my business card.

Yeah. So what are Menlo's values?

Oh, boy. You know, there's a number of them, but I'll pick on a few that are really important to us. The first thing we teach people is the success orientation. It's happening today in a couple of different roles here because of we have two people here today who are on their, what are called their one day trials. They're part of the interview process. They're here for their first full day at menlo. We pay them for that day. But it is truly an interview. And what they have learned already, just having been through what we call our extreme interview and the one day trial is one of the core values of Menlo is help the person sitting next to you succeed, make your partner look good. Now, of course, our team is doing that with them, but we expect it right back. And so core value here is this outward mindset, this success orientation about the rest of the people on the team. So what we really strive for in our values and our culture is openness, transparency, authenticity, collaboration, teamwork, and that support of your fellow human beings. Yeah.

Okay. I want to spend quite a bit of time discussing your book that's to be released. What is it? In May or June?

I believe I have an official pub date now. It is November 13th.

Oh, okay.

It's going to be a little bit further out.

Okay, that's fine. Lead with Joy and maybe we'll have you back on as we get closer to. To get people even more excited about it. But before we get to lead with Joy, let's talk about Joy, Inc. Because I think it just might be the most recommended book that I've ever had. I tell everyone that I know to read this book because no matter what kind of industry, even if they're not in the so called continuous improvement world or what, it's just people in general, we need Joy because this world definitely needs joy. Right. So talk a little bit about that book and, you know, why it's, why you wrote it, and why you believe it's been so. So powerful for folks that have read it.

Well, I think the why I wrote it, Ron, is that, as you well know, because you've been here, we get visitors from all over the planet by the thousands every year. They come to visit, they come to see us, they come to explore what we've created here. It's one big open room. We're a full, fairly small company. We're only about 50 people. And yet thousands of people from corporations large and small come from all over the world to visit us. And when you have that happen over the course of a decade, which we did over our first 10 years, you start to realize, oh, I think we've discovered something important that deserves sharing. And that's really how the book came to be. A lot of people pleaded with us, please write a book about what we've just seen here. The world needs to hear this message in a different way, because not everyone can come to visit. And so the book, in some ways, was an encouragement to pursue joy in your own work life. Because, as you just said, I think it may be one of the most important things we can do, either as employees or as leaders of a company, is that pursuit of joy. And happy to define it for you if you want, but that was really its basis, was we had so many people interested, we knew we had to share the story through a book. Yeah.

Now, you know, I had someone on a few episodes ago, we were talking about, you know, they were also, you know, successful organization and so, giving tours and so forth. And you guys have folks come in daily, you know, to tour you. And I think it would be really, really easy for yourself and especially your team members to. To feel maybe an overwhelming sense of pride, you know, perhaps even eventually an inordinate amount of pride, like an unhealthy amount of pride. How do you balance this, you know, the success that you guys have had and the popularity of Menlo Innovations, and how do you ensure that you don't. You don't slide into that pride before the fall kind of mentality?

Well, I think actually the tours themselves help with that in an unusual way. I still lead quite a few of them. The tours are right out in the room with everybody else. So the team itself is overhearing the tours. And I can tell you that one thing I'd never want to have happen, Ron, is for somebody on my team after a tour to come up to me and say, hey, Rich, that company you described in the tour, that sounds amazing. Where is that place? Because I'd love to work there. And so there's a. There's a built in, almost required humility in this. And the team knows that our main goal on these tours is to share the truth as close as we can. Because there's. We're not trying to. And I get it. I mean, your question is 100% appropriate. There would. We could show off. We could be too prideful, we could be not humble. We could actually embellish to the point of eliminating the things that people really want to learn about. I think what prevents it is some statements we make early on in any tour that any stone you want to overturn, we'll turn it over with you and look underneath. And there might be ugly things under that rock, but we're willing to explore them. And part of it is what we've learned is how much better it makes us by having to answer these questions. And so we're a real company. We have real challenges just like everybody else. We have real people working for us that have their own personal challenges at home or at work. But boy, we've gotten to the point where we're. So. We share it so easily that people are shocked in some ways because we had a group here from a large financial services company and they spent the day here. And at lunchtime, I leave them the group that was here. Anybody comes for a whole day, they spend a lunch hour with four of our team members and it's just this wide ranging discussion. I don't stay in the room for that. So I always come back afterwards and say, so what'd you think? How did that go? What did you learn? This one guy just did the. The mind blown gesture over his head with his two hands. He's kind of like, he's like, oh my gosh. It's just an amazing amount of authenticity here and transparency, which again, are two of our core values, because the team shares everything that is appropriate. We've actually had people on tours join feedback lunches, which is equivalent of an employee review. We had tour group join the discussion about one day candidates who had just been in that day. And so we really let them see stuff. We've had tour groups come into orphan book finance meetings to hear us talk about where we're struggling financially, if we are at that particular moment. And so that openness and not a. It's not a scripted story we're telling that is devoid of the realities of what it takes to run A business like ours. And I think that's where the. The reality comes in and makes sure we keeps us humble because we have struggles. We absolutely do.

No, that's what I always appreciate about visiting you guys is. Yeah, you don't. You don't. You don't hide anything. You're not trying to show off. And so, yeah, it's a. It's a great. It's a great tour. So. All right, let's jump into Lead with Joy. What's it about? Why did you write it? And fill us in, Richard.

Yeah, well, it's funny. Bucket list for me was writing the first book because I always wanted to write a book. And it's been a really incredible journey just through that process. My publisher came back to me and said, the first book's doing well enough. Rich, let's go. Let's get a second book out. We talked a bit about what would be a good focus, and we zeroed in on the chapter in Joy, Inc. Called Growing Leaders, Not Bosses. We've got an unusual leadership system here at Menlo in that there is no hierarchy here, there are no bosses here. And so a lot of the world wants to know how on earth can that possibly work and not devolve into, like, Lord of the Flies style chaos? And so we together decided that this idea of the leadership system that exists here at Menlo and how it works would be a good exploration. So the book is called Lead with Joy, and it's largely broken into two different pieces. The first one is what are joyful leaders and what are their values over and above the values of menlo? What are the additional values required here to be a leader? And then what are the systems in place to build that culture of joyful leadership? And that's the main thrust of the book.

Okay, so can you give us an overview of what are joyful leaders?

Sure, yeah. So there's a lot of words I use here that kind of highlight the chapters of the book. Some of the words are dangerously overused. So hopefully I've exposed the reality past the danger. Like authentic and humble, I think, are words that are often used when you talk about great leaders. And so I explore what would that actually look like here? So some powerful stories around that maybe some words that aren't used as loving, optimistic, visionary, grounded in reality and servant leadership. And obviously a lot of those things themes are probably consistent with a lot of leadership books. I think the difference in the books that we write here at MENLO are that they aren't theoretical, written by academics. These are books born out of the reality of what we're doing to run a company. And so a lot of stories. Chief storyteller. Of course, I'm going to write stories, and I think it's the stories that really enhance. How did these values play out here at Menlo? When you bring them up, Give me.

A story of a loving leader at Menlo.

Yeah. So, yeah, this is actually. This is a very personal story for me, but it exhibits not only the loving care we take care of each other, but also, in some ways, the ability, based on the system we've created, to speak truth to power. There was a day on a special project that was kind of my personal pet projects. It was an interest. It was an internal project that we were working on that I had really espoused because I really enjoy it. It's a small app for my iPhone that allows me, as the CEO of the company, to check on receivables. And that's kind of the lifeblood of a company that's driven by people, is cash flow. And receivables are the leading, you know, the canary in the coal mine. And the app does a simple thing. It just highlights troubled receivables. And, you know, that's kind of an AI type of trouble of which receivables are behaving differently than they normally do, rather than which ones are past net 15 or net 30. And the system wasn't working perfectly, but that's okay. It was an internal project, so it's a learning project as much as anything. And Tracy and Matt, two of our QA people, were taking a look at one of the problems, and they came up to me and asked me what my expectations around this problem the system was experiencing. And it was that the data wasn't always right up to date for me. And that was what we were discussing. And I asked Matt, who was fairly new here at the time, maybe only been here about six months at that point. I said, matt, how often does the system update itself? And he looked at me and he said, I don't know, Rich. And I can tell you, in that moment, I was not my best self as a leader. And I said something like, you know, I wasn't mean. I didn't yell, I didn't swear, but I used my best adult voice and probably said something like, you know, Matt, I'm the customer for this project. And that's the sort of thing I think a customer should expect you to know the answer to. And I'm probably either said it or made it clear how Disappointed I was about that. And he looked at me, and Tracy was right there with him. Tracy been here a long time and said, okay. And then they walked away. And I could tell right in the moment, I probably didn't handle that particularly well. I actually tossed and turned about it a little bit that night, thinking, yeah, I probably didn't do that well. The next morning, Tracy came in and applied a lesson that I've taught the team over many years. She walked up to me and she said, hey, can we talk? You know. You know when the boss says that, yeah, this wasn't. You know, this was the boss being told this to you. And we sat down, and she looked at me, and she. She used a simple question that I have taught years and years and years for the team to use when they're having trouble with another team member. She looked me in the eye and said, are you okay? And I looked at her and I said, this is about yesterday, isn't it? She said, yeah. She said, I was surprised. It just didn't seem like you. So I want to make sure you're okay now, in that moment, right? That is an act of love. That is an act of caring about the other person, assuming that if they're misbehaving, it's not because they're a bad person. It's because maybe something's troubling them in their lives. And I went on to explain that I had some expectations, and I realized that I probably didn't handle them well, and I was fine. There was nothing wrong with me, wrong with my life, per se. And at that moment, Matt walked in the front door. This is real early in the morning. It's probably 8, 8:15 in the morning. And Matt walked in. There's Traci, and I sit. And I waved Matt over. I said, hey, Matt, come here for a second. And he sat down, and I said, hey, Matt, that thing that happened yesterday, I didn't handle that very well. I'm sorry. And without missing a beat, this guy had only been here for six months, looks me in the eye and says, I forgive you. Now, at that moment, my humble self just melts because I realized, here's a guy here, six years, six months, and he's demonstrating more loving, caring leadership than I did. Leader of the company, the chief storyteller, the CEO after 17 years. And I learned an important lesson that day about how to be a better leader. And I learned it from one of our youngest team members. Wow.

I forgive you. Yeah. I mean, talk about the. I don't know the talk about the difference between the tossing and turning, because the reason I'm mentioning is I have a similar story myself. I coach my kids soccer teams, you know, and my older team as a under 16 team and a pretty good little team. And we're playing our big rivals who. Well, I don't know if we're quite rivals. We've never beaten them. Right. We've never beat this team, but we're close. And we played them this past Tuesday night and it was 2 to 1 in the second half. We were losing, but we're the first team to score on this team all season, by the way. And, and a couple of my girls were doing their best and they just, they didn't do something well. And I kind of lost my mind.

Right.

I mean, and I was really, really ashamed of myself. After we have practice tonight, so I'm going to actually practice my own Richard Sheridan talk, you know, with, with this, with these players. But there's what I'm just curious, just exploring the emotions that you felt. The moment of the, of the event that night when you're tossing and turning and then the next day the bell curve, if you will, of emotions like. Can you talk about that?

Sure. You know, I think if we're really honest with ourselves, Ron, we usually know. We usually know when we screwed up, mainly because we feel it like in our heart, in our gut where emotion should be paid attention to. But I think sometimes when we're the top guy, we're busy, we're running from one thing to another. We might justify in our own minds, hey, I'm the CEO, I'm really busy. I'm running from one thing to another. I need to motivate you with fear or self doubt or something like that, but in your heart, you know it's wrong and you can feel it. And so when that happened and they looked at me funny, I felt it. I could feel that this didn't go right. And I think that feeling carried with me until I got home and went to bed that night because it's not the kind of leader I want to be. It's not the kind of discussions I want to have with my team. It's not how I want to make them feel. I know that doesn't build up a team. It tears them down. And yet I didn't step in, in the moment.

Yeah, that's what my question is like, why didn't I apologize to my girls after the game? It took me a night to stew on it. And now we have practice and I'M going to do it. Same with you. Like, why didn't you, 10 minutes later, after the event or whatever, why didn't you go up to Matt and say, I'm sorry, you know, what is that about humans that I don't know well.

And that's, that's one of the reasons I told that story is because Matt looking at me and saying, I forgive you without hesitation, without, without even blinking an eye and said it so sincerely, he was being a better leader than me. And that felt, felt important.

Yeah.

And it was funny because as soon as it happened, I realized, oh, this is a really great story.

Yeah.

Because you know, and I think, you know, to, not to let us off the hook, you and me, in those situations, but at least as a reminder that no matter how long we've been doing what we've been doing, no matter how much experience we have had, no matter how many books we've read or people we've talked about, you and I still have room for learning, growing. And I so appreciate that aspect of Menlo where we keep ourselves in that mode even when it's a six month guy talking to the co founder and CEO of the company.

Yeah. Well, circles right back to how do you battle pride? Realizing that we are fallen creatures and that we got a lot of, a lot of opportunity ourselves.

Right. So. Well, let's face it, the opposite of Joy Inc. If you were going to create two companies and put them across the street and say we're going to have one company here on the east side of the street called Joy Inc. And we're going to have a exact opposite company on the, on the other side of the street. We'd probably call it Fear Inc. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And I, and I'm going to, you know, again, not to let myself off the hook, but I'll tell you, I'm fighting a lot of demons here because I was brought up in that world. That's how I was taught to lead. That's how my bosses managed me. And like, who else am I going to model myself after than the people who I followed as a leader or a boss or a manager in all the decades prior to that in my career. So I usually will be up front with my team and say, guys, I got a long way to go here. I'm still learning how to do this.

Yeah, it's tough.

I know many of us grew up reading business books. I'm not gonna name names of companies, but we all know who they are. You know, took it the bottom 20% and fire em, you know, I mean, goodness gracious, you know, that's the definition of Fear Inc. Right?

It's stunning some companies are still doing that. Yeah. It seems like even some of those ones we could probably easily name have turned away from recently, but many were taught by that system and continue to espouse it.

Yep, yep, yep. Hey, so the last thing I want to just explore quickly here, Richard, is we were talking over email before we, before the interview here, talking about kind of a changing set of clients that you guys have, that you guys have been experiencing. I wonder if you could maybe talk about the requests that you're getting and, and how that's playing out.

Yeah, well, the, you know, our core business, Ron, as you know, is designing and developing software for our customers. We still, the place we earn the majority of our revenue is forming teams around these projects. And they're all business to business projects. Even if the ultimate users of the software we're creating might be consumers in some cases. But mostly it's business software. And it can be in every field imaginable, whether it's manufacturing or healthcare or life sciences or retail, all those kind of environments. And so that's delightfully ongoing. We have this wide range of mix of projects and technologies and teams just enjoying that work. With the tours in the book that enhanced and grew rapidly a part of the company we call experience. This idea of let's go visit Menlo, let's go learn from them, let's go take a class or two. And that part of the business has continued to be solid and be a great performer and grown dramatically since the book came out. Now what's happening, which isn't at all surprising to us and delightful for us is the people who want to combine those two things, they come to us and say, yep, glad we learned, glad you taught us, glad you showed us that sort of thing. We want the direct experience. We don't want you to just do some software project for us. We want to do a project. We want you to do a project with us. And so now what we're doing is we're blending our team with our clients teams in the spirit of not only getting the work done, which is important, of course, but doing it in a way that leaves behind a lasting impact on the way they work going into the future and taking some of the lessons they learned from working shoulder to shoulder with us and transforming the inside of their companies with a new way, a new approach to doing things. As you probably well know, even in the manufacturing sector, there are very few products anymore that don't include some element of software in them. And software is hard. It's a little more theoretical than mechanical devices. And a lot more things can go wrong. And so they want not just the results of our efforts, but they want the results of touching our team while performing those efforts so that they can come themselves away transformed. And now we see ourselves in some regards, helping other companies lead those transformation efforts. Some potentially really large companies. And we've had some dramatic effects on large organizations. And I'll leave it to your listeners when they grab the book. There's a couple of pretty compelling stories about two of the largest, oldest companies in the nation who were directly affected by their touch with us and what effect it had. And that's really fun for our team. That's a bit of a new frontier. It's something we always anticipated. It's something we're delighting in and it's, you know, taking Joy to the next level.

Love it. All right, Richard. Well, hey, next time I'm in Ann Arbor, I'm definitely going to swing by. I always enjoy visiting with you and your team. And let's go ahead and wrap things up with maybe sharing some final words of wisdom and then definitely tell folks how they can connect with you, learn more about menlo, and then obviously talk about Lead with Joy. I guess you'll have links off your website and so forth.

Sure. Yeah. You know, I would say that what I have discovered through the process of writing Lead with Joy and some of the tours over the recent years is that defining joy is very important and we have our own definition for it. They'd be happy going to. But somewhat the more generic questions I think any organization needs to ask themselves if they are in a serious pursuit of joy is two questions. Who do you serve? And what would delight look like for them? So this idea, as Arbinger Institute would say, take an outward mindset, take an outward view, don't look inside, don't talk about foosball tables and ping pong tables and think it's all about beanbag chairs and, and beer. 30s to get to Joy. This is about service to others. I believe as human beings we are so wired to service others, particularly doing so in community with one another while doing it. Because most things we want to accomplish these days are very complex, no matter what endeavor you're in. So we need teams of human beings working together to serve others. So these two questions I ask all of our visitors now to think about as they go home, these aren't as easy questions as they seem, who do you serve? And what does delight look like for them? Answering those two questions well will probably lead you on a path to joy. And when you think about who you serve, it better be with this total outward mindset. Because if we just simply say, well, I'm here to serve our customers, that's still a little bit inward mindset, right? Because your customers, where your revenue comes from. If you think about, well, I'm here to serve our shareholders, well, that's again, inward mindset. You know, increasing shareholder value will produce happy board members, and therefore you get to keep your job and maybe get a raise. Even if you say, you know, I'm here to serve my staff. Again, important but not outward mindset, because your staff are the ones who deliver the services and products that produce the revenue. What I encourage them to think about is, who do you serve beyond all those people? Who's the ultimate service? Now, for us, we design and develop software. We design it with the intent that it one day will delight the end users that are going to use it every day. So people will never meet people who will never pay us for what we do. And they might not even know who we are because our work is often buried inside of some other product that's going out to the world. And they don't tout our name when they do that. And so that's who we focus on. And I'll use a simple example that I think everybody will relate to, to. We had a life insurance company here not too long ago, and I asked them these questions and I said, who do you serve? And their immediate answer, as you might imagine as well, our policyholders, of course, I said, yep, I get that. I said, but I can't tell you who you serve. That's for you to contemplate. But let me plant this thought in your head. It's possible for you to consider another target, and that's the beneficiaries of the policies you sell. People you'll never meet, people that don't know who you are, people will need you. But 30, 35, 40 years from now, and when they call, they expect compassion, they expect understanding, they expect execution, and they probably expect a big check. And if your method is to treat them as if they're trying to defraud you, if they're almost like criminals on the phone trying to betray your systems, you probably aren't serving them well. And it was interesting, as I told this story to these life insurance executives, there was one lady in the room who I could see actually dabbing Tears from her eyes. And then they told me that they had just outsourced their claims department to a third party offshore firm and that they'd instructed them that they should suspect everyone who calls. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, you get it. Right. I mean, that's not going to be delight. Right. If I call in and I'm in my. You know, because the people on the other end of the line are probably in one of the most disastrous times of their life. They lost a loved one, someone who cared enough about them to buy a policy and take care of them. And this is somebody who meant a lot to them. Yeah. And if our first instinct is to treat them with disdain or. Or contempt, that is not going to delight them. And so I think every one of our businesses, as we think about it, has that opportunity, that opportunity to think about deeply who we actually serve and what would delight look like for them. And I think those two questions are probably going to form how I think about Menlo for the rest of my days. And I think the companies we touch are taking a different view of things.

Yeah. And, you know, kind of that just reminded me of. Of the Barry Wehmiller story. I don't know about their company, but, you know, I don't know exactly. I might get the story exactly correct. But, you know, they speak a lot about how, you know, their aspect of continuous improvement is really important, but what they're really looking at is things such as, you know, less divorces. Right. Like, of their associates, because people are going home and they're happier and, you know, they're more pleasant to be around and this and that. And it's like, you don't think about lean impacting divorce rates.

Right.

But it could. It can. It will in a positive way if. If it's done correctly. But that's a. Maybe a slightly different way to look at it, right?

Yep. Yeah. I think, you know, I've actually gotten to know Barry Waymiller pretty darn well, and they have a really interesting tagline where their view is that they essentially judge themselves by the number of lives they touch. And they don't just consider that to be their customers, their employees. They look at their communities that they're in. They look at the family members of the people that they work. And, you know, that's. Bob Chapman and his group are really doing a wonderful job of really thinking that through. And I admire them and really think about that when I think about us, because I think there's a lot to learn about that.

Good stuff. All right, what's the best way to get ahold of you, Richard.

So email a great way. I'm nutty about email, so people can write me@rsherdinloinnovations.com if they just want to hear my thoughts for the day. They can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn as Menlo Prez with a Z. And I'm pretty active on both of those platforms. And obviously they go to our website, menlotivations.com they can learn more about us. The tab that is probably a favorite is Experience Menlo by visiting and they can come here. Come here and see us.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Good stuff, my friend. Well, thanks again for coming on. It's always great. Let's not wait another few hundred episodes to have you back on.

So.

And maybe we'll get back out there with our video cameras or something and do another tour.

Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously, obviously, Ron, I would love to talk with you when the book comes out because I think we'll have a lot more to talk about.

Yeah, for sure. I can't wait to read it.

Thanks.

All right, Take care, Richard.

Take care.

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