Richard Sheridan on Building A Workplace Centered On Joy

Written By Ryan Morrison
 
 

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About Richard Sheridan

Richard Sheridan is a transformative leader in workplace culture and human-centered business practices:

  • CEO, Chief Storyteller, and Co-Founder of Menlo Innovations, a pioneering software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan

  • Bestselling Author of "Joy, Inc." and "Chief Joy Officer," both exploring the intersection of joy and business success

  • 24-Year Track Record of building and maintaining an intentionally joyful workplace culture that attracts worldwide study

  • International Speaker on joy, leadership, and creating human-centered workplaces

  • Pioneer of Open-Door Culture, welcoming thousands of visitors annually to study "The Menlo Way"

 

The Origin Story: From Disillusionment to Joy

Richard Sheridan's journey to founding Menlo Innovations began in 1971 when, as a high school freshman in Macomb County north of Detroit, he discovered computer science for the first time. He typed a simple two-line program into a teletype machine, it clacked out "HIGH-RICH," and he was hooked. Fifty-four years later, he remains passionate about software development, though the path wasn't always joyful.

Despite his early enthusiasm, Sheridan's heart began to break for the profession he loved. Throughout his middle career, he witnessed the tech industry's darker realities: missed deadlines, blown budgets, low-quality software plagued with problems, and users who despised what his teams created. Marketing departments complained they were building the wrong products, even when developers thought they were following specifications exactly. This consistent pattern of failure led Sheridan to a crossroads—either find a better way or leave the profession entirely.

His search for solutions took him away from technology books toward literature on human organization. He became fascinated with how to structure teams to unlock creativity, innovation, imagination, and invention—not through pressure and grinding work, but by creating environments where people could thrive. This exploration ultimately laid the foundation for what would become Menlo Innovations.

What Is "The Menlo Way"?

Menlo Innovations was built with an audacious mission: to end human suffering in the workplace. This ambitious goal centers on a brand promise of joy, but not joy as a vague feel-good concept. At Menlo, joy has a very particular, purpose-driven meaning.

Sheridan explains that every company should be able to answer two fundamental questions: "Who do you serve?" and "What would delight look like for them?" For Menlo, which designs and develops custom software for business clients, the answer is clear—they serve the end users of the software they create. Intriguingly, these are not the people who pay them. While businesses hire Menlo to build software, the company's true north is creating products that make end users say, "I love this software."

This focus on user delight drives everything at Menlo. When the company can consistently produce software that people genuinely love to use, they bring joy into their own organization by serving others. This philosophy has attracted attention worldwide, with companies, leaders, and organizations seeking to understand how to cultivate intentionally joyful cultures in their own workplaces.

Over 24 years, Menlo has maintained an open-door policy, welcoming visitors from around the globe who want to learn "The Menlo Way" through tours, book studies, and consultations. The approach represents a fundamentally different way to design and build software, organize teams, and structure work itself.

 

The Bookshelf Moment: Understanding Joy's Deeper Meaning

When asked why he centered his philosophy around joy rather than other concepts like work-life balance or employee satisfaction, Sheridan had to look deeper into his personal history—before he ever touched a computer.

He recalls being 10 years old when his parents bought a bookshelf from what would be equivalent to an Ikea purchase today. The unassembled unit sat in a box in the garage while his parents went out to dinner and a movie. Young Richard decided to surprise them by building it himself. He assembled 50 pieces of wood and 200 nuts, bolts, and screws into a unit approximately eight feet wide and six feet tall.

Bursting with pride, he then realized a problem: he'd built it in the garage, but his mother wanted it in the living room. He painstakingly inched the massive shelving unit through the house, positioned it exactly where his mother envisioned, arranged her knickknacks and his father's books, wired up the stereo, and had her favorite album playing when they walked through the door. His mother cried.

For Sheridan, this moment epitomizes joy: "When the work of your heart, your hands, and your mind are done to the service of others, to their delight, that's where joy comes from."

This childhood experience revealed a universal truth about the tech profession that Sheridan has shared with audiences worldwide, and one that no one has ever disputed: software professionals want only one thing—to delight the people who use what they've created.

Most programmers, Sheridan argues, would even consider working for free if they could consistently experience that joy of seeing their work get delivered, knowing they worked with pride on something elegant, and watching people love what they built. Unfortunately, many software teams never experience this. Projects fail before delivery, or when delivered, users hate them. This was Sheridan's reality for much of his middle career, and it became the catalyst for change.

 

The Transformation: From Vice President to Founder

Between 1999 and 2001, while serving as Vice President of R&D for Interface Systems on the west side of Ann Arbor, Sheridan had the opportunity to design a fundamentally new way of working. Collaborating with a consultant named James Goble, who would later become his co-founder, he transformed the company in ways that literally restored his sense of joy.

While Sheridan didn't use the word "joy" at the time, the feeling was unmistakable. This experience became the foundation for Menlo Innovations' mission statement, established from the company's first days: to return joy to one of the most unique endeavors mankind has ever undertaken—the invention of software.

What makes Menlo different? Everything. The physical space is different. The way teams are organized is different. The processes are different. The way people actually work together is different. Sheridan and Goble had to invent new approaches to ensure they could consistently delight users, and these innovations have become the hallmark of "The Menlo Way."

 

Joy in the Software Profession: A Universal Desire

Sheridan's philosophy rests on a simple but powerful insight about what drives people in technology. Software developers, like all creators, yearn for three things:

1. Delivery: They want to see their work actually get out into the world. Too many software projects fail before reaching users.

2. Pride in Craftsmanship: They want to work with pride, knowing they've created something with elegance and quality. Software, despite being invisible, can be beautiful.

3. User Delight: They want people to love what they've built. This is the ultimate reward—creating something meaningful that genuinely helps and delights the people it was designed to serve.

When software professionals can experience these three elements on a regular, consistent basis, they achieve the kind of satisfaction that makes the work itself rewarding. The problem in much of the industry is that teams rarely get this experience. Instead, they face the opposite: users hating their products, developers feeling they didn't get to work with pride, and a pervasive sense of failure.

Menlo exists to change this reality by creating an environment where creativity, innovation, imagination, and invention can thrive—not through pressure and long hours, but through intentional culture design that puts people and purpose first.

 

Ann Arbor's Role in Menlo's Success

Geography and community have played crucial roles in Menlo's development. Ann Arbor's entrepreneurial ecosystem provided fertile ground for the company's experimental approach to workplace culture. The city's combination of University of Michigan resources, local innovation, and a culture of giving back created the perfect environment for Menlo to flourish.

Sheridan emphasizes the importance of being an active participant in the local business community. He encourages entrepreneurs and professionals to "get out of the house"—to work from coffee shops, attend local events, and build serendipitous relationships. It's in these unplanned encounters that crucial connections form and opportunities emerge.

This philosophy of community engagement extends beyond casual networking. Sheridan believes leaders must embrace a "giving first" mentality, sharing their time and expertise to create opportunity zones where innovation can happen. Ann Arbor's tech ecosystem thrives because leaders actively cultivate relationships and support one another's growth.

The presence of the University of Michigan has been particularly influential, not just for talent development but for fostering a culture of experimentation and research that permeates the local business environment. This academic-entrepreneurial symbiosis has helped shape not only Ann Arbor but also Detroit's broader tech ecosystem.

 

AI and the Future of Software: Navigating Transformation

When asked about artificial intelligence and whether software-as-a-service (SaaS) is dying, Sheridan offers a nuanced, historically grounded perspective. He reminds us that old technology never truly dies—50% of code still runs on mainframe computers using COBOL, technology from decades ago. This body of legacy work remains important and continues running critical systems worldwide.

That said, Sheridan has witnessed several transformative moments throughout his 50-year career in technology. He can look back and identify pivotal shifts: the release of the IBM personal computer in 1982 and the Macintosh that followed, his first experience with the Mosaic browser and the implications of the internet, the growth of the World Wide Web, the dot-com crash between 1999 and 2001 (when many declared the internet dead, only to watch it rebound stronger), the emergence of mobile devices, and the rise of cloud computing.

We are unquestionably in another such moment with AI. Sheridan pays close attention to experts in the field, and what seems common among almost all of them is candid uncertainty: "We have no idea where this is actually going and how fast it's going to get there. But it is going, and it is going to get there fast, and we all better be paying attention to it."

Cautious Optimism About AI

Sheridan observes that we're still in the process of assimilating AI into our daily lives. Even experts he speaks with privately express doubts about how fast AI is advancing and whether it's as complete as public narratives suggest. Technology adoption often follows S-curves that trail off before reaching theoretical maximums—autonomous vehicles provide a useful example.

While we haven't achieved full vehicle autonomy with cars that lack steering wheels, brakes, or gas pedals, we are deriving tremendous societal benefit from partial implementations. Adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assistance, and automatic braking make driving safer and more pleasant. Sheridan jokes that he's a better husband because of his car's adaptive cruise control—his wife no longer has to yell at him when he gets too close to the car ahead.

Similarly, AI is already providing meaningful benefits without achieving science fiction-level capabilities. Sheridan has personally shifted his behavior: he finds himself doing fewer Google searches and more queries on ChatGPT. He finds the richness and comprehensiveness of AI responses far more informative than traditional search results. Google now feels "legacy" to him—clunky and limited compared to what he once thought was cutting-edge.

AI Will Make Us More Human

Perhaps most importantly, Sheridan believes AI will ultimately make us more human, not less. The frontier we're navigating is determining what makes us most human: creativity, imagination, invention, and innovation. These remain distinctly human domains, but AI tools will help us reach these destinations faster and more effectively.

Critical questions remain about power consumption, resource allocation, and how humans will use these powerful tools for good versus harmful purposes. But ignoring AI is not an option. We must engage with it thoughtfully, experimentally, and with our eyes wide open to both opportunities and risks.

 

Creating Joy in Your Organization: Practical Wisdom

For leaders interested in bringing more joy to their workplaces, Sheridan offers several insights:

Start with Purpose: Clearly identify who you serve and what would delight them. Make this the North Star for all decisions.

Organize Around Humans: Focus less on processes and procedures, more on creating environments where creativity and innovation can flourish naturally.

Open Your Doors: Share what you learn. Menlo's commitment to transparency and teaching has actually strengthened their culture while benefiting others.

Embrace Community: Get out of your office. Build relationships through serendipitous encounters. Give first without expecting immediate returns.

Think Long-Term: Building a joyful culture isn't a quick fix. Menlo has invested 24 years in refining their approach, and it remains a daily practice.

Measure What Matters: Focus on user delight, employee fulfillment, and work quality—not just traditional business metrics.

The Menlo Way demonstrates that profitability and joy are not mutually exclusive. In fact, when companies consistently delight the people they serve, business success often follows naturally. The key is maintaining an unwavering commitment to joy as a moral imperative, not just a nice-to-have benefit.

 

Memorable Quotes from the Episode

"When the work of your heart, your hands, and your mind are done to the service of others, to their delight, that's where joy comes from for me."

"If you're in the tech field like I am, there is only one thing that we software people want, and that is to delight the people who use what we've created."

"Most programmers, if they could get that on a regular, consistent basis, might even consider working for free just to get that kind of joy, that kind of receipt of joy from the people they intend to serve."

"Our goal was to return joy to what we believed was one of the most unique endeavors mankind has ever undertaken, the invention of software."

"Get out of the house. Get out into a coffee shop. Because you're likely to run into somebody who you didn't even know was in the town, who you didn't know what they knew, you didn't know how willing they were to help you."

"Google search now feels like legacy to me, you know, just like we used to refer to mainframes as legacy."

"I think it's ultimately gonna make us more human, not less. I think the frontier we're on is the one where we're deciding what makes us the most human. The creativity, the imagination, the invention, the innovation. That's still the realm of humanity, but these tools are gonna get us there faster."

 

  • Menlo Innovations: https://www.menloinnovations.com

  • "Joy, Inc." by Richard Sheridan: Available on Amazon and major book retailers

  • "Chief Joy Officer" by Richard Sheridan: Available on Amazon and major book retailers

  • Connect with Richard Sheridan on LinkedIn: Richard is active on LinkedIn and welcomes connections from those interested in joy-centered workplace culture

  • Lean Enterprise Institute: Resources on scaling The Menlo Way for organizations

  • Ann Arbor SPARK: Information about Ann Arbor's entrepreneurial ecosystem

 

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