The business benefits of joy

If the title of this blog post puts you off, I should say from the outset that I’m normally however quite dismissive of this sort of thing. But bear with me; I think there’s something in this.

I recently interviewed a guy called Richard Sheridan at an event staged by the investment platform Nucleus. Richard has written a book called Joy, Inc., which is based on his experiences at Menlo Innovations, his software design business based in Michigan.

To use his own words, Richard built at Menlo “a culture that removes the fear and ambiguity that traditionally makes a workplace miserable. With joy as the explicit goal, we've changed everything about how our company is run, and have brought that joy into the lives of our clients and their end users.”

It sounds great. So, is it? And can the Menlo experiment be made to work in other sectors, like financial advice, for example?

This is the first video in a two-part series.