When Richard Sheridan speaks to MBA students, he tells them that their careers will really start after they’ve been fired the first time. This gets their attention – and it got ours. It happened to Sheridan when he was 43, with a wife and three young daughters, and he got the call that his software company would be eliminating his position. But from that low point came his best idea: Menlo Innovations, a completely different kind of software company, one they founded on an almost foreign concept: joy – joy for the creators, the users, and the sponsors. “Joy is the goal,” he says, and the high customer satisfaction, low turnover, and strong profits, happy byproducts. Almost everything your company probably does, Menlo does the opposite.