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Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job Dennis Bakke tells the story of the working environment he created in the energy company AES, a company he co-founded with Roger Sant. Bakke's central thesis: the workplace should be fun and fulfilling (p. 15).
Bakke chronicles the AES story, ups and downs, and describes a unique working culture that adheres to a set of values because it is the right thing to do. When stock downturns and ethical breaches challenge company values, Bakke fights to keep the organizational model of fun, as well as AES's core values, even when his board of directors want to adopt a more traditional model of control. The AES core values include integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and fun (p. 24).
A unique aspect of the AES experiment is pushing decision making down as far into the organization as possible. Bakke reasoned that those closest to the day-to-day line operations have the most information about relevant decisions. He made it his goal to make as few decisions as possible, and to enable others in the organization to make decisions relevant to their work and expertise. A tenet of this policy was an "advice process" (p. 97) of gathering the advice and feedback from others within and outside of working groups; however, the individual ultimately was responsible for making the decision, as well as for remaining accountable for the success or failure of the decision. The following two quotes describe Bakke's position on delegated decision making.
Joy at Work challenges traditional assumptions about management, leadership, and control. Early in the book Bakke argues that in the name of fairness, employees should be treated differently from one another--because each employee is a unique individual (p. 28). About leadership he writes, "One of the most difficult lessons I have had to learn is that leadership is not about managing people. People are not resources or assets to be managed. Nor is leadership about analyzing issues and making big decisions" (p. 133). A few additional challenging aspects of the AES experiment:
All in all, Bakke's Joy at Work introduces some interesting structural changes to the workplace that challenge industrial revolution era assumptions about the nature of work.
Page 1 | Page 2: Nine reasons why the Joy at Work model isn't used.
by Dennis W. Bakke
ISBN: 0976268604
By far the most important factor [of special workplaces] is whether people are able to use their individual talents and skills to do something useful, significant, and worthwhile. When bosses make all the decisions, we are apt to feel frustrated and powerless, like overgrown children being told what to do by our parents (p. 75).
Every decision made at headquarters takes away responsibility from people elsewhere in the organization and reduces the number of people who feel they are making an effective contribution to the organization. Remember, joy comes from freedom. When central staff assume the lion's share of power and control, the people who are operating units don't get as much excitement and fulfillment from their work (pp. 102-3).