Ann Arbor software firm reinvents the workplace

Work life is anything but "The Office" in Menlo Innovations workspace in downtown Ann Arbor. The company is reinventing how to get work done and the environment in which it is done.

Excerpt:

It's not true that you must work 80-hour weeks, trash competitors and gouge your customers to get ahead in today's dog-eat-dog business world.

Rich Sheridan and his gang of computer programmers and high-tech anthropologists at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor told me so.

They are dedicated to reinventing the workplace, for themselves and their clients, as a means to an even more ambitious goal: "To end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology," says Sheridan, president and CEO of the software firm he founded with three partners in 2001.

Inside Menlo's offices above a coffee shop a few blocks from the University of Michigan's central campus, there are no walls.

No cublicles.

Nobody working long nights.

Nobody working weekends.

No offshoring of work to programmers in India or other countries.

And nobody telecommuting (sort of counterintuitive for a technology firm in the era of virtual offices).

And if a client is a cash-starved entrepreneurial start-up -- is there any other kind? -- Menlo might just cut its usual rates for custom software by 50% in return for equity in the client's business or royalties from its products.

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Related Company

  • Menlo Innovations
    410 N. 4th Ave., Godfrey Building, 3rd Floor
    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104 Website
    Menlo Innovations is an Ann Arbor software design and development firm that strives to forever end the "stupid user" syndrome by making products that are intuitive to their clients' needs. From their iconcoclastic work space to their underlying ...