Whenever I give a tour of Menlo and describe our approach, I know I’m connecting with the audience when I start getting laughs or painful groans at just the right moments. People come here to learn from us and they attempt to find things they can take away that day that could make their lives better.

One of the key moments comes early on in the tour when they’re looking at our open and collaborative work environment and I just happen to mention that we don’t use e-mail to communicate with each other. This is almost always followed by a painful groan as my guests consider how much of their day is consumed by reading and responding to e-mail from their peers. Of course at this point they’re curious about how we do communicate with each other. I go on to explain that when we communicate with each other we use High-Speed Voice Technology™.

It usually takes a second for this to sink in and then the laughter starts. I explain to them that this technology comes built-in to the operating system and is pre-configured for use. I believe the laughter comes from the overwhelming amount of common sense and the stark efficiency this represents. At this point they begin looking more closely at our team and they see these constant, active conversations going on at each computer where two people are paired together working on the same task at the same time. It is not unusual at all to hear laughter and see smiles while the team is working through difficult problems.  Our screens have lots of fingerprints, arms are often lifted in the air pointing at screens, and the keyboards are moving back and forth frequently between the pair partners.

I believe this is the first point where people truly grasp what we like to call “The Menlo Magic.”

The energy, the noise, the collaboration suddenly come into view and it is not rare that some of our tour guests will say, “Wow. I would love to work in an environment like this.”

When most people talk about wanting to improve their “teams” they often talk about team building exercises like white water rafting trips, ropes courses, or trust falls. We have a better idea. How about building software together? It’s such a simple concept but in our environment we get to practice it every single day. Most visitors wonder if we’ve somehow cornered the market on extroverted software engineers. I’m often asked this on a tour. At this point I typically ask the team for a show of hands of how many would give themselves an “I” in their Myers-Briggs score indicating they are an introvert. More than half of my team raise their hand. I believe that it’s not that introverts don’t like relationships with other people, rather they simply prefer fewer, deeper relationships. We give them that opportunity in our environment.

And yes, the result is magical.