Leadership Book Review Blog: Joy at Work
In this book, author Dennis W. Bakke describes the strategy he employed as CEO of AES, an energy company that by 2002 had plants in 31 countries and 40,000 employees. He endeavored to make work fun, rewarding, and joyful. In this role, he made some significant cultural changes, summarized below.
Leadership layers were kept to a minimum and decision-making happened where the work was happening by the people who had the facts
Hourly paid employees were converted to salaried employees and people were paid for their talent, expertise, and achievements, not for the hours they put in
The mission, vision, and values centered around serving society and assuming that everyone who worked there was a thoughtful, creative, trustworthy, and capable of making decisions.
With these changes, Bakke seems to have created the idyllic place to work and he received many kind words of gratitude over the years from employees who, for the first time ever, felt great responsibility and stewardship in their roles. They felt seen, valued, and heard. Many who were offered the opportunity to retire with extremely generous severance packages opted to stay because they loved the culture and how they were empowered to work.
Bakke described the ebb and flow of business success at AES that ultimately ended up with the board pushing him out of his role as CEO. He describes many factors that tie into stock prices and how the company is valued in the market and at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem that the board or his fellow executives had fully bought into the culture he created. I don’t think you can fully connect the downturn of the business to the culture, but Bakke doesn’t share what happened after he stepped down. At the end of the book, Bakke includes this line, “Success as I have defined it in Joy at Work cannot be guaranteed.” The book read more like a manifesto than any other leadership book I have read and that line right there felt like confirmation of it.
What I loved about this book is that it talked about the benefits of cultural change and how it needs to be led from the top. As a CEO, he modeled the values everyday and was the primary ambassador for the changes. Before reading it, I was fearful that the book would be about pizza parties, annual parties, and prize drawings. Those things bring joy to work, but they are short-lived and employees see right through them and what they are meant to accomplish. Bakke’s aim was to develop people through their work, treating them all as capable stewards of the business and his people responded.
That being said, this book was very hard to read. Perhaps it was just too long and there was a lot of extraneous information? I often found myself lost in a chapter, having to go back and look at the Table of Contents to see what I was the key takeaways from the chapter should be. Also, I don’t believe I was the intended audience. This book will land well with executive leaders who have the decision-making power in an organization, though that flies right in the face of what Bakke is advocating for in this book. That being said, I’d have a hard time recommending this book to anyone given the poor results AES had.
If you know me, you know I am an advocate for people first. But I do think you need people in the executive suite looking out for the business. You can take great care of your people, be an admired leader that everyone appreciates, but if your business fails, those grateful people won’t have a job anymore. There is a balance that needs to happen between a focus on business results and how the work gets done. There has to be a point in the organizational structure where the message gets translated from “we need to see XX percent growth in the next year,” to “how can we provide more meaningful service to our customers.” When you take good care of your people, they will take good care of your customers, and the growth will happen.