Transcriber: Hélène Vernet Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
I flew here actually from Necker Island.
Necker Island is the private island of Sir Richard Branson.
My wife, my son and I flew about 35 hours
to get here to Dubai, we were in Necker just two days ago.
We had the honor of having dinner with Sir Branson
two days ago and at this dinner,
it was just one on one for about 90 minutes, me and him.
We got to talk about life, business and lots of things
but I asked him this one question, I said:
"Richard, there're so many theories about what makes you tick,
what has led you to be perhaps one of the most successful entrepreneurs
in human history, a guy who's now taking people to space.
But in your words, what's one thing, one thing
that you would attribute to your success?"
Do you want to know what Richard said?
He said, "It's all about finding people smarter than you,
getting them to come and work at your business,
giving them great work, making it fun, then stepping back
and leaving them alone so you can focus on your vision.
But here's the most important thing:
make their work a mission."
Wow! But the question is, how can the average company do this?
That's a powerful message.
So, Mindvalley, my company sort of stumbled upon a way
and it happened quite by accident.
In 2002, my company was operating out of a bedroom in Times Square.
That space was where we started.
It was a shady apartment in Time Square.
In fact two years before I moved there, it was a Thai massage parlor.
And we all know what Thai massage parlor in Times Square means!
So, yes, the company started in a former whorehouse in Times Square.
But since that, what happened next, quite by accident,
was that due to visa problems,
I had to leave the US and fly all the way back to Malaysia.
As soon as I got to my home city in Kuala Lumpur,
I realized I had a problem:
problem number one, all our clients, customers and partners were all in the US;
problem number two was way bigger:
Malaysia has a massive brain drain issue.
Every year one per cent of our population leaves the country
to go to the developed world.
In 2007, 140,000 of Malaysia's smartest minds left the country.
2008 to 2009, that number rose to over 300,000.
Now, this was a problem.
And in the words of Buckminster Fuller,
"You never change things by fighting an existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
We couldn't fight brain drain but we decided to create a new model.
And that new model, our goal, was to create the world's greatest workplace.
We decided that if we could create
the world's greatest workplace in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
brain drain would no longer have to apply to us.
And so we proceeded to, and over the last five years,
Mindvalley has become one of the best places on the planet to work.
In Kuala Lumpur, we are clearly the #1 place to work.
We attract talent from all around the world.
We've a spectacular office,
and we have amazing people working from this one office.
Mindvalley's become such a competitive place to work
that people now take part in YouTube video competitions
just to get recognized by the company.
If you go to Youtube, type Mindvalley Cover Letters,
you'll see literally hundreds of applications
creating these beautiful cover letters.
This one for example, this lady spent over 300 man hours
creating a custom animated video just to get noticed by Mindvalley.
This has resulted in this little company in Malaysia
now employing people from 31 different countries,
all in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
We've effectively reversed brain drain at least for our business.
And these amazing people in Mindvalley has allowed our company to expand
in a variety of different industries.
We've become the most successful incubator in Mindvalley, in Malaysia.
Last year we launched seven companies and every single one of them
became profitable or got sold in ten months.
That's a pretty phenomenal record.
And we've now expanded into everything from technology to venture capital.
We've even launched our own festival in the Caribbean called Awesomeness Fest,
all because of this amazing group of talent
that we've been able to attract,
in short, by following Sir Branson's advice.
The question though is: how can the average company do this?
What I want to share with you here is five ways we were able to accomplish this
and how any company by adopting these five ways
can have the same results in their culture.
Now the first of these methods is happiness.
This is something that many companies overlook.
The first thing we do at Mindvalley is we wanted to give our people
a workspace that is so beautiful
that they do not want to return to their homes
because they enjoy being in the office so much.
So we built a really spectacular space in Kuala Lumpur.
But it's not just about a good space,
you also need to give people freedom to use this space
in any way they want.
So we incorporated flexi time.
At Mindvalley, you chose your own working hours.
You can chose to spend Monday to take the day off to go watch a movie
and then make up for it in the Sunday.
It doesn't matter to us as long as the work gets done.
And because we attract people from all around the world,
the other thing we wanted to do was to make sure they live beautiful fun lives.
We take a vested interest in making sure our employees have glorious social lives.
We fly employees to Paradise Islands.
We put on amazing parties and dinners
to get people to enjoy their time in Malaysia,
to become friends.
When you're friends with the people at work
you tend to enjoy coming to work a lot more.
Now this also led us to relook
at everything about how traditional companies run.
Take for example the company weekly meeting :
all companies have this but most employees dread it.
In Mindvalley, a weekly meeting is called the "Awesomeness Report".
Employees actually look forward to it, really.
We email our employees and we ask them
to send in their key accomplishments for the week.
We then share this with the team.
But we do it in a way that's more like a stand-up comedy act.
People are laughing, people are joyful, it's a ton of fun.
Our Awesomeness Reports are rather like watching The Daily Show.
And another thing that we do is we decided to give our employees power.
Every year for the last five years, we've won the award:
the World's Most Democratic Workplace.
We were the first company in Asia to win.
This award means that we open up the way we run our business
to give employees freedom and power.
This leads to happiness,
happiness when you know you've control over your workspace.
One such example of how we do this is a process called "Ask" at Mindvalley,
where any employee can submit an anonymous question to the founder
or any key manager at MindValley and question them.
When the question goes through, it becomes public.
Everybody knows the question has been asked, they just don't know by whom.
The founder or the manager has to answer it.
So everyone is accountable to each employee
including interns who've been with us for just a week.
A typical question might be: "I love how you're always pushing us to think big
and grow, however I'm concerned at how fast we're progressing
because it feels like a foundation is not solid enough to support that growth.
That's a question I had to answer to my team just a few weeks ago.
Now, why happiness? A lot of people focus on productivity.
Productivity does not even make my top five.
What I found instead is that when you make people happy,
when you make people excited about jumping out of bed every morning,
when you blur the lines between work and play,
people will come up with ways to make their work culture productive,
and people get amazing things done.
Branson in another quote once said,
"Work, play make no difference to me. It's all just living."
Of course, play and fun is good,
but, to function as a workspace, you need a second ingredient,
and that's "the noble mission."
So, Mindvalley is a publisher.
We publish personal growth products for the generation that comes after books,
people who use iPads, membership sites, YouTube.
We have about 120,000 students and over right now 1.7 million subscribers
using our content all around the world.
But our goal, our grand mission is to touch 500 million lives.
We're not even one per cent there yet.
But this is what keeps our employees working late at night,
waking up excited jumping out of bed every morning:
the idea that someday we can get new ideas in parenting,
in entrepreneurship, in marketing, in personal growth,
to five per cent of the global population, and make a ripple in history.
Now, bold missions are one thing
but, to really be happy at work, you need day-to-day tasks to keep you excited.
Here, we borrow some ideas from the computer game industry.
You guys are playing computer games, you know that game designers
have ways to keep you engaged, addicted, and hooked.
We take many of these same ideas and we simply bring them to work.
One is the concept of the badge.
If you've ever used a tool like Foursquare or played FarmVille on Facebook,
people get addicted to these because of badges.
In Mindvalley, we give badges as well
but they are desk badges, icons that you place on your desk,
the Flash, for example, for doing speedy work.
We also have, like in computer games, a way to level up.
In games, you complete a level, you level up.
In Mindvalley, when you do something bold
like set a new sales record or create a beautiful new website,
you get the Bell of Awesomeness that is only to be rung
in moments of shared Total Awesomeness run for you,
You can't just call it the B-E-L-L, that's sacrilegious, it has a title.
So, the average person will have the bell rung for them
maybe once or twice in their entire lifetime at work,
but when they do, it's this massive honor.
That third thing we do is high scores.
Every team, every department
submits their high score every Friday at five p.m.,
and every week they seek to beat their high score
just like a computer game.
One more thing game designers do well is the "Leader Board."
You see a list of the people who're doing the best in the game.
We do the same: every month, employees at Mindvalley
work for the top performance.
We share the Leader Board, a top top performance with the team
at the monthly Awesomeness Report, but one of the cool things we do
is the top performers get to do a ritual called "Mounting the puppy."
They basically sit on a beautiful green fluorescent puppy,
and the other employees in the company, sometimes up to 80 people,
for three minutes shower them with praise and appreciation
and talk about why they won the award. It's a beautiful thing to see.
People literally have tears coming down their eyes.
One more thing we do is we democratize praise.
As a founder, I don't always know
what every single person in our company is doing every single day.
Yet people love praise.
So, our own employees created a system called "1up",
where anyone can send an icon or a badge to anyone else
and thank them for something great they've done.
The 8,000 praises or love letters just went out last week.
Imagine coming to work where three to four times a week,
there's a little love letter waiting for you on your computer, with a badge -
Austin power for knowing that you have mojo or bora,
for knowing that you do things very good, yes? -
(Laughter)
and a note attached to it
about why someone else in the company appreciated what you do.
That's what people look forward to at work in Mindvalley
One funnest part of computer games is Easter eggs.
When a game gets boring, the designer creates surprises
called "Easter eggs" to pick the pace up.
We do the same thing in Mindvalley: our Easter egg is a secret organization
within the organization, called "S.P.L.A.S.H."
It stands for "the Secret society for Platonic Love,
Appreciation, Smiles and Happiness."
It's like the CIA within the organization.
Nobody in MindValley knows who's a member of Splash,
but these members have a secret budget to do funky cool things for the company.
You might show up to work one day
and Splash has organized Starbucks coffee for everyone
or bought a latest new tech toy for our computer team.
One of the other things that Splash does is it organizes spontaneous festivals.
They might be: "Mustachioed day" at Mindvalley
where every guy showing up is given a mustache
and has to wear it the entire day.
Splash brings all these fun elements into work
so you never know what's going to happen,
but every two weeks, something weird happens.
Weirdness in the workspace is a wonderful way to create happiness.
Now, there's a fourth ingredient as well: personal growth.
If you're doing the same thing over and over, and over again,
you start to stagnate.
What we do is we make personal growth a big part of our company.
Every manager in Mindvalley abides by this motto:
"Leadership is recognizing that we're all one,
that every person you lead is as brilliant as you,
as talented as you, and has the same capacity for growth and accomplishment.
They simply need to be reminded of this fact."
With this, we put a ridiculous amount of time in helping people grow.
People, at Mindvalley, abide by something called a "45/5 work week."
It means that we're encouraged to only work 45 hours a week,
because if we don't have this gap, people go crazy.
They just don't leave the office.
Out of these 45 hours though,
five of these hours, you must spend growing yourself.
Combine this with flexi time,
it means that someone at Mindvalley could be curled up in bed on a Friday,
reading a book on meditation, anything that helps them grow,
and they get paid for this time.
We also give people an unlimited budget on Amazon
so they can buy any book they want.
We also created our own auditorium, the Hall of Awesomeness,
where we bring in world class trainers to come and speak to our team.
We have team retreats in Paradise Islands.
We fly an entire team down and bring trainers from around the world
to come and train our team on everything from entrepreneurship to personal growth.
But best of all, we have a program called the "Dream Manager."
See that board in that picture?
That board holds the dreams and ambitions of every one of my employees.
We ask every employee to make a list of experiences and objects
they want to amass during their lifetime,
a list of how they want to grow -
maybe learn public speaking or pick up a new skill -
and a list of how they want to contribute to the world.
This is what goes on that board.
I try to know this for every person who works for me.
I believe if you know these three things,
you truly get to know a person.
We believe that the company's mission is to help in any way
make these goals for these employees become a reality in their life.
The fifth thing we do : tribal dynamics.
This is really about building a tribe, a family.
People in Mindvalley abide by the code of Awesomeness.
My employees came up with this.
It governs the day-to-day operations of how the company works.
We also have our own language,
a word such as "Awe-gasmic" for example.
Sounds odd, but this is what it means:
it's when you do a work that's so great that you appear watching your work.
It so impress that a shiver goes up their spine.
(Laughter)
So, we come up with our own language. We have our own code.
We then extend this tribal dynamics to our customers,
to people who want to visit our office.
We've an open office where anyone can come and visit.
We even organize our own festival called Awesomeness Fest.
It's taking place in places like Costa Rica or Maui
where our customers come together
to learn about personal growth, and business processes,
to engage in amazing parties and bond with our team.
We've actually blurred the borders between our company and our customers.
The biggest thing done recently is MindValley insights
where we actually decided to open-source our business
and give away our marketing principles and management principles
to the world for free, so other companies could learn and grow from us.
Now, why does this work?
How have all these five things come together to make Mindvalley successful?
Here are a couple of models.
Again, you have happiness, a noble mission, quests,
personal growth and tribal dynamics.
Happiness and a noble mission: when put together,
you have what is called "flow."
I believe that that's this peak state of human existence.
It's a state where you have bold missions pulling you forward,
but you're happy in the now.
In other words your happiness is not tied to your goal.
Your happiness comes from the journey.
As you can see, happiness and noble mission
put you in this elegant state called "flow"
where it almost seems as the universe has your back,
and things just work out without stress.
Then, there's Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins said that there're two great spiritual needs of every human being:
a noble mission and personal growth,
the desire to contribute to the world and the desire to grow yourself.
And that's what a noble mission and personal growth do.
Then, there's the tribal dynamics model of Dave Logan.
He talks about how healthy companies form a level-four tribe.
If you read "Tribal Leadership",
happiness, a noble mission and tribal dynamics
help create that level-four tribe.
So the five things again.
The result is not just
loyalty, innovation, hard work, fulfillment, impact
and the bottom line.
the greatest result we're seeing is the impact on employees.
Catherina joined Mindvalley from Slovakia. She worked with us for two years.
She's gone back to Slovakia, now become a published author
and organized a forum for empowering women.
Amir joined us from Sudan.
He's now writing a book on democratization in the Arab world.
He's been invited to speak in places like Harvard and MIT.
He's only 27.
Nika joined us from Poland.
She used her skills from Mindvalley to become a yoga instructor
and is now one of the top yoga instructors in Southeast Asia.
Kylie joined us from Malaysia.
After two years at Mindvalley, he went to start a company,
and in three months sold it to Groupon,
becoming one of Malaysia's most celebrated young entrepreneurial success stories.
Cecilia joined us from Italy, work for us for one year,
went back to Italy, became a best-selling author.
Her book just reached number one on its list,
and she just sold her company back to Mindvalley.
Through empowering our employees this way,
we have launched Mindvalley in Poland, Russia, Argentina, even in the Arab world,
simply by turning our employees into entrepreneurs.
The crazy thing about Mindvalley is this:
a full 25% of everyone who's been with us for longer than two years
has become an entrepreneur,
and 12% of these entrepreneurs have become Mindvalley funded entrepreneurs.
All the people you see in this picture
are employees who are now entrepreneurs funded by the company.
So, our goal really is to build the world's greatest workplace.
We're not seeking to do this for awards, honors, recognition
or even the bottom line.
We're seeking to do it being the right thing to do,
because 70% of our waking hours are spent at work.
Why shouldn't work be the happiest moments of our lives?
And what we want to do is continue pushing the boundaries of work culture
and then openly share it with the world
so Branson's advice can be applied to millions of companies around the world.
And we seek to do it in Malaysia, a developing country,
because if it can work in Malaysia,
it can work in 80% of the countries in the world.
And someday, we hope billions of people
can jump out of bed in the morning with a big smile on their face,
knowing that they're going to a workplace that gives them happiness,
fulfillment and meaning.
Thank you.
(Applause)