Imagine a company where people love coming to work and are highly
productive on a daily basis. Imagine a company whose top executives, in
a quest to create the most fun workplace ever, obliterate
labor-management divisions and push decision-making responsibility down
to the plant floor. Could such a company compete in today's bottom-line
corporate world? Could it even turn a profit? Well, imagine no more.
In Joy at Work, Dennis W. Bakke tells the true story of this
extraordinary company--and how, as its co-founder and longtime CEO, he
challenged the business establishment with revolutionary ideas that
could remake America's organizations. It is the story of AES, whose
business model and operating ethos -let's have fun-were conceived during
a 90-minute car ride from Annapolis, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. In
the next two decades, it became a worldwide energy giant with 40,000
employees in 31 countries and revenues of $8.6 billion. It's a
remarkable tale told by a remarkable man: Bakke, a farm boy who was
shaped by his religious faith, his years at Harvard Business School, and
his experience working for the Federal Energy Administration. He rejects
workplace drudgery as a noxious remnant of the Industrial Revolution. He
believes work should be fun, and at AES he set out to prove it could be.
Bakke sought not the empty fun of the Friday beer blast but the joy of a
workplace where every person, from custodian to CEO, has the power to
use his or her God-given talents free of needless corporate bureaucracy.
In Joy at Work, Bakke tells how he helped create a company where every
decision made at the top was lamented as a lost chance to delegate
responsibility--and where all employees were encouraged to take the
game-winning shot, even when it wasn't a slam-dunk. Perhaps Bakke's most
radical stand was his struggle to break the stranglehold of creating
shareholder value on the corporate mind-set and replace it with more
timeless values: integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense
of fun.
