This was a pleasant surprise. After winning the World Blu Award for Democratic Workplaces for the second year in a row we were the subject of an interview my Business Today, a Malaysian business magazine.

My friend Mikko Espime who runs a Finland-based web analytics  company called "Getting Personal" also shared the award with us. Mikko runs the Malaysian office for Getting Personal and he's a friend and colleague.

Some highlights from the article.

The call for democracy is heard almost in every part of the world from time immemorial, but it has so far been confined to the realm of human rights and the world of politics. But we are now talking about democracy in the workplace.

Besides information and technology empowering people in ways they’ve never been empowered before, an up and coming workforce comprising Generation and X and Y also want to have a different kind of work place.

As many as 40 companies made it to WorldBlu’s Most Democratic Workplace List this year (http://www.worldblu.com/worldblu-list/worldblu-list), the biggest number since its inception in 2007. Worldblu hopes to have at least 20,000 democratic organisations by 2020.

MindValley joins the ranks of most democratic workplaces with Getting Personal. Being one of the very few companies in Asia to have made the cut, also means a lot to the six-year old company that Vishen Lakhiani founded with former Silicon Valley exec, Mike Reining. And what’s more, in 2008, MindValley was the ONLY Asian company to be on the list. As testament to its sustainability and authenticity to democracy, MindValley applied and qualified for the second time in a row, after its 30-odd employees were successfully surveyed.

To illustrate, he admits in the last 30 days, he’s spent 21 of them on paradise islands around the world. “I was at Richard Branson’s private island in the British Virgin Islands, I was at Tony Robbins 500-acre resort in Fiji, and then I was at a friend’s wedding in Cabo, Mexico. In that time, I’ve spent only six days in the office. Yet, in that same time, our company went through one of our biggest, most profitable months, we had our single best sales day.”

All this just goes on to make one wonder what business is MindValley in. Well, it is a publisher of personal development material and thanks to the Internet and technology, which is now increasingly available, the company is able to take famous authors’ knowledge and transform them into mixed media that can be consumed by the public via several ways - podcasts, streaming video, membership websites and so on.