Scott Berkun's Blog, page 33

My Return to WordPress.com

It’s rare that companies have books written about them. Most aren’t interested and those that are must find a journalist willing to put in the  time required, which is often a year or more. It’s even rarer for the writer of a book about a company to get invited back to that company to talk about it (how very meta, but you all know I love meta).

So when I was invited to come to Automattic’s big meetup last week at their new HQ in San Francisco, I was thrilled. Although I worried about what their response would be to The Year Without Pants, I knew whatever happened would be fascinating. I planned to talk for 20 minutes about the making of the book, focusing on things employees would want to know even if they didn’t like the book itself, and then do Q&A.

The company is now 200 people, twice the size from when I left. Nearly 70 of the employees were so new that this was their first company meeting and for them the book is the backstory of the company, a very different perspective compared to how folks at the company while I was there see the book. And I learned of other new updates the book’s “where are they now” chapter will need.

The talk went well, at least for me. I shared the movie trailer for the book, how the title and cover were chosen, as well as the backstory on how the project started. I also talked about the writing process and how many unusual challenges there were (imagining writing about your boss and coworkers). After a half hour of Q&A we retreated to the bar and, to my pleasant surprise, partying began. Someone generously (or cruelly) provisioned a bottle of Ouzo, a reference to a story from the book, and Team Social and friends celebrated long into the night.

For some of my former coworkers that I respected the most, the book was a fine, but predictable, read. For them, unlike the rest of the readers on the planet, working without email, from anywhere in the world, with little management and high autonomy, on the 8th most popular website on the planet is normal. It’s just a different reading experience when you were there, or nearby, than it is for everyone else.

Someone asked all the employees to sign the book which was amazing to see. I never expected something like that to happen.

Some current and former employees had already read the book and posted about it, and I hope more of them do. Even for folks who don’t like the The Year Without Pants I’m pleased if it leads them to share perspectives, stories and opinions related to or inspired by the stories in the book:

Andy Peatling
Mike Adams
Beau Lebens
Hugo Baeta
Paul Maiorana
Jeremy Herve
Raanan Bar-Cohen
Evan Solomon
Lloyd Dewolf 

No matter how well the book sells or doesn’t it has been an amazing and fascinating experience as a writer to write a book like this one. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider for making the project possible, and for everyone on Team Social, and supporters at Automattic, for helping the project come together so well.

Mega list of Remote Work Tips and Tricks

There is a ton of advice on remote work and I’m compiling a list of good, simple advice for reference. What’s interesting is while I was at WordPress.com I don’t recall ever seeing a list of tips or tricks, or even seeing much discussion about remote work itself.

If you have other articles that should be in the list, leave a comment.

6 tips for super productivity working remotely
Working from home without getting fired
How To Be a Remote Founder
Tips for transitioning from traditional office to remote work
Misconceptions and challenges of remote work
Tips for working remotely
Tips for maximizing your remote work
Top ten tips for making remote work, work
Working remotely: is it right for you?
The benefits and challenges of remote teams
Tech tips for working remotely
Four strategies for remote work
Benefits and challenges of remote work
Remote work lifestyle advice
Mashable has an entire category
Huffington Post has an entire category
Tricks for managing remote workers
10 tips for working from home
Five tips for implementing remote work
17 tips for a flexible workforce
7 tips for managing a remote workforce
Communication tips for remote workers
10 things that would never happen in an office
30 communication tips for remote workers
Tips for remote work meetings

Know of other good references?

The Year Without Pants v1: Typos and corrections

Much like software, first releases of books, despite the makers best wishes, have their share of mistakes. Mary, John and the entire production team at Jossey-Bass worked hard to help me find and fix any issues, but some got through the cracks.

I’m collecting known issues for The Year Without Pants here to make it easier for people to report them and for me to have the publisher make corrections. This will happen quickly for the kindle edition, and as soon as possible for the print edition too.

If you find a typo and want to report it, please leave a comment. Thanks.

Here’s the known list:

pg 56. “Team Theme” should actually be “The Theme Team” (“Team Social” is right, but most other teams tended to be called “X Team” e.g. ”Happiness Team”)
pg. 56 (and 199, index) Willet should be Willett
pg. 76 Automatttic is spelled with three t’s
pg. 71 – ever/every “…to get the best value for Automattic out of ever hour they worked.”
pg. 78 Nick McCormik on Janitorial should be Nick Momrik
pg. 89 – “At an MySQL meetup” – should this be a, not an?
pg. 212 – Denmark should be Sweden
pg. 235 In the acknowledgements Peatling’s new team is Triton, not Titan.

 

 

How To Change A Company

I spoke about The Year Without Pants last week at Seattle Town Hall. I talked about some of the fascinating things that go on at work at WordPress.com. One of the questions was “this all sounds great, but how do you change an old, bureaucratic  company to switch to new or better ideas?”

The best answer is you can’t. Not all at once. You can’t change the world all at once either. Even people who changed the world didn’t start out by trying to change the whole thing. That’d be silly.

Here’s the steps to consider:

What power do you have? Don’t worry about the company (or the world) yet. Instead set your ambition based on the authority you have. If you’re a manager, start my changing your team. If you’re an executive, start by changing your division. If you’re just a worker, start by changing a meeting you run or a decision you make. Pick something you can have enough influence over to have a fighting chance.
Do a pilot. Use the new idea on a small, well understood project. Apply the new method to it. If needed ask your boss, or coworkers, for time to try out working differently. Try to control the other variables, so your new idea is the primary difference between the pilot and other projects. Set a clear expectation for how things will be better and communicate it before the pilot begins. Do everything you can to make it work.
Show better results. Your hypothesis in trying a new method is that it’s better, right? Think about how you can prove this to people who weren’t on the project When the pilot ends if you can show your boss or coworkers than the new way is better than the old, they’ll keep using it. Pitching skills are as important as the results themselves. If the results were poor, that’s ok. Figure out why and do another pilot (repeat #2). Also consider piloting a different idea, or a variant of it, rather than the first one you had in mind.
Show peers and leaders the results. If  you truly found better results, good leaders should be interested in how you did it. Teach them. Help them do pilots of their own and help them to be able to genuinely show better results.
Ask for more resources and repeat.  As you find more supporters, go back to #1. You should have more power now. With a handful of leaders supporting the new idea, you can run an event or pitch an executive on widening the adoption of your proven idea.

If you’re fortunate someone with executive power will see the potential and turn the tides towards progress by making the new idea that’s growing in popularity a concept officially endorsed by their station.

But keep in mind there are natural limits to change. Maybe the best that can be done is to change one team or one division. Perhaps those are the systems where the change is most effective anyway. That alone is a huge accomplishment in this world. Even CEOs of corporations find change difficult. Generally people defend the status quo on matter what they say and even a powerful leader needs to find ways to convince the powerful people who work for them to try, much less endorse, something new.

 

And the signed book goes to…

Recently I offered a signed copy if you vote on the ad for The Year Without Pants.

Nearly 80 of you commented and nearly 167 voted. I did read them all, and we decided on the the clouds, which won by a landslide.

The winner of the signed copy, chosen at random, was: Kristen DiFate.

Should she be unable to perform the duties of telling me where to send the book, another winner will be chosen at random.

 

Pantless at 7000 feet

My friend Shawn Murphy read some of The Year Without Pants on a recent hike to the top of White Mountain, a 7k foot peak here in Washington State. He was thoughtful enough to take a photo.

I love it when folks take interesting, funny or unusual photos with my books in them. If you take one, let me know and I’ll post it.

 

Ten Great Reasons To Buy The Year Without Pants

If you’re not sure if the The Year Without Pants is for you, here’s a list:

This Internet thing might be important and WordPress powers 20% of it. Shouldn’t you know how they did that?
WordPress.com is the 8th most popular website in the U.S. Their methods are worth studying.
Remote work is on the rise and is probably in your workplace’s future. What’s it really like?
Email is the bane of most of our lives: what’s it like to work without it?
50+ positive reviews only one day after the book launch: they can’t all be wrong
It’s the only book you’ll find where an “expert”, in this case me, puts themselves to the test of real work (See Call BS on a Guru)
It has the words pants in the title, which if you say five times fast will make you smile. Yet you can buy the book for work!
It’s a fast and entertaining true story. I’m good at this writing thing.
It explains the bad things you’ve experienced at work with good advice on how managers can change things.
There’s a compelling argument for treating employees like people and not machines.
(Bonus) You can read the first chapter, watch the movie trailer or read expert reviews for free.

I hope I changed your mind:  If I didn’t leave a comment or question and I’ll write better reasons.

Year Without Pants: Launch Party in Seattle (Photos)

About 100 friends and fans joined me last night to help celebrate the launch of The Year Without Pants which hit #313 on Amazon.com yesterday, and is currently #1 in many categories, including #1 in organizational behavior (which might be revoked after seeing these pictures).

Here are some photos of the fun. Thanks to everyone who helped yesterday all around the world. You can see all the reviews (50+) so far here.

If you were there last night and took photos leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll add them. Thanks for coming and helping me celebrate.  Lisa-Marie from Usnaps.com ran the photo booth used in some of the photos.

 

 

 

 

List of Year Without Pants reviews & mentions

Thanks to everyone who has tweeted, Facebooked and blogged so far. We’re off to a good start.

If I missed one, yours or someone else’s, leave a comment and I’ll add it in.

Here’s the list of reviews and mentions so far. I’ll update as launch progresses:

Fast Company
CopyBlogger 
Lunch.com
The Examiner
Post Status
Misc-ience
Torque
HR Examiner
Tech Cocktail
WordPress.com (Q&A)
StartupQ8.com (Q&A)
Bob Sutton
Duffbert
Andy Peatling
Raanan
Beau Lebens
Hugo Baeta
Paul Maiorana
Aaron Hockley
Amazon.com (22)
Jossey-Bass / Wiley (Q&A)
Bellevue Business Journal
PR Web

Tweets

Zeldman
Jared Spool
Tim Ferriss
Gina Trapani
Chris Guilebeau 
Clair Diaz-Ortiz
#nopants (Thanks everyone! Too many to list here)

Facebook:

More than 35 folks have posted and shared the book so far. Awesome.

Early endorsements:

“The Year Without Pants is one the most original and important books about what work is really like, and what it takes to do it well, that has ever been written.”

—Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss

“WordPress.com has discovered a better way to work, and The Year Without Pants allows the reader to learn from the organization’s fun and entertaining story.”

—Tony Hsieh, author, New York Times best seller Delivering Happiness, and CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.

“The underlying concept—an ‘expert’ putting himself on the line as an employee—is just fantastic. And then the book gets better from there! I wish I had the balls to do this.”

—Guy Kawasaki, author, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and former chief evangelist, Apple

“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”

—Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times best seller The 4-Hour Workweek

“With humor and heart, Scott has written a letter from the future about a new kind of workplace that wasn’t possible before the internet. His insights will make you laugh, think, and ask all the right questions about your own company’s culture.”

—Gina Trapani, founding editor, Lifehacker

“Some say the world of work is changing, but they’re wrong. The world has already changed! Read The Year Without Pants to catch up.”

—Chris Guillebeau, author, New York Times best seller The $100 Startup

“Most talk of the future of work is just speculation, but Berkun has actually worked there. The Year Without Pants is a brilliant, honest, and funny insider’s story of life at a great company.”

—Eric Ries, author, New York Times best seller The Lean Startup

“The Year Without Pants is a highly unusual business book, full of ideas and lessons for a business of any size, but a truly insightful and entertaining read as well. Scott Berkun’s  willingness to take us behind the scenes of WordPress.com uncovers some of the tenets of a great company: transparency, team work, hard work, talent, and fun, to name a few. We hear about new ways of working and startups, but we rarely get to see up close the magic that can occur when we truly tend, day in and day out, to building something bigger than ourselves.”

—Charlene Li, author, Open Leadership, founder, Altimeter Group

“ Once you’ve seen how WordPress.com does things, you’ll find yourself asking why your company works the way it does.”

—Tom Standage, editor, The Economist

“Berkun smashes the stereotypes and teaches a course on happiness, team culture and innovation”

—Alla Gringaus, web technology fellow, Time, Inc.

“The future of work is distributed. Automattic wrote the script. Time for rest of us to read it.”

- Om Malik, founder, GigaOM

You’ll be surprised, shocked, delighted, thrilled and inspired by how WordPress.com gets work done. I was!

 - Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

On Sale NOW: The Year Without Pants

The time is now. Three years in the making, you can now buy The Year Without Pants.

It’s launch day and buying the book now helps tons to establish a nice trajectory for the book. If you’re so inclined please hop over to Amazon or your favorite bookseller and grab a copy.

You can help with launch by:

Buying the book! Amazon is best for me (but any store / format helps including your local bookstore)
Email your coworkers or business associates about the book
Spread word on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere with the link
If you’ve read the book, post an Amazon.com review (and Facebook / Tweet about it)
Share the the sample chapter, the movie trailer or the high profile endorsements
Multiple mentions throughout the day can only help

Hope you like it. I worked hard to make it for you :)