The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun

If the supporting roles, including management, dominate, the quality of products can only suffer.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of a meeting. If the people in a meeting think it's a waste of time, then either they're the wrong people or what's being discussed is not important enough to justify a meeting.

The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones. An organization where nothing ever changes is not a workplace but a living museum.

Diversity of skill makes people self-sufficient.

Online there is no passive data.

The realization that everyone is different when you talk to them alone is a secret to success in life.

Ambiguity makes everyone tolerant of incompetence.

The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.

The culture in any organization is shaped every day by the behavior of the most powerful person in the room.

Teams create territories. This is a force for good since it helps people focus and feel pride. But it creates problems for projects that fall between teams.

Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal.

People who have grand ideas but little influence wonder why no one supports them. They think the lack of support is a judgment on their ideas rather than the politics of authority. Ideas are evaluated differently depending on the mouth they come out of.

The best way to share knowledge is to share people.

Thousands of managers around the world inherit healthy teams in healthy companies, do little of merit, and get great rewards for just being in the right place at the right time.

Succession planning must be part of any long-term leader's thinking, and it has to be done now.

While money provides status, status doesn't guarantee meaning.

It's not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself.