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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The very idea of working remotely seems strange to most people until they consider how much time at traditional workplaces is spent working purely through computers. If 50 percent of your interaction with coworkers is online, perhaps through e-mail and web browsers, you're not far from what WordPress.com does.
Since location is irrelevant, Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, can hire the best talent in the world, wherever they are.
No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.
Importance of trust in teams
Those who put in more time and made better contributions received respect. Authority was earned, not granted.
work-oriented KPI
Talent is hard to find, especially at new organizations, which allows leaders to justify rushing to hire people who are selfish, arrogant, or combative.
ethical workers are important
Product creators are the true talent of any corporation, especially one claiming to bet on innovation. The other roles don't create products and should be there to serve those who do. A classic betrayal of this idea is when the IT department dictates to creatives what equipment they can use. If one group has to be inefficient, it should be the support group, not the creatives. If the supporting roles, including management, dominate, the quality of products can only suffer.
!! dont limit your product creators!
Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.
remote meetings are not bad. Sometimes, it is just the discipline of the members.
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.
Making good ordered lists is the fundamental thing any effective leader does, and it's the heart of popular planning methods like Kanban and SCRUM.
have an agenda!!!
More than anything else, I recognized that the big cultural bet wasn't on process but on people. Instead of betting on the enforcement of an elaborate fifty-step process or the magical talents of management, Automattic put the onus on individuals.
bet on people, not processes
A central element in Automattic culture was results first.
results-oriented KPI
But like attracts like. Every time a company settles for a mediocre hire, it becomes harder to recruit the best.
hire the best
