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

by Scott Berkun

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.

If you take on the task of taking notes, people have a chance to see how you think. If they find your recording of what happened clear and honest, you get a trust point. If the way you summarize complex things is concise but still accurate, you get another.

Communication at Automattic was roughly broken down as follows: 1. Blogs (P2): 75 percent 2. IRC: 14 percent 3. Skype: 5 percent 4. E-mail: 1 percent Of course, since Skype and e-mail were private, these are just guesses. Most of the uses of e-mail, as low as it was, were for notifications about new posts or comments on P2s.

Interesting, many “all-remote” companies don’t use email at all.

The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.

It's design, not functionality, that determines if people will succeed or fail in fulfilling the promises products have made to them.

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

I have to periodically shift between thinking small (bazaar) and thinking long term (cathedral).

Laughter leads to running jokes, and running jokes lead to a shared history, and a shared history is culture.

In every meeting in every organization around the world where bad behavior is happening, there is someone with the most power in the room who can do something about it. What that person does shapes the culture. If the most powerful person is silent, this signals passive acceptance of whatever is going on.

It's deep in human nature to look to the top to define our own behavior, even at a company as autonomous as Automattic.

E-mail madness, or e-mailopathy, is the name I have for the psychological disorder where people are so overwhelmed by the waves of e-mail they receive that they protect their psyche by never reading any of it. Instead they skim e-mails quickly and write and send replies even quicker, like a paranoid, drunk blindfolded man pulling the trigger of a fully loaded AK-47. What they don't realize is if they send waves of bad e-mail out, they're guaranteed to get waves of bad e-mail back, especially if the person on the other end has the same disorder they do. If Pascal, who once wrote, “If I had more time I'd write a shorter letter,” had to contend with this, he'd have said, “If I read incoming e-mails carefully, the e-mails I send will generate fewer replies.”

The real story behind some people you meet with fantastic reputations isn't notable talents or skills, but merely an exceptional ability to choose the right time to join and leave particular projects. The work of managers everywhere is rarely evaluated with enough consideration for the situation they inherited and the situations they faced that were not in their control.