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.

No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose. And of course if the leader is the asshole, there is no hope at all.

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.

The reason most managers aren't good at what they do is that they overlook the basics, which likely includes earning the trust of their coworkers. Trust is expensive to build and easy to destroy, which is why it's rare.

This is the advice paradox: no matter how much advice you have, you must still decide intuitively what to use and what to avoid.

There is nothing wrong with tradition until you want progress: progress demands change, and change demands a reevaluation of what the traditions are for and how they are practiced.

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.

Dreams are free; shipping must be earned.

But the problem isn't functionality. Functionality means a piece of software is capable of doing something. Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying. Your car might be equipped with dual warp drives, but if you can't find it or figure out how to use it, what good is the ability to travel at the speed of light? Not good at all. It's design, not functionality, that determines if people will succeed or fail in fulfilling the promises products have made to them.

As the joke goes, if you don't have a plan, then you never worry if your plan is wrong.

It's a great bullshit test of any boss who says, “X is important.” If she doesn't match that statement with resources, she's incompetent, insincere, or both. If it's important, prove it.

Importance is always relative to other projects, not verbal fairy dust to sprinkle over your staff.

For example, if you tell me my job is to cook the french fries, I will resist anything that threatens the existence of french fries, since when they go away, so does my job. But if you tell me my job is to make side dishes for customers, I'll be open to changing from fries to onion rings or other side dishes, even ones we've yet to invent, since my identity isn't tied to a particular side dish but instead to the role side dishes play.

Employees can yell and complain, but there is no louder message to management that something is wrong than forcing them to watch a great employee walk out the door.