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

by Scott Berkun

Rarely do the consultants championing, and profiting from, these ideas disclose how superficial the results will be unless they're placed in a culture healthy enough to support them.

no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.

culture is scary because unlike techniques, which are all about logic, culture is based on emotion.

It's far safer to simply wait for the next trend to come along and rally behind it,

no singular decision defines a culture. Instead it emerges from a back-and-forth between

a leader and the contributors, reinforcing some things and pushing others away.

Often founders don't fully understand the seeds they've planted until much later.

Talent is hard to find, especially at new organizations, which allows leaders to justify rushing to hire people who are selfish, arrogant, or combative.

if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.

if the leader is the asshole, there is no hope at all.

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.

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 grou...

If the supporting roles, including management, dominate, the quality of pr...

Unlike proclamations about culture that are easy to put in speeches and e-mails, it's the small decisions that define a culture.

Until the day you end a meeting where someone other than you says, “Wait! Can we meet longer?” it's safe to assume the meeting was longer than necessary.

My theory on meetings was simple: if what is being discussed is important, people will pay attention.

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.

My list of priorities looked like this: Trust is everything.

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.

The slippery slope toward misery starts with all major players having their own agenda, their own thing they're championing this quarter, and they push to make it part of the official schedule.

The more an event is driven by the people in power, the more it will reinforce the status quo. This is why these big meetings start with promises of growth and innovation and end with a vague sense of disappointment.

The general work flow at Automattic had seven steps:

A simple process affords three things:

The fundamental mistake companies that talk about innovation make is keeping barriers to entry high.

I've visited companies that use big meetings, with far too many cooks in the room, to rank ideas based on one-sentence descriptions. It was madness.

The best feature names simply describe what the thing does.

With about five people, there's always enough oxygen in the room. It means on average that every person gets to speak once every five times, which is enough for everyone to feel they are at the center of things.

a team of ten to twenty people is unlikely to function in the same way as a small team does.

“Man is after all a finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work. But when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years.”

What mattered was what we shipped.

the bigger the doubts are. Leaders have two good choices with that uncertainty: use that tension to your advantage or diffuse the tension.

but by making everyone's private fears public, they become far less dangerous.

Every new manager is a kind of experiment. And any experiment that goes wrong should be changed.

How do you know if you're doing a good job?

How should we handle within-team conversations

If we can't guess the next sentence in a book, there's little hope of guessing the future.

no matter how much advice you have, you must still decide intuitively what to use and what to avoid.

We faithfully follow practices we can't explain rationally.

We have little evidence these habits produce better work. Instead we follow these practices because we were forced to when we entered the workforce, and over time, they became so familiar we've forgotten they are merely inventions.

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.

Shouldn't the quality of work be the primary measure of worker performance?

Any manager who eliminates superfluous traditions takes a step toward progress.

If removing a restriction improves performance or has no impact on performance but improves morale, everyone wins.

Continuing tradition simply because it's a tradition wor...

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.

management is seen as a support role.

1. Hire great people. 2. Set good priorities. 3. Remove distractions. 4. Stay out of the way.