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

by Scott Berkun

“Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared, ‘I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul.’”

A GPA is not a strong indicator of passion,

“We don't have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn't your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.”

You get more mileage if you make people laugh, even if it's at themselves, at the same time you're reminding them of something they've forgotten.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to remote work. If I Skyped someone to say, “How are you doing?” and he said, “Fine,” and then I said, “No, really, how is everything?”

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

Only a fool thinks all decisions are made in meetings.

Almost no one can convince an entire conference room of coworkers with a speech.

Some things are never said, or heard, if more than one pair of ears is listening.

How people who are respected treat you defines how everyone else will treat you.

believe I can manage anyone making anything provided two things are true: clarity and trust.

Layers of hierarchy create conflicting goals.

Leadership centers on abstractions and trade-offs: Is X faster or Y? Is A more reliable than B?

Patience is a manifestation of trust. It conveys to the other person that he or she is worth the time.

All services require maintenance, but when you spend more time maintaining than growing, something is wrong.

Studying how a culture manages its problems is a powerful way to understand the culture.

It reveals who has the real power despite what the organization chart says.

Mostly it was up to programmers and their teams to decide how to triage issues that landed on their P2s.

by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting.

if Incoming > Fix, quality is probably going down, and if Incoming < Fix, quality is likely going up.

Mullenweg's attitude of letting that which did not matter, not matter.

The common designations of priority (Is this priority 1, 2 or 3?) and severity (Are we deleting customers' blog posts, or did we just misspell something?) didn't exist.

they never used the P word (process), a word that smelled of big corporations, that's what it was.

Depending on anecdotal reports from users was a poor system.

Today many managers love the saying, “You are what you measure.” They're convinced measurement is the secret to success and seek metrics to track—sometimes called KPIs,

Workers can't resist hourly glances at the score, reinforcing gentle nudges in how they make decisions that juke the number upward, at the cost of everything else that isn't represented on the scoreboard.

Want to increase new sign-ups for your service? Fine. It's easy to get more sign-ups if you don't care if “customers” never return

When a culture shifts too far into faith in data, people with great intuitions leave. They'll find employment where their judgment is valued rather than remain as an annoyance in some powerful equation maker's report.

He wanted a data-influenced culture, not a data-driven one. He didn't make data the center of the conversation but wanted to ensure they were part of it. His balance of respect for both intuition and analysis was one of his most notable qualities.

“Real Artists Ship.”

Merely shipping something does not make you an artist. However, the only way the world learns of what makers makes, whether it's art or trash, is when they're brave enough to say it's done and put it out into the world.

Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

Defensive management is blind to recognizing how obsessing about preventing bad things also prevents good things from happening or sometimes even prevents anything from happening at all.

safeguards don't make you safe; they make you lazy.

The basic notion is that if people are smart and respect not blowing things up, too many safety measures get in the way. Instead, employees are trusted and empowered to release things fast.

We certainly launched many things, but did it add up to making a better product?

Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.

Most of the popular ones like Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail are proud to tell you how many “users” they have but conveniently skip past the low statistics for how many of those “users” have ever been active at all or had even logged in once during the past month.

Ambiguity makes everyone tolerant of incompetence.

Meetings at Automattic were always qualified disasters. They happened so rarely, certainly in-person ones, and had so little urgency there was little pressure to get better at running them.

If you don't have deadlines, the need to be good at efficient decision making fades away.

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

you never invest more in your flank than your front line. If you did, you'd always be defensive, not offensive.

sometimes takes ugly effort to make beautiful things.

People who love great things but are ignorant of how they're made are mystified by how dirty they have to get their own hands to make anything at all: they think the mess means they're doing something wrong, when mostly it just means they're finally doing real work.

movement was the only way to spread knowledge and simultaneously keep people challenged to keep learning.

Often acquisitions create a paradox: they're hard to fit into a company for the same reason they're attractive to acquire.

more you do to force it in, the less of what you wanted to acquire in the first place remains.

Fear of this uncertainty motivates people to spin their wheels for days considering all the possible outcomes, calculating them in a spreadsheet using utility cost analysis or some other fancy method that even the guy who invented it doesn't use.

Once you start moving, you get new data regardless of where you're trying to go.