Andrew Cohen > Andrew's Quotes

“It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius.”
― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

“The staff at WordPress.com call support “Happiness.” Therefore it's not the support team, but the Happiness team. And people who work in support aren't called tech support staff; they're called Happiness Engineers (HE).”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Making everyone work in support forces everyone to take customers seriously, which we should since they pay our salaries”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“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.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Regarding clarity, most teams in the working world are starving for it. Layers of hierarchy create conflicting goals.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“the saving question was always, “How will this impact the user experience?”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Being a good lead is all about switching hats: knowing which level of abstraction to work at to solve a problem. It's rarely a question of intelligence; instead, it's picking the right perspective to use on a particular challenge.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Patience is a manifestation of trust. It conveys to the other person that he or she is worth the time.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“It's only when something is burning that you find out who people really are.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“truths are discovered by breaking rules: you need to break some to learn which are just for show and which ones matter.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“the broken window theory, the idea popularized by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.1 She examined why some neighborhoods in New York City were safer than others and concluded that neighborhoods that were well maintained by their inhabitants, including small things like picking up trash and fixing broken windows, tended to have less crime. In other words, by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The trap is that even if you find a good metric that avoids the trap IBM fell into, people will naturally, even subconsciously, work to game the metric.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“You see a similar downward spiral at schools that try to measure teacher performance. They create new student tests for evaluating teachers that reduce time teachers have to teach real lessons, which lowers their scores, which, sad surprise, leads to more testing.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Just as there is an advice paradox, there is a data paradox: no matter how much data you have, you still depend on your intuition for deciding how to interpret and then apply the data.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Beauty, inspiration, and pleasure are qualities that corporations hope customers find in their products, yet none are easily measured. If you want to explain the difference between Apple, BMW, and IKEA and Microsoft, Fiat, and Walmart, KPIs alone will not help you.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Although he was not using these as a hammer to end arguments, he regularly referred to data as part of his thinking. He wanted a data-influenced culture, not a data-driven one.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Real Artists Ship.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“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.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“As a rule, everyone who launched something was expected to stay online for a few hours to ensure things went smoothly.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The absence of a grand schedule removed the constant fear of falling behind that many projects create and replaced it with small but frequent payoffs that we were making things better.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“A major reason it works at Automattic is belief in a counterintuitive philosophy: safeguards don't make you safe; they make you lazy.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Someone has to define what we're trying to get to and clarify which ideas are both more and less important in completing that vision.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“For all of the strengths of WordPress's bazaar culture, its user experience lacked the grace and clarity a cathedral architect would naturally provide.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Often I made a teamwide bet about one of the data points we were going to collect to help keep us interested.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“It's design, not functionality, that determines if people will succeed or fail in fulfilling the promises products have made to them.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“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.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work