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How cool to have dinner with ma.tt Mullenweg and satisfy my WordPress fanboy moment. BY sheer luck I was seated across form Matt and enjoyed great conversation, he is more down to earth than most CEOs.
The next day I was blessed even more to be the kick off speaker for WordCamp 2.008!
Matt Mullenweg and Sam Harris are two of my favorite people (a good friend and undergrad classmate) — their new podcast on distributed work is brilliant and timely.
(Not everyone can WFH, but most knowledge workers can. As an aside, I especially like this WFH photo from one of our hard tech companies, bringing the lab bench home.)
As the founder of WordPress— a Level 4/5 fully distributed work organization — Matt has been giving this deep thought since he was 19. WordPress powers 35% of all websites today.
My summary notes:
Happiness at work depends on:
1) Mastery: ability to get better at your job
2) Autonomy: freedom and agency to control the work environment
3) Purpose: working for something greater than the paycheck, intrinsic motivation
Traditional work organizations can do well on 1 and 3, but distributed workplaces can nail 2. So many elements of the office work environment are out of our control: temperature, pets, food availability and smells, desk type, window view, shared restroom, exercise areas, etc. Think “The Office”
Levels of Autonomous Organizations:
Level 1: Unprepared (98% of companies). People can get by remotely, but they are not as effective. Not all work applications are remotely enabled.
Level 2: Heading There. Most recreate the office environment online (in the Marshall McLuhan sense of each new media initially recapitulating its predecessor media). We inherited the 9-5 workday from factory work in the Industrial Revolution. Your contribution clocked closely to your time on the job. In this phase of autonomy, companies often try to track their employees online work time. This Big Brother phase can actually decrease freedom and agency.
Level 3: Leveraging the New Medium. Various new tactics: shared google doc with live note taking. Better equipment like a desk lamp. Better audio equipment: a headset with a proximal microphone and machine learning noise cancellation (for microphone and headphone) can allow for no Muting on calls. Fumbling with mute hinders spontaneity. We mute because we have terrible microphones (here are Matt’s product recommendations). Written communication becomes more important. Companies should screen for written prowess and can hire based entirely on a written evaluation process.
Level 4: Go Asynchronous. Synchronous online work does not boost agency. With asynchronous, the focus shifts to what not how you produce. Managing handoffs, like batons in a relay race, becomes the main point of leverage. Handoffs across time zones enables 24 hours of productivity. You can tap a global talent pool. Decisions can take longer but they are better. Meetings are really terrible. We are finding out now how many could have been an email instead. Meetings are a forcing function to get people’s attention on same topic at same time. But all you get are people’s reactions. You also get biases from gregariousness, gender, and status. You lose a lot of inputs to decision making. Introverts and ESL suffer.
Level 5 Nirvana. Doing better work than is possible in a traditional centralized office organization. It may seem unobtainable, but we can get a taste of it. We can integrate health and wellness into our work flow. We focus on output not time spent in office. This can remove implicit biases. Companies can be more antifragile, like cities – cities give up elements of control to persist and thrive, and productivity per capita grows as they scale (Ref. Geoffrey West from SFI: public companies have a 10-year half-life wheras cities can survive nuclear attack)
Tools: Zoom, Slack or Matrix, some kind of email replacement. Email is private and locked up. We use an asynchronous blogging system instead. Very few work emails remain (<5/month). Communication should be flat and accessible. See headphones and noise filtering software link above.
What do we lose? Those who practice management by walking around; we lose the ambient intimacy and information gathering from being together. Address with: Synchronizing time zones on team allocations. Paying closer attention to visual cues on zoom. Experiments with auto-allocated company meetups.
Fundraising without an office was hard. Matt raised $450M last year and kept a physical office location just for investor meetings!
Sensitivity: there is good woke and bad woke. API: Assume Positive Intent (reminds me of the Bain principle to Presume Trust). Given the ambiguity of emotional overlays to messaging: as a recipient, assume the best intentions by the sender. As the sender, be conservative in what you say. If things get heated, jump to audio to deescalate. And deescalate yourself with exercise.
Inspiring book recommendations: 1) Daniel Pink’s Drive 2) Geoffrey West’s Scale and 3) Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (I agree with 2 and 3; they are awesome. Have not read 1 yet.)
“I hope there can be a silver lining to this crisis, which we all hope is over as soon as possible, that enables people to reexamine how they work and how they interact and improve it. I’m happy to spread the gospel wherever possible for distributed work. I think it’s better for companies, employees, the environment and the world. There are very few downsides.”
Some other gems from the Automattic Gospel:
“Every problem can get a lot better if you think really long term” — Auto Matt
“Don’t play with bats” — Sam Harris
One of the many offices on the 1st floor of this large gothic building. Finding such a place with little to no grafitti is a wonderfull change. I cant take credit for finding this location, there are other photographers who have known about this site for some time. Thanks to Photomatt, Worksongs, Yokes and others for tips and info on this site.
It's hard to believe that the 5 of us (plus Eris) sat down at a table at Ritual Roasters just 12 days ago and unleashed upon the world BarCamp.
Sure, we (esp. Chris, Eris and Andy) worked hard to make it happen, but we got very lucky, too- we got a location, more sponsers than we could take, t-shirts, food, drinks and tons of people in 6 days.
We hadn't even registered barcamp.org until that Saturday.
Sure, Tantek and I had thought of it and joked about it a month and a half ago, but we couldn't get anyone else interested in the idea at the time.
All I can say is "wow".
Ryan King, Matt "WordPress" Mullenweg, Om Malik & Nicole Lee
laughingsquid.com/wordpress-san-francisco-meetup-january-...
This is the very first photo I ever uploaded to Flickr.
laughingsquid.com/first-flickr-photo-in-honor-of-flickrs-...
Sentience?
Google has no sentience. It's a ranking, linking and sorting machine.
Fun
Having a bit of fun here. You'll see in a couple of weeks. Oh and do I think google is evil? (no, but at a crossroads) I'll be writing this up soon. But here's a sneak peak...
Higher level of abstraction
Note spelling mistake prompting response. This is a very useful spelling engine that collects the majority of users spelling, compares it against your spelling and if it differs offers a suggestion.
'... A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. ...
Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't. ...'
[From the Good-Intentions Department,Joel Spolsky, 14 October, 2005 joelonsoftware.com]
It's far superior compared to MS Word.
From: www.connectedaction.net
Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Makerbot when queried on June 20, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.
Layout using the "Group Layout" composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.
A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5858564395/sizes/o/in/ph...
Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality
Top most between users:
@makerbot
@techcrunch
@bre
@laughingsquid
@scobleizer
@makerbotpitbull
@core77
@mc_frontalot
@photomatt
@rebatesmoney
Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 387
Unique Edges: 523
Edges With Duplicates: 606
Total Edges: 1129
Self-Loops: 0
Connected Components: 130
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 119
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 244
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 1086
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 8
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.076407
Graph Density: 0.00520143
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.170
The local networks of each of the users is shown alongside the complete network graph.
More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/
NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl
NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) - which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.
The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.
Marc Smith on Twitter.