Culture Always Wins

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

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

Competencies: entrepreneurial leadership, business acumen, cooperation, demonstrating respect, driving strategic direction, team development

Who benefits: students of the future of business, entrepreneurs

Consultant Usage: If you consult at the organizational level, this is a must read.

What’s it about? The Year Without Pants is about the future of work – no bosses, everyone coaches, no performance appraisals, no offices, almost no emails, internal social network and meet-ups, working customer service as an orientation process – learning while producing work and doing good. (I don’t know where else to put this tidbit, but those folks working in customer service are called Happiness Engineers.)

It is an unorthodox read. It is written in the first person. You absolutely race through the book. It is fun, funny, with lol moments.

But what makes this book special? Really, really special? It is this: It takes you inside the work – not about the work. It is in some ways a memoir of a person working for one year inside a futuristic organization. Not much theory, just how people work and behave 24/7.

The organization happens to be “Automattic, Inc., which runs WordPress.com, the 15th most popular website on the planet, and is the leading organization behind WordPress, the software that powers 20 percent of the entire web—60 million sites and counting.” And they do it from homes, coffee shops, malls, boats in countries all around the world – with about 120 people.

But who they are isn’t really important. What is important is how they operate and how they get work done. It is one BIG reason why you should read this book. Their success is based on challenging our basic assumptions about how work is done:

Rule 1, although there really isn’t a Rule 1, is understanding the system people work in. The system is commonly called “culture”. What works in one culture seldom works in another culture. Good managers, good workers understand how their culture works and nurture it. Bad managers take ideas and try to jam/cram them into a culture that is resistant. Scott Berkun (the author) uses a wonderful metaphor. He says bad managers who try to fix an internal problem without understanding the culture are like someone at home trying to fix a TV by banging it on the side.

Culture is scary because, unlike work habits or new trendy trends, it doesn’t work on logic. Culture is emotion. And few of us are skilled enough to evaluate, let alone understand how to change culture. Chapter 4, “Culture Always Wins” is another BIG reason to read this insightful book.

How Automattic retains its culture is actually pretty simple. It is ingrained and likely not transferable but here it is: (1) Recruit a certain type of employee: smart, funny and helpful; (2) provide tools and systems but let employees decided how, when and where to use them and where to work; (3) remove all distractions; and (4) stay out of the way.

As an aside, I wrote above that these four principles probably aren’t transferable. Many companies may have some or all of these principles, but these were created “within”, not transplanted. It is much like the human body. We all have similar organs, but we can’t simply admire and then transfer someone’s heart to our body. There are a few skilled surgeons (think great leaders) who can do it. But not many. Changing culture is about as easy as changing hearts.

Now back to the book.  The founder has three guiding principles that every employee must buy into (this is determined during the hiring process):

Transparency is tantamount and paramount in this company – every “conversation” is open to all employees and all users (customers). All discussions are public and available for reviewing and comment.

Meritocracy – respect, not titles, is the coin of the realm. Work data is public – the most respect goes to those who work the hardest and smartest.

Longevity – long live the company – work towards eternal existence. “The responsibility of those in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones.”

I am not a big fan of reading book endorsements. Usually they seem to be friends swapping endorsements for future endorsements with other friends. However, there were a couple of endorsements in this book that I wholeheartedly support and are far more elegant than anything I could write. Let me conclude with them as my enthusiastic endorsement of this book:

“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.” Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek.

“Some say the world of work is changing, but they’re wrong. The world has already changed! Read The Year Without Pants to catch up.” Chris Guillebeau, author, New York Times bestseller The $100 Startup.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.